The secret struggles of Yorkshire’s first Oscars ‘Best Picture’ nominee: “Please don’t try to be all northern”
The glitz and glamour of the Academy Awards is a million miles away from Yorkshire in more ways than one, but a little movie that could went up against some of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters to find itself in the ‘Best Picture’ race, even though everyone knew it didn’t stand a chance of winning.
While it wasn’t the first nominee to be shot in the county, with Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon capturing footage of Castle Howard for the titular family estate, and it wasn’t the last, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour following suit, The Full Monty was as Yorkshire as it gets.
Scripted by Keighley’s Simon Beaufoy, set in Sheffield, and featuring several locals among the cast, not to mention others who did their best to perfect the accent, the comedy became the biggest breakout sensation of 1997 bar none, which is saying something when James Cameron’s Titanic was decimating records left, right, and centre.
A surprisingly deep and emotionally involved story that touched on everything from notions of masculinity and depression to broken families and body image, although it was packaged, sold, and marketed on the back of its working-class stripteases, The Full Monty earned over a quarter of a billion dollars at the global box office, riding that unexpected wave of success to the Oscars.
Not that anyone could have predicted such an outcome, with Robert Carlyle revealing that it was almost sent straight to video. Even in the beginning, Film4 commissioned Beaufoy to write the screenplay, but refused to invest in the production, with Fox Searchlight stepping in to stump up the £3.5 million necessary.
It even managed to get one over on Harvey Weinstein, who, in deciding which of the year’s British films about unemployed working-class Yorkshiremen to acquire for American distribution, opted for Brassed Off instead. As director Peter Cattaneo recalled, it was anything but sunshine and roses.
“Robert lost faith in the film; I don’t know why,” he recalled to The Guardian. He said Fox Searchlight took it away from me in the editing room, but it’s not true. It was prearranged that Uberto Pasolini should do his own cut. Fox had a weird way of releasing it, though, which was in America first and then here.” Carlyle losing faith might be an understatement, seeing as when he was asked for his recollections of the shoot almost two decades later, he surmised the experience as “a load of fucking pish.”
Even when it was time to release The Full Monty in the UK, Cattaneo cringed at the studio trying to force the Yorkshire of it all. “They decided the UK premiere would be in Sheffield, with an afterparty at the Leadmill, with fish and chips as the nibbles,” the filmmaker explained. “We thought, ‘Please don’t try to be all northern.'”
Not that it stopped the movie from spending nine weeks at number one in the UK, ending 1997 as the tenth highest-grossing release of the year, ahead of Good Will Hunting, Face/Off, and Batman & Robin, among others, culminating in an Oscar win in the now-defunct ‘Best Original Musical or Comedy Score’, and nominations for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
After all that, it still wasn’t entirely good news. “It gave the British film industry a shot of confidence,” Cattaneo added, with a caveat. “A lot of films got greenlit that shouldn’t have done in the hope they might be the next Full Monty; I probably made a couple of them myself.”
