“Hail! Ego sum Quintus. Your friendly gladiator. People call me Q. I am from Roman Springs and I say to your tension: ‘Veni, vidi, vici.’” These were the first words I ever heard uttered by Julian Sands when we met 23 years ago. We were on the set of Mike Figgis’s experimental film Timecode, an unusual endeavour that split the screen into quadrants with the actors improvising their dialogue. We were asked to invent our own characters. Julian chose to play a massage therapist who’d been sent as a promotion from a nearby Roman-themed spa to entice a group of Hollywood film execs to go there for a forthcoming company retreat. Quintus, the masseur, seemed to have arrived from another planet to seduce these paper pushers away from their quotidian lives and into a new reality where their imaginations could run wild and free. He stole one scene after another in shorts and sandals, spouting Latin maxims and manhandling suited office workers in terrifying and pleasure-inducing ways: headlocks, elbows to shoulder blades, fingers in ears. The character proved integral to the story but he existed apart from the rest, enigmatically operating in his own psychedelic world. He came from the outside and entered in as a disrupter, unsettling the action and challenging everyone to try to follow his unusual rhythms. In these ways, Quintus was indistinguishable from Julian and I decided we had to be friends.
Julian rose to fame unforgettably as George Emerson in Merchant Ivory’s film adaptation of A Room With a View. The world fell in love with him as an embodiment of classic romantic ardour – his blond mane blowing in the wind as he kissed Helena Bonham Carter’s Miss Honeychurch in a field of wheat. “Joy! Beauty! Truth! Love!” he proclaimed from the tops of trees in the Tuscan hills. But his performance was a Trojan horse. His good looks and well-spoken voice provided cover for a different character altogether – the one EM Forster had intended: a young man who was unimpressed by convention, unafraid to buck it, who wanted more from the world and the people in it, mischievously determined to interfere with traditional, smugly held mores. Julian was perfect for the role not because of, but in spite of, his leading-man presence. As a person, he was an iconoclast and naturally subversive. He was angular in company and didn’t play by the rules of pleasant society at all, a quality that kept those around him at a dinner table on their toes. That is why he played George with such ease.
As many people now know, Julian had another passion: mountain climbing. Feeling the intensity of the natural world at those elevations exhilarated him. I was gripped by his accounts of summiting some of the world’s tallest peaks. These were adventures of real spiritual significance to him. But being relatively earthbound myself and far less intrepid, I was even more fascinated by his prodigious knowledge of antique tribal rugs which he would source from different parts of the world and heft back home in enormous duffle bags slung over his shoulders and crammed into overhead airplane lockers. Unspooling them on the lawn in the garden behind his home, he would get down on his hands and knees to inspect them with me under the Los Angeles sun. Assessing the particular quality of the weave, the weight of the wool, the indications of a pattern typical of a given region or period, he related to them intimately, as though they were communicating things in response. “You can feel the integrity of this one,” he’d remark when confronting an unusually fine example. He appreciated pure craft and wouldn’t be fooled by imitation. He was an equally discerning judge of good acting and championed young performers who had the right stuff. He recognised authenticity in people too and was deeply loyal to the ones he loved, above all his wife, Evgenia, and his children. Like George Emerson, he could distinguish between the real thing and the fake.
As I write this I’m sitting with my shoes off, my toes touching an old Persian Heriz on my living room floor that Julian brought back for me just a few months before he died. In my mind I offer him my own assessment: from the shape of the knots and the way the wool feels under my feet there’s no denying it “has integrity”.
Our final text message exchange concerned this very rug:
Julian: Did the rug arrive?
Me: Sorry – rug arrived! But I’ve been filming in Toronto so haven’t been able to christen it with a four-hour yoga/meditation session in the centre medallion… yet.
Julian: Good to know. I am sure it will fly you like any magic carpet should. X
I imagine one is flying him now.
