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Notes on a Scandal
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 Notes on a Scandal Production NotesTagline: One woman's mistake is another's opportunity.
“People have always trusted me with their secrets. But who do I trust with mine?” --- Barbara Covett, Notes on a Scandal.
Two women caught up in a drama of need and betrayal are at the heart of this psychological thriller, Notes on a Scandal. The twists and turns of the story are noted in the acerbic diary of Barbara Covett (Dame Judi Dench), a domineering and solitary teacher who rules with an iron fist over her classroom at a decaying state-run secondary school in London.
Save for her cat, Portia, Barbara lives alone, without friends or confidantes – but her world changes when she meets the school’s new art teacher, Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett). Sheba appears to be the kindred spirit and loyal friend Barbara has always been seeking.
But when she discovers that Sheba is having an incendiary affair with one of her young students (Andrew Simpson), their budding relationship takes an ominous turn.
Now, as Barbara threatens to expose Sheba’s terrible secret to both her husband (Bill Nighy) and the world, Barbara’s own secrets and dark obsessions come tumbling to the fore, exposing the deceptions at the core of each of the women’s lives.
A Scandal Begins
“Now more than ever, we are bound by the secrets we share.” --- Barbara Covett
In this age of loneliness, isolation and disconnect, we live in cities that house millions of people yet everyone at one time or another yearns for companionship, for someone to reach out and connect with us on some level...any level.
This is the universal feeling that comes through in Zoë Heller’s 2001 pageturner of a novel, What Was She Thinking: Notes On a Scandal, a suspenseful story of loneliness and obsession that cuts, with equal parts dark humor and realism, right to the shadowy center of the human yearning for connection. Readers were drawn in by Barbara Covett’s blisteringly funny, yet ultimately deceptive, revelations about her so-called friendship with fellow teacher, Sheba Hart.
Between Sheba’s dangerously ill-conceived affair with a student and Barbara’s own “spin” and hidden agenda, what might have been merely a character study unfolded more like a thriller. Eventually, the book would garner not only widespread acclaim but numerous awards, including being short-listed for the coveted Man Booker Prize for English literature. The rights were quickly acquired by leading producers Scott Rudin and Robert Fox, who also recently brought Michael Cunningham’s beloved, multi-stranded novel The Hours to the screen. Rudin had already contracted with leading playwright and screenwriter Patrick Marber to tackle the adaptation, knowing he would create a brilliant screenplay.
When noted theatre and film director Richard Eyre was approached by Rudin and Fox about directing the film version of NOTES ON A SCANDAL he, like so many others, had already read the book. Eyre had found it at once funny, touching and beautifully observed -- precisely the kind of material that intrigues him. Says Eyre: “I saw it as a story of friendships and sexual intoxications. It’s really a tale of two obsessions, of two women in the grip of their own self-destructive, uncontrollable passions.
Eyre and Rudin had previously collaborated with great success, along with Judi Dench, on the acclaimed Iris, the film about the extraordinary life-long love affair between the brilliant author Iris Murdoch and her devoted husband, John Bayley as well as the critically lauded stage production Amy’s View. Iris garnered both an Oscar and Golden Globe for Jim Broadbent, as well as Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Dench and Kate Winslet.
Eyre next directed the critically praised Stage Beauty, a comedy-drama set on the 17th Century London stage, but had since returned to the theatre, directing two highly successful and utterly opposite productions: the new musical stage version of Mary Poppins in London and on Broadway and his fresh adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama Hedda Gabler in London’s West End.
“I’d just done the two extremes of the spectrum in theatre – so to get back to filmmaking with a project with the fantastic credentials of NOTES ON A SCANDAL was irresistible,” he comments. Marber’s adaptation would be challenging, as Heller’s novel was written as a series of highly subjective journal entries in the pen of Barbara Covett which he masterfully crafted as diary entries, slowly revealing through her unreliable words the depths of her delusions and manipulations when it came to Sheba Hart. But based on Marber’s previous body of work, there was no doubt that he was up to the task. He recently came to the fore as the author of the play Closer, a darkly funny look into the realities of love and desire which won the Olivier, Evening Standard and both London and New York Critics Circle Awards for Best Play before going on to write the adaptation of the acclaimed feature film.
Now, Marber had to come up with a way to turn Zoë Heller’s distinctly literary approach to the story of Barbara and Sheba into something far more dynamic, immediate and cinematic. “I did find writing this screenplay very difficult,” admits Marber, “but I was greatly helped by Scott Rudin, who pushed me through every draft. The novel is so rich and expansive that the job was to find a way to somehow compact all this into the story.”
That essence – at once comic and observant – became key to what Marber hoped to create in scenes of witty, tense and revealing dialogue. He carved the story around the book’s most relevant and pressing theme: the overwhelming isolation that wreaks so much havoc in modern lives, which is the ultimate undoing of Barbara Covett. “I hope the film says something about a particular kind of modern loneliness, the desperation one can experience even in a city of millions that I think that everyone feels at times,” he says.
For Heller, Marber was an inspired choice to attempt the feat. “With Patrick Marber, I felt I’d gotten the most interesting and clever screenwriter possible,” she comments. “He was able to take what I had written and make something new out of it. He’s done an amazing job of turning it into something that really works on screen. I like to think my book was a page-turner, but he upped the excitement and the suspense of the book, which is all for the good.”
Marber began by exploring the story’s two main characters, starting with Barbara, the unforgettable narrator who comes to harbor corrosive secrets about her new “best friend,” Sheba Hart. Says Marber: “I thought Zoë had done such a brilliant job that it was all there waiting for me in the book. I was very faithful to what Zoë had written about Barbara. The thing that’s really different in the novel is that Barbara is telling the story from her point of view, so my job was to try to bring a more objective ballast to who she is, but at the same time keep her persona as this prickly, funny, at times stoic, figure. She’s no-nonsense, but she’s also got this aching, beating, vulnerable heart, and is someone who has never known love. Everything she does is out of a desperate loneliness and yet, at the same time, she’s a monster. I’ve always been attracted to characters who you love and despise simultaneously, and Barbara inspires both reactions.”
Marber felt a similarly invigorating conflict towards the character of Sheba. “I gave Sheba a slightly more offbeat, bohemian background than she has in the book, but her vulnerabilities and complicated feelings remain the same,” he comments.
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Cate Blanchett and Andrew Simpson in Notes on a Scandal.
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