Tacita Dean on David Warner: ‘Hummingbirds were his angels – he had an altar to them in his flat’

I learned that David Warner had died after landing in Los Angeles on Monday night. It was here a few years ago that I began my courtship of the actor, trying to persuade him in a string of requests to let me film him, which I’m glad to say, he eventually did.

I had long been in awe of him as an actor, especially for his performance in Alain Resnais’s great film Providence (1977). Only Ellen Burstyn remains alive from that extraordinary ensemble cast of five now that David has joined John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde and Elaine Stritch. I had invited David through his agent to come to a 35mm screening of the film at the Barbican and he replied in person, telling me that he couldn’t come, but nonetheless regaled me with stories about how much Providence had meant to him. He told me that Resnais chose the five actors he wanted in the film ahead of even a script so that when David Mercer wrote it, he wrote it for “us”. He also mentioned, with pride, about how he had been responsible for adding a single word to the script, which appears in the last line, spoken with such valedictory elegance by Gielgud: “I think I have time for just one more.” David had suggested the “just”.

David finally agreed to sit for me after I had described to him at length what my system of masking in the aperture gate of a 35mm camera allowed me to do. The masking, which is uniquely particular to photochemical film, allows me to film part of the picture, like a form of stencilling, before rewinding the roll and filming another part. I only see what I have filmed when I finally process the negative, often months later. I told David that I would be able to film anyone or anything alongside him in the film frame and the example I gave was of a hummingbird. Unknowingly, I had stumbled upon the key; David loved hummingbirds. He told me they had played a large part in his emotional life over the last 20 years since living in Los Angeles. For the non-religious, he wrote, hummingbirds were the equivalent of angels and when I later visited him, I saw he had made an altar to them in his flat.

The stage was set. I filmed David in a house in Hackney. First, for His Picture in Little (2017) for the Miniatures Gallery in the National Portrait Gallery, I chose to film three actors from three generations who had all played Hamlet to great acclaim on the British stage: David, Stephen Dillane and Ben Whishaw. They would appear together photochemically “in the frame” but were all filmed using my masking technique at different times and in different places. I realised it was not easy to ask an actor, who is used to direction, merely to sit and do nothing, so to make the relationship between artist and subject more comprehensible, I drew small pencil portraits of David while the camera turned.

I filmed him on the left of the frame, the right and even in the middle, notionally next to Ben Whishaw, whom I’d already filmed, and in anticipation of Stephen Dillane, whom I’d film later. I did not direct him but merely depicted him. David’s presence was so entrancing that he carried every frame beautifully and something curious happened: unstageable moments of synchronous reaction between the actors – movements, gestures, looks. The only direction had been chance itself.

Finally came roll 50: the roll that I had earmarked to take back to California to fill with hummingbirds. David understood the gravity of the roll and his role in it; he knew he would be in a future duet with hummingbirds, and he performed it so, summoning his angels in absentia, as emotional memory and in blissful reverie. His performance was perfect. I understood the gravity of the roll, too, terrified that I would fail to capture the elusive birds that dart and vanish and never stay still. There would be no possibility of a second take, no chance of just one more.

I researched hummingbird habits intensively, spoke with experts and investigated reliable places where the birds tended to gather and at what time of day. Eventually I narrowed the location down to one flowerbed at dusk in Huntington Botanical Gardens in Pasadena. The birds answered the call and performed.

I called the film Providence (2017) in honour of Resnais’s film and David’s part in it but mostly in acknowledgment of the providential moment that led me to make the film in the first place and then to achieving it. The last time I saw David was him watching the film in the National Portrait Gallery with his son Luke. The elegiac beauty of his father’s performance, not to mention the valedictory nature of it, overcame Luke and I left them together silhouetted in front of the hummingbirds, father moved by his son and son moved by his father.