By Tonisha Johnson

The History of Boys comes to the silver screen after being developed during the hiatus states between the London stage play and the New York tour performances. Director Nicholas Hytner discusses the happiness behind the London audience’s acceptance of the film and how he hopes America jumps ‘on the band wagon’ so to speak with the rave The History Boys.

What film do you know of that has the success of coming from theatre to the silver screen as The History Boys?

Nicholas Hytner: I can’t think of one with the entire original cast. I certainly can’t think of the move from background screen to stage. We knew we were going to make a movie.

Did that help you? The play actually?

Nicholas Hytner: I think it did. Being able to make it purely for each other enabled them to reflect themselves completely. A tribute to them and to the quality of the play; they were happy to return to it. I think that they all realized that this is the kind of stuff that comes along once, twice in their career. Samuel and Dominick who are the most prominent in the film and the play, there are others that are as gifted as they are, but they like the others, I absolutely know they won’t disappear off into the entire world of ludicrous filmmaking. They’re really serious. They’re trained classical actors.

Can you talk about how much more provocative this is as a movie with the idea that the heroic character played by Richard Griffith is also somebody who in America might be seen as a molester and who is married?

Nicholas Hytner: I don’t think he molested children. I think they’re all capable of looking after themselves. I don’t think it’s more or less provocative than it was on stage.

But on stage it’s a much more sophisticated audience?

Nicholas Hytner: I think it will find its audience. It’s not a film which cares one way or another whether it’s the mass popcorn audience or not. It’s already made back four [$4] in England. It’ done. I hope it finds its audience here and will respond to it and enjoy it. And will find the emotional undercurrents. I’ve done theatre for years and I’ve discovered marketing should not be about the amount of people who buy the tickets it should be about informing those people who will respond and who will enjoy.

But what about the complexity of this character Richard Griffiths plays? We haven’t seen someone heroically or sympathetic perhaps, the way he is?

Nicholas Hytner: I don’t think of him as heroic. He’s a complex flawed human being. He has the largest part. He is flawed the way all the characters are flawed. The fact that it’s educated repurposes that its audience will be educated. I will say something that is not all possible to say which is educated in liberal arts makes its more less impossible not to be socially liberal. Not to be tolerant. Education brings with it a degree of understanding and compassion of human nature in all its complexity and in all its diversity. For an audience that is educated either through a school college system or self-educated and it’s because it’s an educated audience it will be sympathetic in a huge way.

You changed some things from the play to the film. Do you think you need to leave the film audience in a different place than the theatre audience?

Nicholas Hytner: No. It has an English melancholy. The changes were made simply to make it shorter. The make it possible to squeeze in 110 minutes which is what we felt the movie should probably be.