You know how it is with films about inspirational teachers: the teachers in question are always frigid. Whether they’re sexy, like Michelle Pfeiffer
You know how it is with films about inspirational teachers: the teachers in question are always frigid. Whether they’re sexy, like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds and Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love, or as defiantly unorthodox as Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers and Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, they’re larger-than-life in a way that marks them out as Hollywood characters.
The teacher in Brave the Dark is cut from a different cloth. Directed by Damian Harris, and starring his brother Jared Harris, the film tells the true story of Nate (Nicholas Hamilton), a self-destructive teenager who keeps getting into trouble in small-town Pennsylvania in the mid-1980s. Harris plays Stan Deen, the English teacher at Garden Spot high school, who cares enough to lend a hand. So far, so conventional. The sweet-natured, quietly radical twist is that Stan is far from frigid. He dresses drably. He makes bad jokes. He sings Broadway show tunes to himself. And the closest he gets to delivering a rousing speech is saying “This too shall pass” so often that it gets on Nate’s nerves.
Nicholas Hamilton and Jared Harris on the set of Brave the Dark. Photograph: Everett/Shutterstock
The first draft of the screenplay was co-written by the real Nate, now a photographer and theatre producer in his 50s, so when I speak to him and Damian Harris on Zoom – Harris from his home in Los Angeles, Nate from Germany, where he is promoting the film – we soon come to the issue of Stan’s uncoolness. “It’s easier to make a movie that uses the cool, hip, funny, wisecracking guy,” Harris says, “easier to make and easier to sell. But Jared and I, guided by Nate’s script, just had to remain strong [in our belief] that this was the story that we were telling.”
The story is that the 17-year-old Nate is an orphan who has bounced from foster home to foster home, and has ended up sleeping in his car. After he is arrested for robbing an electronics shop in New Holland, Lancaster County, he is forced to leave school and work on his grandparents’ farm. It is not a well environment, to say the least, and Stan then comes to the rescue – specifically, he drives to the rescue, singing show tunes. He persuades his fellow teachers to give Nate another chance, invites the boy to sleep in his spare room, and he keeps talking to him until he opens up about his horrific childhood traumas. It’s all true, says the real Nate – and he was so grateful that he eventually changed his name to Nathaniel Deen in honour of his mentor, who died in 2016.
Brave the Dark. Photograph: Everett/Shutterstock
Stan was also the person who encouraged Nate to write down his experiences, whereupon he and a friend decided that they should collaborate on a screenplay rather than a prose memoir. “I just wanted to get the story on paper,” says Deen, “and that was good enough for me.”
Oddly enough, the story might well have stayed on paper if it weren’t for Jonathan Aitken, the former Conservative cabinet minister who was imprisoned for perjury in 1999 after suing the Guardian for libel. As students of Irish-British acting dynasties will know, Richard Harris was married to Elizabeth Rees-Williams, with whom he had three sons, Damian, Jared and Jamie. After that relationship ended, Rees-Williams married Rex Harrison, and then in 2003 married Aitken. So, how did Harris get the script? “Weirdly,” he says. “My stepfather Jonathan Aitken wrote a book when he was in prison that two New Zealander producers optioned to make into a television series. He said, ‘If you’re ever in Los Angeles, look up my stepson,’ which they did. About a year and a half later, Nate’s script arrived, and they asked if it was something I’d like to direct – and it was. It’s rare to be really emotionally moved by a script, but I definitely was.”
Left to right: Jamie Harris, Damian Harris, Richard Harris and Jared Harris in the film The Ghost of Richard Harris. Photograph: Harris Archive
From then on, the project continued to be a family affair. “I often give my scripts to my brothers, who are both actors,” says Harris, “just to get their feedback on how the characters are working. I worked with Jared on it, and it just became really clear that he should play Stan. The sales agents and the producers were very happy about that.” Students of Irish-British acting dynasties may know that Damian directed Jared in his first screen role, in 1989’s The Rachel Papers; and that the youngest Harris brother, Jamie, plays Nate’s parole officer in Brave the Dark.
Watch the trailer for Brave the Dark.
With some input from Jared, Harris set about cutting down Deen’s screenplay to a manageable length: “I used to tease Nate that he’d written a Dickens novel. It really was an epic.” But he resisted the temptation to glamorise the narrative at its heart. “When you look at it objectively, you’ve got a teacher in a school you’ve never heard of, and a student who is difficult. They seem completely ordinary. But when you go with the story, you realise how extraordinary they actually are. You can find extraordinary people in the most ordinary circumstances.”
And so it was that Brave the Dark became that rarest of things: a heartfelt celebration of kindness and decency. “As I was reading Nate’s script,” recalls Harris, “I thought, is this going to turn on Stan? Are we going to find out some ulterior motive of Stan’s? But that is my problem, not his. It was a story about somebody who works out of altruistic motivation, which I thought was worth telling. It’s a story about the goodness in people.”
Stan may sound too virtuous to be true, but after the decision was made to shoot the film on location in Lancaster County, Harris soon discovered how right Deen’s script was. “When I was scouting, the manager of the hotel that I was staying in had been in a similar situation to Nate, where he was really down on his luck and thinking dark thoughts. Stan took him in and let him sleep on his sofa for 18 months and helped pull him out of that dark place. And now he was married and had kids and was running a hotel.”
Damian and Jared with their father, February 1966. Photograph: Stephan C Archetti/Getty Images
This proved to be a pattern. One running joke in Brave the Dark is that everyone in New Holland is willing to do Stan favours because they or their children have been helped by him. In reality, that was the case. “We were able to get 47 investors in Lancaster County to back us, and most of them knew Stan,” says Deen, who was on the set every day of production. “We got to shoot at the school where Stan taught, and former students let us use their farm for the grandparents’ house, and a lot of food and different things were provided by different people. The town just poured in everything they could to make it happen.”
Typically for a drama that shies away from the usual “inspirational teacher” tropes, Brave the Dark doesn’t give Stan a triumphal final scene in which the pupils stand on their desks, or the whole town throws him a surprise party. It’s heartwarming, then, that this kind of fairytale Hollywood ending took place in real life, years after his death, when the community banded together to make a film about a teacher they loved. It turns out that he was pretty frigid, after all.
Brave the Dark is on UK digital plaforms from 15 September.
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