Stephen Frears: The Hollywood Interview

Director Stephen Frears.



STEPHEN FREARS LIFTS THE VEIL ON THE QUEEN
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Venice Magazine.

Stephen Frears is one of Britain’s leading filmmakers, specializing in the “kitchen sink” brand of filmmaking pioneered by his predecessors (and mentors) Karel Reisz (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) and Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life, O Lucky Man!). Born June 20, 1941 in the central English city of Leicester, Stephen Frears read law at Cambridge University, and made his directing debut in 1968, with The Burning. After years honing his craft making independent and television films in Britain, Frears became an international name with 1984’s The Hit, an existential thriller/road picture starring John Hurt, Terrence Stamp, and a young Tim Roth. This was followed in quick succession by the acclaimed films My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Dangerous Liasons (1988), and The Grifters (1990).
Frears returned to England recently for the acclaimed television film The Deal, starring Michael Sheen as Prime Minister Tony Blair, and for last year’s hit Mrs. Henderson Presents, starring Dame Judi Dench. His latest, The Queen, starring Helen Mirren in the eponymous role of Queen Elizabeth II, follows the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, and how the British royal family’s image was nearly destroyed, then resurrected, as the world mourned “the people’s Princess.” One of the year’s best films, with a sublime turn from Helen Mirren in the lead, The Queen is currently in release.
Stephen Frears sat down with us at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills to discuss his latest cinematic outing.

In many ways, The Queen is a companion piece to a film you did a few years ago called The Deal, which dealt with Tony Blair (also played by Michael Sheen).
Stephen Frears: Yes, it dealt with British domestic politics. It was of no interest to anyone else in the world, so I made it for British television. After I did it, they came to me and asked if I’d be interested in making another film with a similar theme, about the events during the week of Princess Diana’s death, and how it affected the Queen, with Helen (Mirren) playing the Queen. So Helen and I met, Peter wrote the script, and here we are.

Looking back at your body of work, you’ve always been sort of an armchair sociologist.
Is that right? Well, if you’re British you can’t really escape that: addressing the class system.

Did you feel that this would be a controversial film?
I knew the making of it would be, and it was. I could see that there was nothing in the film itself, however, that should be viewed as controversial. Just the idea that you’re making a film about the Queen is very, very cheeky. The response to the film has been hugely successful back in the UK. I can’t quite believe it, but no one’s come out and said that this film shouldn’t have been made.

Well, it’s quite a reverent film, really.
Yes, I’m ashamed of myself…(laughs)

It portrays everyone warts-and-all, which is one reason it works so well: everyone’s human.
We’ve been praised for being fair, not a quality I normally admire. (laughs) You just realize they’re sort of sitting ducks, really.

Yes, it would’ve been easy to make them caricatures, and for this to have been an animated film. But you took a very neo-realist approach, which makes sense since you were mentored by Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson.
Yes, they were influenced by the Italians and the French, as were people like Ken Loach. So sure, that’s fair to say, although what I really want to do is make Lord of the Rings. (laughs)

Somehow I don’t see that being a successful marriage, Stephen.
That’s been my problem all along, you know.

The Rings trilogy would’ve been very different: they all would’ve had bad teeth.
(laughs) Yes, absolutely!

Tell us about working with Helen.
She’s just very, very good at her job: very talented, very intelligent. A decent woman. I can’t praise anyone more highly than that. She’s terrific. England is full of these rather extraordinary women: Helen, Judi Dench, Vanessa (Redgrave).

Of course you worked with Dame Judi on your last film, Mrs. Henderson Presents. When you work with an actor of that caliber, are you fairly hands-on, or do you just cast well and get out of the way?
Cast well and keep out of the way. I mean, if doesn’t make sense to you, then you say so, or you conduct an intelligent conversation about what they’re doing. We all have the same pool of knowledge about the Queen: everyone knows a great deal and absolutely nothing at the same time.

So where was most of the character that you and Helen and Peter Morgan created culled from?
I should think from our lives, really. You know the Queen is reticent. She’s a rich country woman who likes going for a walk in the rain, and you start from that assumption. It’s really in the text: would the Queen say this? Helen was always very strong about voicing her opinion if she felt a line didn’t ring true.

The other person I’d like to talk about is Michael Sheen, who equally inhabits the role of Tony Blair.
He’s a very good actor, and very, very individual. The truth is, you would never think that he would turn into this very disciplined character actor. He’s just terrific, very intelligent. There’s no real process to discuss, he just sort of does it. Michael said something interesting once: that I push people quite hard.

How do you do that?
I stab them, I think. (laughs) People always said that about me. John Malkovich said that about me, that I reminded him of his father. I never met his father. I assume there is something in my presence which is authoritarian. But I certainly don’t see that. I could see there is a silent way of where I could be like “We’re making this kind of film, and not that kind of film.” I just expect everyone to be very good. John Gielgud always said “If you’re lucky, you know what film you’re in.”

The other smart thing you did in this film was to cast actors who are virtually unknown to audiences outside the UK, save for Helen and James Cromwell. So they seem to inhabit their characters that much more.
That always helps when the actors aren’t well-known, oddly enough. Sometimes you make a film where the audience get a lot of pleasure from actors they’re fond of, that they know. Sometimes you make a film that depends on that bit of knowledge, and sometimes you make it the other way around.

The other thing the film really drove home to me was the ebb and flow nature of politics.
Yes, today one person’s on top, tomorrow it’s someone else. Explain that to your President.

Yes, which makes me think of that final exchange between Helen and Michael.“This will happen to you one day, Mr. Blair.” And it has.
The only time the Queen ever really had a downward curve in terms of popularity was during the aftermath of Diana’s death, although I think it was a long, slow descent that had been going on for about 15 years.

But hadn’t there been rumblings since the ‘60s that the monarchy had become antiquated?
Well, that’s a tough one, but the Queen has made sense of it in a way that has kept it going. I will say that it was clear to me from the beginning that the marriage was barbaric. People like me were very depressed. The celebrations were so grotesque, and you knew that what was going was barbaric.

I was in London a month before the royal wedding in ’81, and I remember vividly the amount of merchandising that went on, that you were constantly bombarded with. It felt less like a wedding, and more like The Who were on tour.
(laughs) Oh, Diana would’ve liked that! But yes, the merchandising which never really stopped, turned her into this pop culture icon, which I think is the antithesis of what she wanted. But it was apparent from the get-go that the marriage was dishonest and really, really savage, and that it would end horribly. It was done for all the wrong reasons.

And when the Queen passes?
Then I think there will be changes made, yes. She’s made it work. There’s nothing written down, no bill of rights, it’s all just…implied, I suppose. Because of her personal qualities, which might well include lack of imagination for all I know, she’s made it work. But for that one week, she went wrong, she misjudged.