Like many a busy producer, Nicky Bentham gets a number of unsolicited emails.
The London-based Australian, who runs Neon Films, rarely has the time or capacity to respond to all of them. However, one landed in her inbox a few years ago that managed to grab her attention.
It was an idea for a film detailing the true story of Kempton Bunton, a taxi driver from Newcastle upon Tyne who in 1961 at 60 years old, stole Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London.
Kempton then proceeded to send ransom notes, stating he would return the portrait on the condition the government invested more care for the elderly – he had long campaigned for pensioners to receive free television licences.
The pitch for the film came from Kempton’s grandson himself, Christopher Bunton. It was a story that was somewhat forgotten by history – in part because Kempton so embarrassed the establishment of the time – but now the family wanted it out there.
“It was a very short paragraph. Considering how hard it is to write an effective synopsis, it was really well-written,” Bentham tells IF.
“It really caught my eye because it was such an absurd, crackpot story of an art heist that I’d never heard of.”
From its email beginnings, Kempton’s story has been brought to life via The Duke, in which he is played by Jim Broadbent, with Helen Mirren starring alongside as his long-suffering wife, Dorothy.
Currently in ANZ cinemas via Transmission Films, the comedy drama is the last project of the late director Roger Michell (Notting Hill).
After connecting with Christopher, Bentham spent several years developing the screenplay and assembling the team around the film, including Michell.
Christopher had already written a script himself, but Bentham then engaged Richard Bean and Clive Coleman to take it further. They seemed the perfect duo; Bean a writer from the north of England, and Coleman a comedy writer who was previously a barrister and BBC legal correspondent.
The team had a treasure trove of material to draw from; Kempton was a prolific unproduced playwright, and had also written an unpublished memoir. There were also case files in the National Archives, press clippings and court transcripts, as well as Kempton’s family.
“It became really clear to me that there was all of this really rich material and stranger-than-fiction facts to it. But at the heart of the story was a family drama – that’s where the real the real story lay,” Bentham says.
Michell was the first director Bentham sent the script to, because he could do scale, humour but also “intimate, moving human moments”.
Initially he said no, but they later wrangled him on board, along with Broadbent – they shared an agent, and had previously worked together on Le Week-End.
They were the “perfect package” for the film, particularly as Broadbent was who they always had in mind for Kempton – he even bears a striking resemblance to the real man.
In terms of Kempton’s wife Dorothy, Bentham wanted a “fierce and phenomenal” actress in the role, she being the glue and backbone of the family and who put up with Kempton’s schemes.
However, the team were unsure if Mirren would be keen for such a role.
“We’re so used to seeing her in a crown and looking incredible, which she does very naturally – would this really appeal; the role of a housewife and domestic cleaner? But we knew she’d bring something amazing to the role. We thought, ‘Well, let’s just send it to her, it’ll probably be a quick pass, and then we’ll have to think again.’ But she really fell in love with the writing, really understood the character and was just so excited to do something different.”
The Duke was shot in November 2019 and premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, though its theatrical release has then been delayed by the pandemic. Ironically, many of the themes of the film have become more prescient with COVID-19, particularly around caring for the elderly and isolated.
Bentham is warmed that people seem to be responding to the film’s message of kindness and community; that a society can only be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable.
“Obviously the film hasn’t changed, but I think the way that it resonates has,” she says.
“Also the fact that people are getting to see it in cinemas, where we’d always hoped that they would. It is about that community experience.”
Despite older audiences being the slowest to return to cinemagoing, The Duke has proved a relative hit in its native UK, opening to £992,261 and so far tallying £4.8 million ($8.4 million), pushed by a strong marketing campaign from Pathé.
While it has been hard to sit on the film for a long time, Bentham says people seem to “really want to come together and laugh”, and recognise the place of independent cinema among the tentpoles.
“I’m delighted we can offer that experience.
“I missed that, that communal experience, especially with comedy. It’s so much fun to to laugh with people. That’s what life’s all about.”
However, the release of the film has been bittersweet for Bentham, in that Michell, who died last September, has not been around to see it.
“It’s unbearably sad that he’s not here to see how much the film is delighting audiences. As much as he was quite a singular filmmaker – in that he was never making choices just to be a crowd pleaser, he was always following his own instinct and his own interests – he was making them for the people to enjoy. He would have he would have absolutely loved to hear the roaring laughter in the packed houses.”
Bentham has worked in the UK for the last two decades, or almost her entire career, having moved over after studying Media Arts and Production at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).
However, she is not the only Australian who worked The Duke; one of the EPs is the Sydney-based Peter Scarf, who she has known all her life.
“He was the first person that I called when I came across the project and was bidding for the rights.”
After landing in the UK with no industry connections, Bentham worked her way up the ladder from the bottom, juggling a “proper cliché” job in a video store with working as a runner, before eventually moving up the production department.
Her break as a producer came on Chris Atkins’ BAFTA-nominated Talking Liberties, with the financing structure she used catching the eye of Liberty Films, leading to her producing Duncan Jones’ Moon.
While Liberty Films then wanted to move into Hollywood features, Bentham decided to go into a different direction and in 2008 started developing her own projects under her banner Neon Films Her other projects include documentary Who Killed The Klf?, a co-production with Fulwell 73 due for release later this year, Andrea Riseborough and Damian Lewis-starrer The Silent Storm and children’s dance film You Can Tutu.
Neon’s focus is predominantly on film, though Bentham is also currently developing a number of TV projects. She is interested in bringing stories from the margins – or stories that have been overlooked or forgotten – to the mainstream, imbuing them with a contemporary gaze.
“I’m always looking for a distinctive angle on something; a story that we think we know or we understand and and how we can see things differently.”
While firmly based in the UK, where she is an active member of BAFTA, WFTV and co-chair of PACT’s Film Policy Group, Bentham is currently working on a project with Robyn Kershaw, and is “desperate” to make a project out of Australia.
“I’m talking to a number of people, but because I am truly independent, I’m pretty picky about projects. They have to really strike a chord. I have been looking for the right Australian project for some time, and I’m very keen to do either a co-production or a full Australian project.”
Of her career, Bentham says it’s “been a long, old bumpy road”.
“It’s been just over 20 years since I’ve been here [in the UK]. I’ve worked non-stop in that time, had two kids and started a non-profit called Raising Films, which has an Australian chapter as well. It’s been unbelievably hard work and really hectic. But I feel like now I’m kind of just hitting my stride, and maybe all of that hard work and those tricky decisions are finally paying off.”