An Interview With Stephen Frears

“Want to know why I’m in a good mood

A puckish grin emerges from Stephen Frears face as he asks the question where an answer is not a prerequisite. Still, the writer offers up the single word: “Drugs?”

He almost breaks into a scowl, but nothing will invade his delight.

“I’m free,” he gushes. And it’s true that his demeanor has changed appreciably in the past 24 hours. A little more than a day earlier he arrived in Los Angeles for a whirlwind series of events and interviews promoting the release of his film Dirty Pretty Things. He indeed has a reputation of being a circumspect, monosyllabic interview subject, but tonight the weight of scrutiny has lifted and he merely has to comment on a favorite film - The Third Man - he’s selected for a program sponsored by the American Film Institute.

So, how many interviews were there in L.A. and New York? “Oh, 4,000 or 6,000,” he exaggerates. And how many times was he asked the same question? “4,000 or 6,000 times,” he reiterates. “Actually, it wasn’t so bad. I only had to deal with one complete idiot. You know, the sort of innately stupid man who has no idea what a complete fool he is.”

Still, he’s not the sort of person to make sport of human frailties. Frears himself is a rather large, lumpish presence one might describe as resembling a pile of rumpled clothing. He’s looks like a warm teddy bear devoid of threat and, conscious or not, one suspects that his cast and crew responds by trying to please their benign leader.

His new film centers on a group of multi-national immigrants living in London. Most either don’t have valid papers or have temporary rather than resident visas. He refers to them as the significant, invisible population of the city.

“It’s a rather new phenomenon,” he says. “The people in the film aren’t by and large from former colonies, so it’s not about empire. I did that when I worked with Hanif Kureishi on My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie. This is something that’s more difficult to describe. You can view it in a lot of different ways and it does change as it goes along.”

Most reviews have tagged it a thriller, but it’s also a love story and, though he would argue against it, a social commentary. Frears says it is exactly the type of story that challenges him most. It’s something with different shadings that consumes him because he only discovers what it is as he is making it.

The writer was curious about the title Dirty Pretty Things. Was it a British idiom?

“No,” replies Frears. “I like it because it conjures up a contrast. You know, how can something be both dirty and pretty. But the response to the title has been all over the map. You either connect to it in some way or you think it’s the worst, most meaningless thing you could call the picture.”

Though he’s yet to tackle science-fiction or the sort of epic popcorn entertainment movie that Hollywood thrives on during the summer, Frears has amassed an eclectic series of credits that make him tough to pigeon-hole. His English movies have embraced everything from the fanciful Gumshoe to the gritty period drama Liam, The Hit was an homage to bygone thrillers and he calls his first Hollywood foray, Hero, his Capra movie. He’s probably best known for Dangerous Liaisons and forgiven for the Jekyll and Hyde variant Mary Reilly. And then there’s Prick Up Your Ears, The Snapper, High Fidelity, The Grifters and The Hi-Lo Country.

He’s decidedly non reflective and avoids in-depth analysis of why he chose to do any of his films. The offers “come in the post,” he reads them and decides based on the script and his current mood to take the next step.

Dirty Pretty Things, written by Stephen Knight, he describes as “a little more than half there” when he read the first script. But the idea and approach intrigued him enough to pursue its development. Frears employs someone as a script analyst and following discussion with him and Knight, left the two to work on revisions.

“I can’t write, I don’t think I’m even particularly good at telling a writer what’s good or what’s missing. So, actually having someone who can do that is a godsend. Part of his job is to come back to me and say, ‘it’s time for you to read it again.’ And when he did that six or eight months later, that’s when I committed to it.”

That’s as close as Frears comes to developing properties. He enjoys being a hired gun and all that’s involved in having material submitted to him. One of his personal favorites was The Hi-Lo Country, based on a novel by Max Evans that had been one of Sam Peckinpah’s unrealized pet projects. He says that when the material was first submitted to him by executive producer Martin Scorsese, he initially failed to “get it.” It was only after considerable discussion that he realized that though set in the 1940s, it was a classic western and began to watch films including Red River to figure out how to direct a cattle drive.

Frears began his career as an assistant to such British cinema heavyweights as Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and actor Albert Finney. He says it was the most wonderful apprenticeship. Though Gumshoe was made in 1972, he spent the rest of the decade in televison working with top writers and racking up a peerless set of credits. Laundrette was a television movie that crossed over into movie theaters and at the ripe age of 44, fostered his movie career.

Rather than viewing himself as a late starter, he positions his switch to the big screen as arriving at a time when he was mature enough to understand how to make films and connect with that audience. He doesn’t fuss with explanations. When asked at the AFI screening how he gets actors to do “things,” he replies directly: “whatever it takes.” Sometimes it’s patience, other times a joke or something obvious. He’s gleeful recalling how effective it was to fire a gun during The Hi-Lo Country to get an actor to have a startled reaction.

“A friend asked me why I thought I’d been able to direct films for 30 years and I really didn’t have an answer,” he says. “It is a very difficult industry and grinds up talent unmercifully. I don’t know if this explains anything, but I recently caught the last part of The Hit on television and my reaction was a kind of puzzlement as to why I hadn’t made more films like that, in style and attitude.

Here’s basically what happens. Through the process of working and getting a variety of experience, your craft is going to improve. You know what has to be done and what’s involved in getting it on film and you take a professional pride in the work. When you’re starting, what you chiefly have is energy and passion and that will go a long way to cover a certain amount of funkiness in how you tell a story. But you’re never going to make a film late in your career the way you made it at the beginning and to try to is insane.”

Frears lets out one last sigh. “There’s one thing now that I experience every day when I’m making a film. I get up and think to myself, am I going to be able to do it today? I figure as long as I have that fear, I’ll be alright.”

Dirty Pretty Things Review