Jason Isaacs tells Steve Pratt the story behind the troubled making of the movie, Good, based on CP Taylor’s famous play.

EIGHT years ago actor Jason Isaacs received a call out of the blue from Miriam Segal, a producer he’d known when he was 19 or 20 doing drama at the Edinburgh Festival.

She had the rights to make CP Taylor’s play, Good, into a film. “Do you want to help me?,” she asked the actor, who plays Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies.

Isaacs’ reply wasn’t the one she wanted to hear – an emphatic “no” because he thought it was awful for her, as a Jewish woman, to be considering the idea of a film because it was an apology for Nazism.

He admits making these comments from a position of ignorance. He hadn’t seen the play or read it, although he pretended he had. Despite this, she gave him the play to read.

“I read it and phoned her up immediately to apologise for being such a moron. I thought it was incredibly powerful and pertinent, and said I would like to be involved, but didn’t want to help her raise money because she’d never be able to do it,” continues Isaacs.

In the end he put up some of his own money to keep it afloat during one of the periods when ash dried up.

The play, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company with Alan Howard starring in the early Eighties, is by C P Taylor, the Glasgow-born writer who made the North- East his home. His other work includes And A Nightgale Sang, set in wartime Tyneside.

The story is of German literature professor in the Thirties whose work is used by powerful government figures to further the Nazi cause and, incidentally, his own career while his family disintegrates around him.

Segal became obsessed with making the film. “She was so determined, it made such an impact on her ethically and morally, that in the process she lost her booming TV and film production company, her apartment, her car and was sleeping in other people’s houses. But along the way she managed to raise many millions of dollars,” says Isaacs.

Then, with the production about to start filming in Germany, a pre-production financing bridge was needed.

Isaacs wrote a cheque to pay the German crew. Despite that, the project collapsed, with Segal assuring him: “I’m going to get your money back and everyone else’s.”

She spent another year putting the film back together again. Isaacs, given an executive producer credit, thought of Viggo Mortensen for the leading role of John Halder. The problem was he’d announced his intention of taking a year away from acting.

Isaacs “breached Hollywood protocol” by asking a friend to give Mortensen the script. It proved a good move. “He was two pages in and said, ‘I know this, I saw it with Alan Howard 25 years ago. I’m in,” says Isaacs.

Ironically, he then began shooting a US TV series, Brotherhood, and looked like missing out on playing the role of Halder’s best friend, a Jewish therapist.

“Showtime were generous enough to release me twice during the course of filming this gangster series in Rhode Island to go to Hungary to be this psychiatrist in Berlin.

“Because Viggo and I had to be best friends and have a long history together, he flew out to Rhode Island to be with me and my wife and kids, and hung out for a few days just for us to get to know each other. Then he took off in a car across Eastern Europe to do his own research.”

On commercial considerations he says: “It’s about powerlessness in many ways and is that likely to fill multiplexes every Friday night? No, not as much as Iron Man 2. But sometimes you’re driven to tell a story you think is important.

“What drew me to it is nothing to do with that period and Nazism because I find my own life – my rarified, middle class, privileged bubble – a real ethical minefield.

“If my kids study law, like I did, and say ‘daddy, what did you do when they took the right to silence away, when people were being tortured in your name?’ I’m not quite sure how to answer questions to myself in the mirror and to my children as the complications of the world dawns on them.”

Being Jewish put an extra responsibility on him for telling this story. At first he thought it needed to be the most complex, most informative, most educational portrayal of any Jew that had been on screen.

Then he realised he was setting a ludicrously high bar for himself.

He listened to recordings of a rabbi at the liberation of Belsen camp. Then, by chance, he met the man, Leslie Hardman, in Liverpool and he told Isaacs the full horror of that day.

“If you’re ever going to put this time period in a film, you’d better make sure you have the right reasons for doing it, and I think we had noble intentions,” he says.

■ Good (15) is now showing in cinemas.