If you have never actually read the Marquis de Sade, you might not know that he layered beatings, deflowerings and buggery with long stretches of philosophy: the marquis wanted to enlighten his readers as well as turn them on.
Which is why it seems so appropriate that the fascinating new film about De Sade, Quills, should be directed by Philip Kaufman. Kaufman, on the evidence of his sprawling, erotically charged epics The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry and June, is a man interested in the places where serious art, the politics of liberation and lots of sex coincide.
In short, you could call him the highbrow sex guy. Kaufman chuckles. “The highbrow sex guy! I think my wife enjoys me being
the sex guy. She gets a laugh out of that – and we’ve been married over 40 years.
“I only do films that interest me, and I’m interested in sex. Everybody is interested in sex. I would like to see more sex movies, not with slapstick sex, but explorations of sexuality and the ambiguity of sexuality. But I never go about a movie saying I’m going to make a sex movie.”
Sex is a major part of Quills, a flamboyant black comedy about the last days of the marquis. Set in the feverish atmosphere of the Charenton asylum, it has a brilliantly unrestrained and occasionally naked Geoffrey Rush as De Sade, Michael Caine as his persecutor, Joaquin Phoenix as an idealistic priest and Kate Winslet as a buxom laundrymaid. It is very funny, very theatrical and enjoyably lurid. And, despite being openly provocative, it featured heavily in best-movies-of-the-year polls last year in the United States, picked up the prize for best film at the prestigious National Board of Review awards, and Rush looks a good bet for an Oscar nomination. But all that has happened since I spoke to Kaufman. Then, he was still anxious about the way it was going to be received.
“Disney movies are always advertised as ‘films for children of all ages’. I would say this film is definitely not for children of all ages, not even for grown-ups who are looking for the Hollywood ending.”
He worries whether audiences these days are too literal, whether they can only accept people doing fantastical things in movies if they talk in an everyday way. In Quills, which embraces its origins as a play (by Doug Wright), the dialogue is theatrical; the performances, like the extra-large sets, are not meant to be life-size. And it isn’t intended as a historical account of the Marquis de Sade.
“By the end,” Kaufman explains in a deep, slow voice, “the actual boring biopic approach has been forsaken, and in a way it’s as though the marquis has been brought to his end by a character who has risen out of his own literature, the perfect Sadean hero, the hypocrite who acts like he is doing good but will behave in the most abominable way. I wanted the film to have certain Grand Guignol qualities because he was a writer, he was a director, his life was about storytelling, about myths.”
Kaufman has a decadent elegance to him, very much a match with his films. At 64, the longish hair and trimmed beard are mainly grey. Chicago-born, he has spent nearly four decades living in bohemian San Francisco.
For a well-known director, Kaufman doesn’t make a lot of films: Quills is only his fifth since 1980. This isn’t due to any Kubrick-like perfectionism, he claims, it’s just that the people with the money won’t let him make the films he wants to make. “Sometimes you get to the point where the producers say to you, ‘You can make it, but only if you get one of four stars.’ I’ve had that happen.”
He gratefully acknowledges that Kate Winslet’s presence in the film was the main reason Quills made it to the screen.
Kaufman isn’t one of those film-makers who always wanted to be a director, not a Steven Spielberg making short films when other kids were in the playground. He studied history at the University of Chicago, dropped out of Harvard Law School, went back to study more history. It shows in his early films, which examine American history and its big myths: The Great Minnesota Raid (1972) told the story of Jesse James; The White Dawn (1974) was about whaling; The Right Stuff (1983) about the space race. He also wrote the script for The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). “I was thinking of being a history professor at one point, and I
thought I could redo history the way it might have been.”
In Europe in the early Sixties, teaching English and trying to be a writer, he decided he wanted to make films. “I was really inspired by European films. I loved American movies but round the time I lived in Europe in the early Sixties you had the New Wave. So I went back inspired by [Jean-Luc] Godard and [François] Truffaut.”
His first film, Goldstein, released in 1965, picked up a prize in Cannes and the praise of Jean Renoir, who said it was the “best American film I have seen in 20 years”. He found his way back to Europe in 1988 with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a great success. Already in his fifties, Kaufman was abruptly immensely hip. But the film he made on the back of that breakthrough, Henry and June, gained notoriety rather than critical acclaim. The film ran into trouble with the US ratings board – eventually leading to the creation of a whole new ratings category in the US, the No-Children Under 17 (NC-17).
“Blockbuster [the video rental chain] to this day refuses to stock Henry and June in the US, even though they do porno films, which are not rated,” Kaufman notes. “Hypocrisy: that’s what I like about the Marquis de Sade – he railed against hypocrisy.”