For years, Nicholas Hytner, former director of the National Theatre, would walk past Alan Bennett’s house in beautiful Camden Town, north London, and wonder why a ramshackle van inhabited by a dilapidated old lady was permanently parked in the playwright’s driveway.  “I used to wonder, 'Does Alan keep his mother in a van? What’s going on?’ ” recalls Hytner, 59. Only after Margaret (or possibly Mary) Shepherd died in 1989 did Hytner learn the full story of this cantankerous, malodorous, talented pianist and former nun who, “by force of sheer will”, as he puts it, cajoled Bennett into allowing her to spend her last 15 years outside his house.  “Alan published his diary about Miss Shepherd in the London Review of Books, and that’s when it all came out,” says Hytner. “Before, people had always been too English and polite to say, 'What on earth is that?’ ”  Bennett adapted the diary into a memoir, The Lady in the Van, and then a play directed by Hytner, his long-term collaborator (the pair first worked together on The Wind in the Willows in 1990) and starring Maggie Smith. Now, 16 years, comes the film version, set in Bennett’s actual Gloucester Crescent home, with Dame Maggie, at 80, in heart-wrenching, potentially Oscar-winning form.  “Maggie’s a master of both screen and stage,” Hytner says in his fluent tones, with only the faintest hint of his Mancunian origins. “But she did make a point, before we started, of asking that I tell her to push back if she became too demonstrative on screen. Her fear was that, since she’d played Miss Shepherd on stage, there might be something in her muscle memory that made her put [the role] out too hard.”  Did he have to remind her? “Maybe once or twice,” he shrugs. Good news for Smith, who recently revealed that directors are often too intimidated by her reputation to give her the guidance she craves. “Maggie’s demanding, but she’s miles away from impossible,” Hytner says. “She’s on to everything in a flash, if you make a stupid suggestion you know it’s stupid before you’ve even finished.”  The film also features, to various degrees, every actor who’s ever been part of what Hytner calls the “Alan Bennett repertory company”, including all the surviving cast of his film (adapted from Bennett’s play) of The History Boys. “So many of those parts seemed so right for the actors we’d both been working with, so I said: 'Why don’t we have everybody in it?’ ”  Among the returnees are Bennett in a brief cameo as himself, Dominic Cooper, and James Corden as a barrow boy, a part he filmed just before moving to Los Angeles to host The Late Late Show. “James couldn’t have been happier about doing it,” says Hytner. “He has a line where she says, 'I’m a sick woman, dying possibly’, and he says, 'Well, we’ve all got to go sometimes. Smells like you already have.’ That was actually scripted as 'James will think of something funny here’, and he did.”  Most poignant was the casting of a 10-year-old boy who happened to be called Richard Griffiths – the same name as the actor who played the teacher in The History Boys, who died last year. “I emailed Richard’s wife and she was convinced it was some kind of message,” Hytner says.  It’s a wonderfully engaging film, but one where Hytner pushes few boundaries. “I’m a theatre director who happens to have been fortunate enough to have directed a few films, particularly ones written by Alan Bennett,” he says. His CV consists of six films, of which three, including the Bafta-winning Madness of King George, are Bennett adaptations. The others – The Crucible, The Object of My Affection and teen drama Center Stage, all made in the Nineties – performed respectably, though not brilliantly.  But Hytner was never tempted by a full-time film career. “I felt so out-of-place trying to make American movies,” he says. “I’m not going to curl my lip at Hollywood – what’s not to like about Bringing Up Baby? If I didn’t get on with [Hollywood], it’s because I’m incapable of making Bringing Up Baby.”  He’s impressed by how erstwhile theatre colleagues Sam Mendes (SPECTRE) and Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs) have made the transition to blockbuster directors. “I’ve not got the craft to do something like that, I wouldn’t know where to start. I couldn’t do a car chase.” He laughs. “Actually, there is a car chase in Lady in the Van, but I am better at small canvases.”  There’s no ruefulness here, since Hytner’s work at the National Theatre spawned a string of hits, including War Horse and One Man, Two Guv’nors, which generated record incomes (as did his 1989 West End Miss Saigon). He’s rightly proud of launching NT Live, beaming such shows live to cinemas worldwide, and the Travelex sponsorship of cheap tickets that made seats affordable to thousands, but at the same time he was happy to hand the reins in April to Rufus Norris.  “I loved every single moment of it, but 12 years [in charge] is the outer edge of respectability. All of the great London theatres are driven by the tastes and sensibilities of their directors, therefore a director has to let another taste and sensibility take over from time to time. They can’t be personal fiefdoms.”  Long before he stood down, he was plotting his next project, a 900‑seat commercial theatre near Tower Bridge, which will start showing four plays a year from 2017. “There’s no reason why theatre can’t thrive outside the West End," he says. "This location’s still in the centre, but closer to London’s new centre of energy and enterprise.”  It will be backed by investors, rather than public funds, but Hytner’s adamant this won’t result in a “safe” repertoire. “There’s a huge appetite for exciting work. Some of the plays that thrived in the West End, like Charles III, started in subsidised theatre, and there’s no reason why some of that innovation can’t be directly generated by commercial enterprise.”  Yet he also stresses the vital role that the government can play in protecting British theatre, especially in the regions. “The energy and talent in regional theatre is not in question, but is it safe? Absolutely not, because it requires public investment. The Chancellor, who is an extraordinarily cultured man – an opera-, theatre- and ballet-goer – has single-handedly introduced the theatre tax credit, which has been a very creative way of trying to mitigate the consequences of his macro-economic policy.”  The Lady in the Van inevitably brings up the question of the Syrian refugee crisis, and whether most of us would echo the kindness that Bennett, now 81 (played by Alex Jennings in the film), showed to the ungrateful Miss Shepherd. “I don’t have a drive, but would I have been crazy about Miss Shepherd living directly outside my house?” Hytner says. “I’m afraid and ashamed to say that I wouldn’t have been.”  He continues: “Alan absolutely hates it when people accuse him of kindness, it’s the thing he finds the most insulting of all.  “There are still a lot of people, even in London, who know themselves to be luckier than they should be and are a great deal more hospitable than you might expect them to be. But I’m absolutely not saying that everybody should or could behave the way that Alan did, because that’s pretty exceptional and unusual and eccentric.”
The director of The Lady in the Van on not being scared of Maggie Smith, James Corden's improv skills, and why he'll never make a Bond film