‘The Elephant Man’ Joseph Merrick: Showman’s granddaughter calls for him to have a proper burial Like all the best movies, on paper The Elephant Man really shouldn’t have worked: three Americans – Sanger, Brooks and Lynch – working on a very English story, which they decided to shoot in the decidedly un-commercial black-and-white, with an entirely British cast, including Anthony Hopkins as Treves, Sir John Gielgud as Treves’ superior Carr Gomm and Hurt, who had just received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Midnight Express. It was the advent of probably one of the greatest directors of the 20th century… now there’s a man who talks the language of cinema.” While he endured six-hour sessions of prosthetic makeup so restrictive he could only drink through a straw, the shoot “was as near to heaven as you could get”. When I interviewed the late John Hurt several years ago, he told me: “It was an extraordinary event in all of our careers – Mel Brooks, David Lynch, Freddie Francis, myself. What you think of as horrific becomes beautiful.” It was this that enticed Brooks to help Sanger seek funding for the film, independently from the Hollywood studio system. “I think a good part of the movie’s strength is that you’re getting to understand the thing that you’re frightened of because of its appearance. “We quickly make judgements about people, often by what we see, without understanding what really goes behind it,” says Sanger. David Lynch and John Hurt on the set of The Elephant Man As the film shows when Treves re-houses Merrick at the London Hospital, you couldn’t wish to meet a more dignified, refined and humble man. Merrick had endured life as a circus freak before he died in 1890, aged just 28 – his extreme condition thought later to be a combination of Proteus syndrome and neurofibromatosis. The subject was John Merrick – or Joseph Merrick, as was later revealed to be his real name – taken from an account by Dr Frederick Treves, a physician in Victorian London. Sanger, who had worked as Brooks’ first assistant director on High Anxiety, was looking to make the move into producing, when he came across a script by Christopher De Vore and Eric De Bergren. Lynch, who would go on to make Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, was unknown at the time, with just his eerie black-and-white student debut Eraserhead to his name. It was he who managed to capture lightning in a bottle – from teaming up director David Lynch with Mel Brooks, to casting John Hurt for what became one of his signature roles.īack in 1979, Brooks was the comic star and director of such films as Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.
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“It was a series of magical moments,” says its producer Jonathan Sanger, speaking down the line from his Los Angeles home. “I am a human being!” Even now, as the film celebrates its 40th anniversary with a glorious new 4K restoration, this scene has lost none of its power. Surrounded by onlookers, the severely deformed John Merrick lets out a howl of anguish.
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For a film full of heartbreak, The Elephant Man’s most devastating scene comes, of all places, in a grotty public toilet.
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