Five Days on Bowen Island
With the recent death of Sean Connery, we were reminded that he knew our community well. Apart from starring in at least two films shot in BC, Mr. Connery was an avid golfer, spending many hours playing at the Capilano and Furry Creek courses. The world lost Sean Connery on October 31, 2020 at the age of 90, and John Le Carré on December 12, 2020, at the age of 89. You’re gone from us now, but we’ll always have Bowen.
In 2020, three decades after The Russia House novel was published and the movie released, the world lost its creator, John Le Carré, and its hero, personified by Sean Connery in one of his finest roles.
Connery plays Barley Blair, a British publisher who falls for Katya, a Russian woman played by Michelle Pfeiffer, in Le Carré’s world of spy craft and espionage behind the Iron Curtain.
The British Secret Intelligence Service has delivered Barley to a safe house at an undisclosed location to confer with American counterparts about his links with Russia. It’s a great scene, with Barley scoring off the American interlocutor, played by Roy Scheider, with the inimitable Connery combination of arrogance and wit.
The float plane that chauffeurs Barley and the Brits to the safe house ties up at a waterfront dock on a gray and misty day.
Inside the house, the room where the conversation takes place is decorated in high 80s West Coast style, almost as impressive as the location.
The camera looks out through enormous sheets of glass, past armed guards patrolling the deck, through the mist, across the cold gray water to steep mountains rising in the distance.
The scene is short, almost over before a local viewer might realize that the view is of Howe Sound and the Britannia range of the Coast mountains. Then, at the last moment, a B.C. ferry rounds an island and glides into the frame, creating instant recognition.
Yes, in December 1989, Sean Connery was in West Vancouver, on Bowen Island, to be precise. It wasn’t his first time here, nor would it be the last: he visited Vancouver frequently for the golf.
That moment of local glory almost didn’t happen at all. The safe house sequence was not meant to be filmed in West Vancouver’s watery back yard.
Director Fred Schepisi had directed two movies in British Columba. He knew the crews here and pushed for this location instead of the east coast of the United States as originally scheduled. The Bowen Island location was a last-minute decision.
Script supervisor Christine Wilson had worked with Schepisi on those two previous BC shot films: Iceman in 1984 and Roxanne in 1987.
Her shooting log for The Russia House reads:
Scenes 135 to 154:
DAY 61 – 65 Dec 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 1989 5 DAYS SHOOTING.
“For that sequence, along with Sean, we had James Fox as Ned, Roy Scheider as Russell, Michael Kitchen as Clive and John Mahoney as Brady. Jimmy Chow, our Property Master, plays the Chinese servant offering drinks,” Wilson remembers.
The safe house sequence was the last in the shooting schedule. The Russia House wrapped on December 20 and was released in 1990.
“Tom Stoppard, who wrote the script, has it in his contract that not one word of a screenplay he has written can be altered without his consent. In London, he was asked to come into the set to make some changes to the script. During the fifteen or so minutes that we shared an office, Tom was provided with paper and a typewriter to make the revisions, which he rejected in favour of a pencil. For the safe house sequence, the script is marked up with continuity notes, but the dialogue was word for word original.” (Click the script image above to read the script).
There is one more chapter to the Sean Connery on Bowen story. Connery was almost as famous for his enthusiasm for the game of golf as he was as an actor, 007 notwithstanding.
He liked to play the Vancouver courses, saying, memorably, “There is no better place to be on earth on a Monday morning than the first tee at Capilano.” Surely, even Sean Connery, Scot though he was, would take a pass on golf in gray, rainy, wintry West Vancouver in December.
“Not so,” says his local friend and golfing partner of 12 years, Dr. Ted Hunt. “We played, but since he was filming, we could only make a round of 18 holes instead of our usual 36.
“I remember watching The Russia House in the theatre, I believe it was the Stanley on Granville Street, and a full house. All of a sudden, along comes a B.C. ferry up on the big screen. Everyone in the theatre recognized it, and where it was and then everybody started laughing like hell.”
Shot in London, Portugal and in Russia, The Russia House was the first major Western production to be filmed in the country with full permission from the Russian government.
Shot in London, Portugal and in Russia, The Russia House was the first major Western production to be filmed in the country with full permission from the Russian government.
John Le Carré visited Russia for the first time in 1987 when, thanks to Perestroika and Glasnost, the Cold War seemed to be coming to an end, and the future looked bright. And it was, for Le Carré. His time there produced The Russia House, first as a novel and then as a film.
Cast and crew were shooting on location in Russia on November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down. No one working on set that day could have known this pivotal event signalled the end of the Cold War, nor could they have predicted that 30 years hence, that war would be running colder than it ever had.
We make history every day, but it is only with hindsight and the passage of time, that we see the consequences and, we hope, the value, of our actions.