“I think, as time goes on, I’m getting more and more English,” Stephen Frears announces, as he contemplates his antipasti in a Notting Hill trattoria, just down the road from his home. “I wouldn’t know what to do in Hollywood. This is where I live.”
It’s just the kind of mission statement you might expect from a director who’s turned the filmic spotlight on the complexities of domestic class and culture, whether set among the thrusting Thatcherite immigrant entrepreneurs of 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette – the movie which brought him to international attention – or mavericks clawing and scheming their way out of the working-class ghetto, both in his Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears, and his adaptations of Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper and The Van.
Hang on, though – wasn’t this also the man who made one of the definitive American road movies in The Grifters, meticulously anatomised the court machinations of 18th-century France in Dangerous Liaisons, and, most recently, helmed the finest Sam Peckinpah western the man himself never made, complete with cattle drives and dusty rodeos, last year’s The Hi-Lo Country?
We should at least be back on familiar terrain with Frears’s latest movie, High Fidelity, an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s best-selling novel about a manic-depressive, north London second-hand record shop owner who consoles himself through serial break-ups with obsessive Top 5 list-making. Somewhere in development hell, however, John Cusack acquired the rights to the book, assembled his Grosse Pointe Blank writing team, and shifted the location from London to Chicago, with Cusack himself – not the first face that would spring to mind when contemplating the doleful character of Rob – in the leading role.
It turns out to be these two factors that attracted Frears to the project. “I’d read the book,” he says, “and though I found it enjoyable, it didn’t really chime with me; it’s not about my generation. But I liked the idea of John doing it; he’s been a friend since we did The Grifters. And while I was as sceptical as anyone about the change of setting, it finally appealed to me, because it made it less parochial; it stops it being about England.”
“That’s sort of the problem with English films, isn’t it?” he asks, warming to his theme. “England is all they’re ever about, and if they’re not, they’re even worse. This country is just not a very interesting subject. It’s terribly limited.”
It sounds contradictory – an English film director who feels intensely English, who’s ambiguous at best when it comes to making films about England because he doesn’t find England interesting. But then, Frears himself cuts a rather contrary figure. A youthful-looking 58, his bushy black hair greying above the ears, he resembles a rumpled, trendy don. He is, in fact, a visiting tutor at the National Film School in Beaconsfield, and his soft-spoken manner can change from avuncular bonhomie to icy patrician disdain with quicksilver speed.
For instance, when I venture a remark that 70% of High Fidelity appears to be delivered straight-to-camera by Cusack, he’s indignant: “That’s stupid, a wild exaggeration. It’s nothing like that, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s more like 7%.”
The next minute, he’s asking my opinion on which of the new breed of British film directors has “got it” (for the record, the only one he really rates is Kevin Allen, who made Twin Town and The Big Tease – “he seems a very clever boy”).
In some ways, he’s the embodiment of the establishment that came of age in the late 60s and early 70s – he abandoned his Cambridge law degree to work as assistant director to Karel Reisz on 1966’s Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment, and repeatedly refers, luvvie-like, to “Lindsay” (Anderson), “Ridley” (Scott), “Ken” (Loach), “Les” (Blair), or “Mike” (Newell and Leigh). However, he also portrays himself simply as a workaday movie-maker who’s generally been lucky with his projects (though he passed on Thelma & Louise), despite the fact Cusack puts him “in the front rank” of directors working today.
“It doesn’t feel like that from where I stand,” he shrugs. “It’s not that there are 15 offers sitting around and people begging me to do them. There’s generally one thing that captures my imagination and, like a spoilt child, I’ll go off and do it, whether it’s set in Dublin or Illinois.”
But not, perhaps, Notting Hill. Despite living in the area for 20 years with painter Anne Rothenstein and their three sons and daughter, Frears hasn’t seen the film of the same name, “except occasional bits over people’s shoulders on planes”, and looks blank when I mention the legendary Blue Door.
“I’m not really interested in it,” he claims. “That’s what I mean about English films – they’re generally so cosy. I think what we’ve done with High Fidelity is kept the spirit of the book but universalised the story. There are differences – the character of Rob probably has more sexual confidence, but that’s partly a function of setting it in the States, where they seem less neurotic about that kind of thing, and partly because it wouldn’t be too convincing having John being that gauche – but Nick Hornby told me he’s very pleased with it.”
Given the variety of his output, what exactly constitutes “A Stephen Frears Film”? Some critics have compared him to Howard Hawks; like that Hollywood eminence, Frears is a director who, from his debut with Gumshoe in 1972, has transcended genres and settings by focusing on the human drama at the heart of a story. “Hawks, eh?” says Frears. “Well, I was brought up to film what was in front of me, to concentrate on the people at hand, rather than go on some interior journey or get into elaborate framings or effects. I don’t think in terms of high concepts.”
Perhaps this explains his facility to coax sterling, often career-best performances from his actors: one thinks of Anjelica Houston’s murderous rage in The Grifters or Glenn Close’s manic method of make-up removal in Dangerous Liaisons. “I’m interested in those moments where people reveal their true natures,” he says. “And I think the actors in my films are very good and I admire them. I find I say less and less to them; I’m doing as little direction as possible these days, because I tend to make things worse.
“Being on a movie set is very intimate; it’s like being with your family. It’s a sort of organic process; I never quite know what the thing’s going to be about before I start but, on a good day, it sorts itself out and you breathe life into it. I’m not terribly analytical – I go entirely from the gut. I make sure I work with good writers like Hanif Kureishi and Alan Bennett, and have them on hand to deal with that stuff. My natural inclination is to protect the actors while we work things out. I become completely paternal,” he guffaws.
For Frears, casting is the key element. One of his biggest contributions to High Fidelity, he says, was to keep Jack Black, who plays Cusack’s boorish assistant, on board. “Jack’s a bolter,” says Frears, “and I brought him back twice because I had faith in him. Sometimes you’re amazed by the stuff you get. Like Annette Bening, on the first day of The Grifters: she started doing incredible things. If you can photograph that delight, those moments of discovery, you just keep your mouth shut and get on with it.”
While Frears has certainly made films in the States, he’s at pains to point out that he’s never “gone Hollywood”. “I don’t think I’ve ever taken a meeting in my life,” he demurs. “I’ve yet to have a film green-lit, as it were.” He’s “rather disapproving” of young British directors who fashion their movies as Hollywood calling-cards. “I’m a little old-fashioned in that way. My generation was lucky; up until 1988, the idea of a British director going to Hollywood was inconceivable. It just wasn’t on offer. And we didn’t sit around moaning about it; it just wasn’t what people expected or valued. We just got on with it.”
In fact, his crab-like progress between modestly-mounted UK and US indies garnered him a reputation as an on-time, on-budget safe pair of hands; it was only when he tackled a pair of studio behemoths, 1992’s Accidental Hero, starring Dustin Hoffman as a thief who helps the victims of a plane crash, and 1996’s Mary Reilly, with Julia Roberts, that Frears came a cropper.
“I didn’t know how you filmed a plane crash,” shudders Frears. “And it’s not that Dustin was difficult, but having big stars skews the movie; you have to concentrate on this enormous investment. I’m sure I could handle it now, but at the time it knocked me down like a train. In Laundrette and Liaisons, you could see where the money was going, but with Hero we had $42m to deal with, and it was flying all over the place. And I should never have done Mary Reilly. I knew that before I started. It was full of great design and photography, but it should have been a little BBC film.”
These experiences brought on what he describes as “five or six very difficult years where I lost my confidence”. It wasn’t until he began working on The Hi-Lo Country that he got “the old feeling” back. High Fidelity, with its youthful optimism and buoyant soundtrack – could this possibly be a portrait of Frears’s current state of mind? “Maybe,” he confirms. “People say it’s positively jaunty compared to my normal films.”
However, about that perennial Aunt Sally, the renaissance of the British film industry, Frears is less sanguine. “Is there a British film industry?” he asks plaintively. “Where is it? There just seem to be a lot of independent producers leading very tough lives. I served my apprenticeship with the BBC, where you were judged by your peers, and it was rather elitist, but it was a benign hierarchy, and tempered by its beneficiaries. Everyone you can name today came out of it: Sam, Danny, Antony [Mendes, Boyle, Minghella], me. It was a real coal face of creativity, and to have ripped the heart out of that is idiotic, but the government seem unable to see that.”
British film industry or no, Frears keeps right on working. He’s just directed Fail-Safe, a live-broadcast remake of a 60s cold-war nuke-alert movie for CBS TV in the States, starring George Clooney and Richard Dreyfuss (“David [Hare] said, what about your heart, it was absolute madness, terrific though”), and is currently shooting a Jimmy McGovern script about “fascism, unemployment, and Catholicism,” for the BBC in Liverpool. He cheerfully admits to knowing nothing about Catholicism; I wonder if he’s addicted to leaps in the dark.
“What it is,” he says, “is that I’ve no talent for making a film about my own life. I made a huge mistake with Sammy & Rosie Get Laid; I set it on the Harrow Road, in my backyard, and all my judgment went out the window. I like to make films about really different worlds, whether that might be the Pakistani community, the Irish, the aristocracy, whatever. I need distance.”
As we walk back to Frears’s house, we pass a washeteria called, inevitably, My Beautiful Laundrette. “They asked me for my permission,” he says. “They even asked if I’d open it.” And, for all his England-kills-me-I’m-just-a-glorified-techie protestations, there’s just the hint of a gratified smile playing about his lips.