At the start of the 1970s, when producer Cubby Broccoli was looking for an actor to replace the ill-fated George Lazenby as James Bond, a call was put out to 400 hopefuls, including one Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes. Fiennes, or “Ran”, as he prefers to be called, certainly fit much of the bill to be secret agent 007. He was tall and handsome; he was well educated (Eton, then officer cadet school); he was well-travelled – both during his time in the Army, when he fought in Oman, and later as an adventurer who had recently travelled the length of the White Nile by hovercraft; and, though it was a facet of his existence that irked him, as the third baronet of Banbury, he was rather well bred.
“Got into the last six. Some other bloke got it. Roger… Moore,” says Fiennes, in director Matt Dyas’s fascinating feature-length biographical documentary, Explorer, which is released in cinemas on Thursday. Quite why Broccoli overlooked Fiennes to be Bond is not clear, though Fiennes has said that he was told he looked like “a farmer whose hands are too big and clumsy” (his third cousin once removed, Ralph, had better luck). But could it have been that Fiennes, as Dyas’s film illustrates with elegance and care, might always have struggled to see the point in pretending to be a certain dashing character, and live a certain dashing life, when he could just be and live both of those things for real?
And be them and live them he did. For Fiennes, now 78, is, as the marketing materials for the film describe him, “the world’s greatest living explorer”. He has circumnavigated the globe via the North and South Poles; he has crossed Antarctica unsupported; he has attempted a solo trek to the North Pole, which resulted in severe frostbite on his fingers that necessitated their amputation (naturally, he sawed them off himself). In fact, he’s done all sorts of feats of derring-do that are both incredibly impressive and also arguably, depending on how you feel about these things, somewhat baffling. And anyway that, as this intriguing and affectionate portrait reveals, is not what makes him worth your time.
In fact, Explorer does not set out to give a comprehensive overview of Fiennes’ exploits – thank goodness, as it would make your head swim – but rather to give a flavour of them, or rather, to give a flavour of what Fiennes is like when he’s on them. His dogged, sometimes pig-headed, determination to complete the challenge at hand; his natural leadership skills (one expedition partner describes his surprise at discovering that, in a party of two, Fiennes still considered himself the boss); his devotion to his first wife, Ginny, whose unwavering support and organisational skills, the film is careful to emphasise, enabled many of his adventures to happen in the first place.
In this Dyas is aided by an incredible trove of archive footage and photography featuring the young Ran larking about with his regiment, the Royal Scots Greys, or posing, tanned and dashing, with his soldiers in the desert, or trudging with a huge sledge lashed to his waist across the vast ice. Perhaps even more affecting, though, is the footage of Fiennes and Ginny, who met when they were children, and whose love affair was – as so many of the great ones are – both passionately devoted and ultimately tragic. (See also: the leitmotif of Bothie the Jack Russell, whom we first see onboard the Transglobe Expedition in 1979, then later, frolicking in the Fiennes’ Devon house, and, finally, as an oil painting.)
Intercut with the archive is informal, fly-on-the-wall footage of Fiennes today, now nearing 80 and showing signs of frailty (that “living explorer” bit in the marketing tagline feels poignant). Not that he wants our sympathy of course, and much of the sweetness and humour of the film – of which there is plenty – comes from this new material: Fiennes in a bashed-up Ford Mondeo squeaking his way out of a multi-storey carpark; Fiennes mainlining dolly mixture before a stage appearance; Fiennes saying “Morning, Dad, love you,” to a photograph of his father, who died in WWII, while Ran was still in utero. His is a cantankerous charm to which resistance is pretty much futile (at a Q&A before the premiere of the film last week, a straightforward question from Dyas resulted in Fiennes telling an only tangentially relevant but nonetheless entertaining story about being lost in the London sewer system. The audience, if you’ll excuse the unfortunate metaphor, lapped it up).
Fiennes is both a brilliant interview subject and, in some ways, a hilariously terrible one. He is incapable of – or at least fiercely resistant to – introspection; one interviewee describes him as “a piece of granite”. In an early scene in the film, he subverts Mallory’s famous line about Everest to tell an audience that he explores “not because it’s there, or because it’s sort of romantic, but basically in order to pay the gas bill.” When he’s interviewed about losing his frostbitten fingertips he replies, “There’s no point in crying over spilt milk”. Sometimes he seems unable to recognise the advantages that the circumstances of his upbringing brought him; when one interviewer reminds him that he’s a knight, he replies, “We haven’t got any money,” as though wealth and class were somehow one and the same.
But if Fiennes won’t dig too deeply into his own psyche, there are numerous friends, relatives and colleagues – and also a (clearly besotted) Prince Charles – who are prepared to prod, their voices overlaying the archive footage, as though dialling in on a satellite phone. This chorus adds depth to our understanding of Fiennes experiences of grief, of heartbreak, of bitter disappointment. And the prodding isn’t always gentle: one expedition companion acknowledges that Fiennes’ exploits, in today’s view, could easily be described as “white privileged folly”. Another asks: “How insecure do you need to be to have to go around the fucking world to beat the rival, to feel good about yourself?”
And what must it be like now for Fiennes, a man whose extraordinary physical capabilities were his greatest strength, to grow old? To find that his body, after nearly 80 years of active service, no longer wants to comply? On this the film also ruminates, gently, kindly, giving Fiennes space to reflect as much as he is able, and to joke as compulsively as he must. A biographical documentary that is celebratory without being hagiographic is a famously difficult balance and so, just like its subject, Explorer is a rare find. And, just like its subject, you should give in to it, and let it take you where it wants to go.
Explorer is out in cinemas on 14 July and to rent and own from 29 August
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
