With a new film out and a new job as chair of the UKFilm Council, how does Alan Parker see the future for British movies?
Tim Adams
‘Oh, I’m much calmer, less controlling, more relaxed these days,” says Alan Parker, smiling, telling me how he has not only written and directed the film version of Frank McCourt’s bestseller Angela’s Ashes, but also produced the film’s poster on his Xerox at home and done the graphic design for the press pack.
In the past, he admits, he has been fond of suggesting that “directing a film is a crash course in megalomania” and that he “enjoys the Stalinist approach to movie- making – as long as I am Stalin” (in homage to this he has a bust of Uncle Joe in his office presented to him by his colleagues). But all that has changed.
Parker has matured, he suggests, mellowed even. Having waged guerrilla warfare against the film establishment in Britain for nearly three decades, he now is that establishment, chair of new Labour’s new Film Council. The perceived chippiness of the Islington advertising man in Hollywood has, he implies, been replaced by a new kind of phlegmatic wisdom.
He reflects on this personal evolution for a moment. “Of course my film crew would fall about laughing if they heard me say any of that,” he concedes. Parker, explaining his new-found laissez-faire, has a pent-up quality, which seems like it might dissolve into rage. He wears his jacket buttoned and straining, as if to hold his impatience in; he mostly talks gruffly at the floor.
“When I started directing I disagreed with a lot of people and an entire philosophy about what made a good film,” he says; “a) they thought because you’ve got a cockney accent you’re stupid, which is the ultimate insult; and b) if you disagreed with that intellectually snobby establishment they said you just had a chip on your shoulder. It was easy shit to put out, but I don’t think anyone buys that any more …”
In any case, he is at great pains to stress, he no longer feels the need to continually fight his artistic corner. “I have always said the same thing,” he says, “that American cinema is the cinema of the audience.
“I am just as much an auteur as any so- called European director, except that I have to justify people giving me a lot of money.
“It would be much easier to make an ‘art’ film for my relatives and three critics. But, as I say, I don’t think I need to make that argument any more.”
For someone who no longer feels the need to explain himself, Parker does a good deal of explaining. He has just returned from several weeks of television interviews in the United States and Europe promoting his film. “In Germany you get seven minutes; in America you get four, including a clip, so it’s really just ‘good evening’ and you’re off.” Which is just as well, really, because the more he talks about the process of film-making, the less he feels he has anything to say.
“So much of it is instinctive. I’m sure Trevor Nunn can explain it, but I’m so badly educated I’ve never been able to articulate it.” Still, as he insists, he’s not chippy. Parker first read Angela’s Ashes as a manuscript, long before the book was published, and tried to buy the film rights then, only to discover that they had already been acquired by the American producer Scott Rudin. When the project eventually came his way, a screenplay had been written, but he went back to the book and started again.
He’s always written his own films. “It’s the only way to get the thing really inside your head.” To orient himself in the Limerick of McCourt’s childhood, Parker used a map of the book’s key locations he’d found on a Japanese website for Angela’s Ashes obsessives. The site brought home to him the extraordinary universal appeal of a book which had sold six million copies in 30 countries. Its author was a big help and inspiration: “Frank had been a schoolteacher in New York for so many years that he has this endlessly encouraging and patient manner,” says Parker.
“Even though, when I finished it, it did feel a bit like putting an essay in to your English teacher. You know, ‘must try harder’.” (McCourt returns the compliment suggesting that Parker understood the book so well because “he comes from a blue-collar background and I come from a no-collar background”.)
The difficulties of putting McCourt’s memoir on film were always likely to be in preventing its sentiment from becoming too mawkish: it begins, brightly, with the death of the author’s baby sister and infant twin brothers from a mixture of illness and malnutrition, and then the trouble really starts.
Parker succeeds in keeping the grimness in check through performances of great intensity and restraint from Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson, who play McCourt’s parents, as well as inspirational, and often comic, debuts by the boys who play the growing Frank (typically Parker auditioned 15E000 children to find the Franks he wanted: “If you get the casting right, the rest takes care of itself,” he says). Even so, as in the book, the real stars of Angela’s Ashes are Poverty and Damp, which stalk the hopes of the ever- optimistic McCourt children like personifications from medieval mystery plays.
This is perhaps the wettest film ever made. The rain sweeps in from the Shannon (“the damp heart and silent villain of our story”, as Parker has it). It sluices through the alleys of Limerick before collecting in big puddles in the McCourts’ front room. Ever the craftsman, Parker spent months at Technicolor, working with a new grading process that holds more of the silver in the print. Thus, as the McCourt family push their soggy belongings in dripping hand carts from one waterlogged basement to another they are bathed in a kind of sepulchral sepia glitter which lends some scenes a monumental pathos.
Parker’s films often seem likely military campaigns, with him cast in the role of a pugnacious general under fire. When, for example, he made Mississippi Burning, Time magazine branded Parker’s portrayal of the passivity of blacks during the civil rights movement “a cinematic lynching” of history. Parker also exercised the US’s moral majority and the censors with Angel Heart when he poured chicken blood on to Mickey Rourke’s buttocks as he had “voodoo sex” with Lisa Bonet. He survived, too, making Evita in Buenos Aires, where he was greeted with death threats after casting Madonna – “Satan in drag” according to the city’s
bishop – as the lead. He eventually persuaded Carlos Menem to allow him to film from the balcony of the presidential palace and even coaxed Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to collaborate on a new song.
Angela’s Ashes was a doddle in comparison, though he did run into difficulties with Limerick’s Catholic establishment, which refused to let him film in the city’s churches (he went to Dublin instead). It was the most harmonious set he had been on, he says, and after a decade working out of Los Angeles it was good to be back filming close to home. A return to London enabled him to be near his four children, though the overriding reason he came back was to take up the challenge of building a new British film industry as chair of the Film Council with a 27-million annual budget.
In the past, notably in his 1984 TV polemic A Turniphead’s Guide to the Cinema, Parker has been an outspoken critic of little England “red bus” movies and the “fiefdoms who went out of their way to help Derek Jarman but don’t help anyone else”. He once said he would be forced to leave the country if Peter Greenaway made another movie, distributing posters declaring: “Instant narcolepsy – see a Greenaway film.”
But what plans does Parker have for the new Film Council? How does the old firebrand plan to shake up the industry, kick out the old establishment, bring on a new generation of Leans and Reeds and Parkers and Puttnams? “Well, it’s a bit premature for me to say,” he offers, suddenly coy. “I’m going to be very diplomatic. It’s very difficult,” he suggests, before confiding that “there are things the council agrees on and things that we don’t”. When pressed, he concludes that “it’s all at a very delicate stage”.
It may not be the turniphead rhetoric of old. But in his new role as cheerleader for a Blairite film revolution, Parker, it seems, is already talking the right language.