"Bernard and Doris," the film that premieres Saturday night at 8 on HBO, begins with a cryptic disclaimer: "Some of the following is based on fact. Some of it is not."
Here are the facts: In 1987, aging tobacco heiress Doris Duke hired a butler named Bernard Lafferty, a penniless Irish bisexual just out of rehab. In 1993, when Duke died, she left Lafferty in control of her vast fortune.
The rest of the movie, director Bob Balaban said, is largely conjecture. "There ensued, during those six years, something enormous between the two of them," he said by phone recently from New York. So the script imagines scenes, conversations, and entire characters, to guess at the relationship that unfolded.
As played by Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, that relationship is a growing codependency, intimate but chaste. Duke slowly opens up, revealing long-hidden emotions, and encourages Lafferty to indulge his eccentricities. (In one scene, Fiennes carries an ailing Sarandon to dinner while wearing a ball gown himself.)
Because it plays out as a tender pas-de-deux, it amounts to a generous look at Lafferty's role. That's a marked contrast to the mostly skeptical press attention that followed the former butler until his own death, three years after Duke's. And it makes the movie possible, Balaban said.
"The idea of Bernard as the villain who connived his way into this old lady's house and gold-digged from her," he said, "wasn't a story that I thought would be particularly interesting to tell."
Sarandon, too, imagined the relationship as a love story - a tale of lonely souls, enriching each other's lives. "If it was a one-sided thing, I thought it was creepier," she said, talking by phone from her home. "To just have him obsessed with her was not as interesting as her really curious about him, encouraging him to be more of who he is."
And to have Fiennes in the role, she said, made the relationship believable. "He was just so sweet, and of course he's so gorgeous," she said.
Balaban showed Sarandon the preliminary "Bernard and Doris" script after he directed her in "The Exonerated," a movie about death row inmates that aired in 2005 on Court TV. Sarandon was intrigued - provided, she said, that they find the right Bernard.
"It all hinged on getting the right guy," she said. "Someone that you could believe could run a house, that you could believe was bisexual or gay but wasn't incredibly obvious, intelligent, dignified, who would that guy be? And it was just a gift that Ralph said yes."
The casting was a coup, as well, for a decidedly small-scale film, Balaban said: "People loved the idea that Susan and Ralph were in a movie." Sarandon enlisted some of her friends in the industry, such as costume designer Joe Aulisi and production designer Frankie Diago. Friends offered up clothes from their closets. Fendi donated furs. Balaban met a costume designer on a train to Philadelphia; he wound up making a dress for the film.
Principal photography took place over three weeks, Balaban said, and the entire film cost "well under $1 million."
"Everyone was bringing in clothing and dogs," said Sarandon, whose own dog appears in a critical scene. "It was that kind of a picture."
And the hurried production schedule - scenes were often done in two or three takes, with scant rehearsal - offered some freedom to improvise. "The good news of that is if you're all right to think on your feet and you trust the other actor, some surprising things can happen," Sarandon said.
The fact that this wasn't a biopic also left room for imagination. The script, by Hugh Costello, left out large wrinkles in Duke's life, such as the fact that Duke legally adopted - and later disowned - a 35-year-old woman.
"Once we gave ourselves the license to imagine the relationship, I thought it just didn't serve us to have the other character," Balaban said.
And straying from reality also freed the actors to make their own decisions, Sarandon said. Duke apparently spoke in a whispery voice in public, she said. But in her scenes with Fiennes, "He was definitely playing the female and I was playing the male. So to have a whispery voice, to me, didn't seem to lend itself to that dynamic. I didn't try to do an imitation of her."
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net.
