Jacqueline du Pré: previously unpublished intimate interview

The appearance of the 1980 interview with Jacqueline du Pré on Youtube has prompted new interest and raised some questions — that is not surprising for a woman with such enduring charisma and in such a very unusual interview.

And so here, for those who want to know more, are the main background details.

When Jackie was forced by Multiple Sclerosis to stop playing the ‘cello, she asked whether we could persuade the BBC to broadcast a repeat showing of the first film that we had made with her in 1967 because she liked it as a film, thought it was true to her and, above all, because she missed playing for people.

Unfortunately, it was impossible to do what she asked because the most of the rights had expired and were not renewable. Jackie felt let down and said so.

I had already been close to her for more than twenty years and my first wife, Diana, had become one of her most intimate confidantes. Together we felt that we had to do something and so offered to remake the film, clear all the rights all over again — if possible — and put it on DVD. Jackie responded with enthusiasm. It was heartening to see.

We started by filming the interview with her at her home in London on 13 December 1980, seven years after she stopped playing and seven years before she died.
When we began editing it, we started, out of habit, to cut it television style. That is to say, to try and extract the essential elements in the most condensed form possible. We cut the first seven minutes, which took us a day, and, at the end of it, I asked myself why we should be working so hard to condense it when it was destined for DVD, which is never in a hurry, in the way that television is usually in a hurry. We undid everything we had done and started all over again.

This time we allowed the material to take its own course and its own time and so it became something very unusual. We left in all the hesitations, the retakes and the fluffs. We even left in the clapper boards in the hope that the viewer would feel part of a real event happening in front of the cameras — in the presence of Jacqueline du Pré — just as we ourselves had felt on that memorable morning in December 1980. The result is very different from the usual television interview: much slower, less formal but much more appropriate for DVD and closer to the real Jacqueline du Pré. Much of it sad, of course, but her great strength was that she was always so truthful about her situation.
When it was done I showed her the final version — a touch nervously — because I felt that she might think it too direct for some people, also because she had very sharp eyes for what is good and what is not good in film and was never afraid to say exactly what she thought. She loved it. I asked if there was anything that she would like us to change. She said no. I asked whether there was anything we should add. Jackie said, “How about lunch”.

But in the final analysis I felt that it did not fit in the remake of the first film. She had been 22 years old when we made it and the interview would have been anachronistic.
Also, although we were talking about the things which she had chosen to talk about, I felt that her honesty might have been too raw for some people at the time and in the face of the all too evident and disturbing manifestations of her illness. And so, for more than 20 years I kept it under lock and key, and showed it to nobody.
Twenty-seven years later the world was a different place. Jackie was no longer alive and many things had changed. Among the changes was the worldwide establishment of DVD which had become so different from television.
Our first Jackie DVD had won the DVD of the Year Award and been so well received that we decided to put the interview on a new one together with the films "Who was Jacqueline du Pré?" and "Remembering Jacqueline du Pré".

When it was complete we entered it for the Midem Classical Awards competition in Cannes, thinking that it had no chance whatever of winning anything because it was so unorthodox, but that it was worth exposing it to people in the music and television worlds because it said so much about Jackie’s courage.

It turned out that something which I had felt was too raw for release in 1980 had become a deeply revealing testament by 2007. It won DVD of the Year in January 2008. That was entirely unexpected not only because Jackie had won it in 2005 but because the new DVD did not have the overwhelming power of the Elgar cello concerto, as the first one did.

I am in no doubt that it was, once again, Jackie who won that award and it was because of what she conveyed in that interview, but the over-riding thought is one of gratitude that we were there at a moment when she needed us, that we made something which pleased her immensely and that keeps something of her extraordinary free spirit alive in the world — as she wanted it to do.

Christopher Nupen, 12 January 2017

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