My First R-Rated Movie

My First R-Rated Movie

William Friedkin  

MY FIRST R-RATED MOVIE OR…
HOW I BECAME THE 007 OF COVERT FORBIDDEN FILM VIEWING
By Alex Simon

For those of us who grew up in the suburbs in the pre-home video, pre-cable TV and pre-Netflix coupons 1970s and early ‘80s, there were few dangerous pleasures as heady as sneaking into an R-rated movie at the local multiplex. The multiplex cinema was a ‘70s phenomenon that made regulating children’s viewing habits infinitely more difficult than the old days of stand-alone, single screen theaters. Ironically, the new freedom that filmmakers enjoyed with the advent of the MPAA rating system in late 1968 was almost in perfect synch with the rise of multi-screen cinemas. Some things do happen for a reason.

You never forget your first...

My first R-rated film was during Thanksgiving of 1976. We were visiting my dad’s family in Birmingham, Alabama and the men adjourned after dinner to go see Two Minute Warning, a Charlton Heston-led, all-star splatter fest boasting an impressive cast (John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands, and Martin Balsam, to name a few) about a psycho with a scoped .306 rifle picking off sports fans at an LA Rams game. Even at age nine, I knew the movie sucked, but I was quite thrilled to be watching bare breasts, geysers of spurting blood, and liberal use of the f-bomb, feeling the kind of euphoria that can only be found in nibbling on previously forbidden fruit. I also noticed something else: there was little, if any, usher presence regulating who went into the theater playing the R-rated film. On the screen next door was Martin Ritt and Woody Allen’s PG-rated (and far superior) offering The Front. My 108 month-old synapses starting firing.

The following years found numerous R-rated fare that I yearned to see: Marathon Man, Black Sunday, Taxi Driver, Which Way Is Up?, and most significantly Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, which ushered in my pre-adolescent Brooke Shields fixation. So determined was I to see this movie that I spent weeks devising a careful plan to gain admittance for myself and my more adventurous friends. Upon opening the Friday paper one afternoon, it seemed as though lady luck had smiled upon me: Pretty Baby was in a double-bill with King of The Gypsies, my virtual girlfriend’s latest cinematic outing, playing newcomer Eric Roberts’ younger sister (if Brooke only knew what a coveted part that would become in reality years later). It was showing at the UA 5 Theater in Scottsdale. In those days, it was a safe bet that a film would play at least 2-3 weeks, so I convinced my parents to drop me and my best bud at the theater two weekends in a row, to cover all the PG fare and case the joint, to find the weak link into the Shangri-La showing on screen number three (for the curious, some of the unfortunate ‘70s fare we saw included Slow Dancing in the Big City Caravans, and Death on the Nile. Contrary to popular belief, a lot of ‘70s movies sucked, kids).



After careful deliberation, my friend and I thought we’d discovered an opening: at around 3 PM every Saturday and Sunday, the two shaggy-haired ushers would disappear from the lobby for 15-20 minutes. There was a Pretty Baby showing that began at 3:15, and a 3 PM show of the PG-rated A Bridge Too Far. Simple math, or so we thought…

The fateful Sunday came. My buddy’s mom dropped the two of us off at the UA 5, where we got our Bridge Too Far tickets for a whopping two bucks apiece. Upon entering the theater’s semi-circular lobby with the color-coded doors (red, yellow, green, blue and orange) we scanned the area and saw nary an usher in sight. Just to be safe, we got popcorn and Cokes, and then calmly walked the long mile to cinema 3, the blue door.

There were many thoughts and emotions running through my head as we walked, not to mention more intense physiological happenings occurring in the pit of my stomach, spreading like a wave through my body. My forehead broke out with beads of sweat, my mouth grew dry, my palms clammy. What really lay beyond that blue door? Would I find the secret that lay behind my nightly dreams of the lovely Miss Shields or perhaps something bigger? Maybe the answers to all the riddles of life lay not only in the movies, but more specifically in R-rated movies? Could it be…salvation? That was it. Salvation lay beyond that blue door, and my hand was now on its handle.


"Pretty baby/Ma petite ingénue."

“Hold it right there, scumbag!” the voice rang out. A hand clamped down on my shoulder. My buddy turned to me, face ashen. The other usher approached us, nodding to his friend. “What’s this?” His friend responded: “Caught ‘em trying to sneak into the R-rated movie.” “Whoa. Bad move, boys.” Sandwiched between the two hulking teens, I was overwhelmed by “a strong, sweet smell of incense” floating off them both like steam. Five years or so later when I was introduced to the giddy pleasures of cannabis, the question in my sense memory finally made sense but in early 1978, they just smelled funny, in addition to being total assholes.

We were not-so-gently ejected by these two 18 year-old virgins and told never to return.

My game, I’m happy to say, got much better after that humiliating maiden voyage. The Fall of 1978 brought my neighborhood a much-needed local theater that we kids could walk or bike to, happily taking our parents and their cars out of the equation. The Lakes 6 theater was one of AMC’s flagships, with a half-dozen screens shaped like bowling alleys housed in an equally oblong, rectangular building with its center section containing box office, concession stand and usher area. This made the Lakes 6 blissfully ripe for sneaking and hopping from R-rated gem to gem. It was such a cakewalk, in fact, that not only did my friends and I never once get caught, but the kids who manned the box office and ticket-tearing duties knew that trying to enforce the MPAA’s censorship dictates was absolutely useless given the building’s architecture.


"The Exorcist" left scars on my 11 year-old frontal lobe.


The Deer Hunter, Midnight Express, Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C, and Raging Bull were just a smattering of the great films that rocked my pre-pubescent body and soul during these heady days, a highlight being the ’78 re-release of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, when my two Irish Catholic altar boy buddies and I (an agnostic half-Jew, which perhaps accounts for my initially-brave face) bought tickets for Rocky II, but sidled into the hard-R horror classic next door instead. Our tough facades quickly melted as the movie progressed, with Tommy Kehoe running out of the theater during Linda Blair’s notorious intimate encounter with a Crucifix. No one saw Tommy for ten days after, and there is still speculation to this day as to where he disappeared to, although one hopes it wasn’t too far south of the material plane. My other friend (whose name is lost to time) and I bravely kept our game faces on for the rest of the movie, but didn’t speak a word to each other during the bike ride home, and never again spoke of the traumatic cinematic experience we shared. My fifth night or so of fitful sleep afterward, I began to think, for the first time, “Gee, maybe they’re onto something with this rating system. What the hell was I doing watching that movie?” Years later, when I interviewed William Friedkin and told him I’d snuck into both The Exorcist and Cruising, he responded that I owed him six dollars. I replied that he owed me thousands from all the therapy I needed after recklessly exposing my delicate psyche to two pictures no kid should ever watch. Friedkin agreed to drop his claim if I would.

"Taxi Driver": Childhood's end.


When Taxi Driver came to Tempe’s venerable Valley Art Theater on Mill Avenue, one of two second-run/arthouse screens in Phoenix along with the long-gone and greatly missed landmark the Sombrero Playhouse, my dad took me for my 13th birthday. As I sat through Martin Scorsese’s visceral masterpiece without flinching and showed no signs of PTSD afterward, my parents’ selective censorship of R-rated fare suddenly disappeared, and from 1980 onward, they took me to pretty much any film I wanted to see. That, coupled with the fact that by freshman year in high school I’d grown to over six feet in height, I was able to buy my own damn R-rated tickets from then on, without ever getting carded. With that new-found freedom, however, much of the joy that came from viewing technically-forbidden fruit vanished. No longer when I entered a cinema showing an R-rated film did I get that giddy/frightened/euphoric burning that started in my gut and spread like a wave through every molecule in my body. I was going to the movies, so there was the joy and excitement that I feel to this day when the lights go down and I ready myself for one of the few communal experiences left in society, but that’s all it was. Going to the movies. Before I knew it, I stopped looking at what a movie’s rating was, and just went to the ones that sparked my interest. There was however, a final exception in 1983, when I was sixteen.

There is something you have to understand about Phoenix in the dark days before the Internet: it had something of a coolness embargo foisted upon it. In other words, a cutting edge film, piece of music, or even book release might hit the left and right coasts in the Fall of 1980, along with releases in major markets such as Chicago and Dallas, or high-end niche locales such as Ann-Arbor or Austin, but in Phoenix, you’d be lucky if that high-end item reached us by 1982 or ’83. Such was the case with Tinto Brass’ notorious Caligula. Correctly described by one critic as “A train wreck of a film that looks as if it were made by Cecil B. DeMille gone psycho,” Caligula was a multi-million dollar pornographic epic that purported to tell the true story of the debauched Roman emperor who was utterly insane. It also featured an A-list cast, including Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole and Helen Mirren. Rated X? Hell, it was so far beyond X or even XXX they couldn’t even come up with a rating for it, so it was one of the first releases to go out without an MPAA seal or rating on it. It was playing at the Valley Art for a week-long engagement. My buddies and I, with freshly-minted driver’s licenses, decided to go for it. That burning feeling in the pit of my stomach was back!

Above, The Valley Art, circa mid-1960s. Below, as it appears today.




The Valley Art was Arizona’s oldest continuously-operating theater, and in the early ‘80s was run by aging hippies who’d arrived on Tempe's Mill Avenue between 1968 and 1970, and hadn’t moved, either physically or temporally. They didn’t really give a shit who went to the movies there, so long as you paid your three bucks admission so they could keep buying cheap weed and some hot wings from Long Wong’s down the street. As we approached the box office, we saw an anomaly for the uber-liberal Valley Art: a hand-printed “Adults Only” sign in black, block letters, Scotch-taped to the inside of the box office window. We halted in our tracks. The groovy dude inside the glass booth saw our hesitation, smiled, and beckoned us forward. Looking us over, he inquired “You guys twenty-one?” The three of us exchanged hasty glances, gulped in synch, and replied “Yeah. Sure” (None of us were even shaving yet). The hippie dude smiled, looked us over once more and said “Right on. Enjoy gentlemen.” We got our tickets and went inside. The theater was packed. By the film’s mid-point, half the audience had walked, most in disgust, muttering to themselves. The week-long engagement ended two days later, after vigorous protests from pillars of the community. This was Arizona, remember, and then as now, “progressive” was not the dominant vibe.

Malcolm McDowell as "Caligula." End of the road.


After seeing our first, official (sort of) X-rated film in a theater, my friends and I made our way to the equally venerable Chuckbox burger factory, and mulled over the fact that our days of pushing the cinematic censorship envelope had officially come to an end, and with a regrettably crappy movie, to boot. And after years of sneaking into “verboten” cinematic fare, to paraphrase George Carlin, none of us were inflicted with rotting of the soul, curvature of the spine, or a sudden desire to overthrow the government. For God’s sake, they were just movies. What was the big deal, after all?

Indeed. Or not.

I did finally see Pretty Baby, on VHS, around the same time I saw Caligula. I thought, and still think, it’s a brilliant film. And with each successive viewing as time has progressed, I find it more unsettling, and not the least bit titillating, which is how I’m sure Louis Malle intended it. By 1983, my attentions had moved onto real girls in my orbit, as opposed to the lovely, unattainable Brooke Shields. I wasn’t any more successful with most of them than I had been in sneaking in to see Brooke au naturale all those years ago. But just to show what little sponges we are at that age, I did have an opportunity to meet Miss Shields at a party years later, standing a mere few feet from her and making eye contact. I froze like a star-struck 11 year-old and couldn’t budge, while my friend chatted up Brooke and her gal pal, and got the gal pal’s number. Awkwardness dies hard.

I often wonder what became of those two spotty, stoned teenage ushers who threw my friend and I out of the UA 5 (another theater long-gone), who unwittingly whetted my appetite for R-rated covert action. I’ll quote a not-so-beloved slasher movie satire called Student Bodies, which came out around 1981. In the middle of the not-so-hilarious high-jinks was this gem: a stern-looking gent in a gray suit, seated behind an impressive desk, suddenly appeared on-screen, with the following message: “Ladies and gentlemen, in order to achieve an "R" rating today, a motion picture must contain full frontal nudity, graphic violence, or an explicit reference to the sex act. Since this film has none of those, and since research has proven that R-rated films are by far the most popular with the moviegoing public, the producers of this motion picture have asked me to take this opportunity to say ‘Fuck you.’”

Indeed.

Helen Mirren: The Hollywood Interview

Helen Mirren: The Hollywood Interview

The Queen  

Dame Helen Mirren.

I interviewed Helen Mirren for Venice Magazine in 2005. Like most of the male population, she had given me palpitations of the heart and brain since childhood, my own introduction to her unique brand of elegant, brainy sexiness occurring with John Boorman's Excalibur, in 1981. The petite woman with the easy smile who greeted me wasn't the bigger-than-life figure I expected. She wore a t-shirt promoting relief for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which had recently happened, and a pair of well-worn jeans. She had the figure of a twenty-five year old, but didn't seem to care. Another of my favorite conversations ensued. The lady herself, like the lady on-screen, didn't disappoint. One final note: much of Mirren's very diverse filmography that we discuss is available on Netflix, Amazon.com and Amazon Streaming.

HELEN MIRREN: SCREEN QUEEN
By
Alex Simon


Helen Mirren has carved out a unique niche for herself as the thinking man’s pin-up girl. A dynamic actress of incredible range and intelligence, Mirren was born Ilynea Lydia Mironoff July 26, 1945 in London to a Russian-born father and English mother. After cutting her teeth as a child in Britain’s National Youth Theater, Helen went on to train at the legendary Royal Shakespeare Company, before landing her first film role in 1967’s Herostratus, followed in quick succession by Sir Peter Hall’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968) and Michael Powell’s Age of Consent (1969). Memorable turns followed in diverse fare such as Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (1973), followed by a great deal of TV and stage work, but Mirren really came into her own around the time she appeared in Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione’s notorious epic Caligula in 1980: as Bob Hoskins’ upper-crust gangster’s moll in the British mob classic The Long Good Friday, and a memorably sensual Morgana Le Fay in John Boorman’s masterful King Arthur adaptation Excalibur (1981).

Helen Mirren gradually became a household name on both sides of the pond, as her appearances on-screen became more prolific: she was heart-breaking as the policeman’s widow who unwittingly has an affair with the young IRA recruit in Cal (1984), appeared in Peter Hyams’ underrated 2001 sequel 2010 as a Russian cosmonaut, was fine again drawing on her Russian ancestry as Mikhail Baryshnikov’s former lover in White Nights (1985, where she also met her husband, director Taylor Hackford), gave a mutli-dimensional turn as Harrison Ford’s saintly wife in Peter Weir’s excellent The Mosquito Coast (1986), and an no-holds-barred, uninhibited performance in Peter Greenaway’s scathing, scatological The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989).

1991 brought about the birth of the character Mirren has become most identified with: police inspector Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series, of which there have been six installments, with a seventh, and final episode to air later this year. Among her many accolades, Helen has been nominated for two Academy Awards (The Madness of King George in 1995, and for Robert Altman’s masterful ensemble drama Gosford Park in 2002), and won three BAFTA awards for her work in Prime Suspect. She has twice won the Best Actress prize at Cannes (Cal and The Madness of King George) and has also captured two Emmys (Prime Suspect 4 in 1995 and The Passion of Ayn Rand, 1999).

Helen Mirren graces the big and small screen in two very different films: HBO’s Elizabeth I is a gritty, literate look at the life of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I, AKA “The Virgin Queen,” one of history’s first liberated female leaders, who ruled England during the particularly bloody period of 1558-1603, also referred to as the Elizabethan Period or The Golden Age, when English influence and power was marked worldwide. Co-starring with the great Jeremy Irons, Hugh Dancy and Toby Jones, Elizabeth I is a pinnacle in Helen Mirren’s already-illustrious career. It premieres on HBO April 22. Also set for release is Lee Daniels’ Shadowboxer, which Helen co-stars with Cuba Gooding, Jr. as a deadly assassin. It is set for limited release in May.

Helen Mirren sat down recently with Venice over lunch at photographer Jeff Dunas’ studio to discuss her latest work, and her remarkable career.


You have two very different movies coming out: Elizabeth and Shadowboxer.

Helen Mirren: I also did a film about the other Queen Elizabeth, Elizabeth II, which will be coming out later in the year. It’s a Stephen Frears film.

I saw that the director of Elizabeth I, Tom Hooper, directed the last episode of Prime Suspect. You must’ve worked well together.

Yes, we enjoy working together very much. I suggested him for this project because he’s this wonderful combination of young and hungry, but also quite experienced. He’s done a lot of big TV stuff, which in a way is more demanding than doing a movie, because the turnover is so much faster. To do something like Elizabeth, you’ve got to have someone who has the strength to hold on and sort of get through it.

The thing I liked about it was it reminded me of the stuff people like Tony Richardson and Franco Zefferelli did in the 60s: there’s a classical element to it, but also a “kitchen sink” element, that brought grit and realism to the table.

We had the best Steadycam operator in the world working for us, which was amazing. Almost the whole thing was shot on SteadyCam, which is technically difficult but it gave the film an immediacy which it needed. So often you feel as if you’re outside watching this pageant take place which is gorgeous, but it doesn’t put you into it. We wanted to drag the audience into it.

Mirren as Queen Elizabeth I in HBO's mini-series Elizabeth I.

Yeah, it had a real griminess to it. Nobody looked like a shirt model. You could believe that they bathed once or twice a month and their teeth were bad.

(laughs) That’s probably thanks to being shot in Lithuania. We shot it all there.

What were your impressions of the country?

It’s extraordinary. Very beautiful and rather magical. At the same time, it was a little frightening, which many of those northern European countries are. A lot of dark things have happened there over the centuries and you can’t get away from that fact. The extras all had these very real, almost medeival looking faces. Lithuania is probably very close to what the English countryside looked in those days: heavily wooded and undeveloped. It’s very forested in Lithuania, very undeveloped. So they used a certain amount of digital effects, to put bits of London in there, but they also built these amazing sets out of wood that were very authentic.

What were you impressions of Elizabeth herself?

She was fascinating, an amazing character. The only sadness about playing someone like that is you only have access to them through doing a huge amount of research, the type of which will allow you to only get so close to who they were. The accounts of her that were written at the time were, of course, very tempered because the writers were frightened that if they displeased her, they’d get their heads chopped off! (laughs) So the only truthful accounts you have of her are from foreign ambassadors who didn’t have the necessity to be polite. All of them were absolutely fascinated by her. She was incredibly powerful, often foolish, but whether deliberately or just by instinct, an absolutely superb politician. Obviously she was very bright: spoke several languages fluently, but obviously a fool in love, as well. That’s what was great about her. She wasn’t just this cold fish. She was incredibly emotional and passionate. And since she was the queen, her emotions were allowed to rage. She’s so unlike Queen Elizabeth II, whose emotions are completely controlled and pulled in. There are so many similarities between Elizabeth the I and II, but also they are polar opposites in just as many areas.

One reason Elizabeth I was so hugely emotional was the fact that she never consummated any of her relationships. Why do you think that was?

It was incredibly dangerous for her, physically. Pregnancy was a very dangerous thing for a woman in those days. So many women died in childbirth, it was very, very common. Politically it was very dangerous, as well. To get pregnant by someone, and it was impossible to hide since she was constantly surrounded by people all the time. They lived a very public life in those days. People slept in their rooms with them. So they couldn’t get away with anything. Plus there were so many people whose interests would have been served had she been disgraced. She came to the throne as a bastard. Henry VIII never took away her status as a bastard after declaring her to such, even though he put her second in line to the throne after her sister. So her claim to the throne was always very precarious. So that was another fear of getting married.

Henry VIII was a Protestant also, right?

Yes. Henry created the Church of England after he wanted to get divorced, and threw out Roman Catholicism.

You know who I kept thinking of while I was watching you: Hillary Clinton. As the English weren’t ready for Elizabeth I, I don’t think the United States is ready for Hillary yet.

(laughs) She’s an extraordinary woman, and I agree with you. But it’s coming. It’s very interesting that people are even talking about it, because ten years ago, they wouldn’t have even talked about it. At least now, the thought is out there in the ether.

I don’t know. I think ten years ago we would have been ready for a woman or a minority, but since the current administration took office, I think this country has de-volved three or four decades. I think we’ve gone back to the 1950s.

And in a far more dangerous way than in the 1950s, because the U.S. is the most powerful country in the world now that the threat from the east is gone, and also because you have corporate globalization, development that’s gone so far beyond anything that existed in the 50s. There’s such unbelievable economic power out there. It’s almost a return to Feudalism, in a way. The peasants are sort of kept quiet with celebrity gossip magazines and Big Brother.

And in this case Big Brother is in the form of the leaders of our government who invoke the name of Jesus Christ to shut the peasants up.

Right, fundamentalist religion.

Which is what they did back in the day, as well. If you look at the history of both the Protestant and Catholic churches, when their officials ran the world, their doctrines were designed to keep the masses opiated.

Yes, absolutely.

Do you think Elizabeth would have been more comfortable as a modern woman, in this century?

No, she would have hated it! I think if you took Elizabeth out of her environment and plopped her into this one, it wouldn’t have worked, because she was a dictator, really. She was a Saddam Hussein, or she had the power of one. She could put anyone into prison, torture them, have them executed.

Although in terms of the manners and mores of the time, she didn’t strike me as being a demagogue.

No, that’s true. She wasn’t out of control, relatively speaking. And whenever she could, she tended towards leniency, and towards forgiveness.

The entire film, parts I and II, deals with her relationships with these two men, played by Jeremy Irons and Hugh Dancy. Had you worked with Jeremy previously?

No, never. I’ve known him for many years, but never had the great pleasure to work with him, and he was so wonderful to work with. He was born to play that role.

The older he gets, the more he reminds me of Laurence Olivier. He has the same kind of carriage.

That’s interesting. He’s a superb film actor, isn’t he? He’s also a brilliant stage actor and great comedian, which many people don’t realize.

How about Hugh Dancy?

How lucky can a woman get? (laughs) Hugh and I started at the beginning of the piece doing all our scenes together. Every scene we did I had to kiss him or he, poor kid, had to kiss me. And all the girls on the set are just looking at me with envy, saying “I can’t believe how lucky you are!”

Tell us about Shadow Boxer. Have you seen it yet?

No, I haven’t. I tend to sort of avoid seeing films that I’m in. Lee Daniels, who directed it, is such a great guy. He calls it “Homo-Euro-Ghetto.” (laughs) Which I think is sort of a great mixture of things. And that’s probably exactly what it is. It was great fun to do it. You don’t often get to be in pieces like that, so I was very glad to do it. Most girls don’t get to run around with guns and be assassins.

I read that your father wound up in the UK under very unusual circumstances.

My father was born in Russia. He came to England when he was two years old. His family was upper military class. They were a form of aristocracy, I suppose.

Wasn’t your grandfather in London brokering an arms deal with the British government when the revolution in Russia took place?

Yes, he was, and he was stuck there. He was very loyal to the czarist system, and just happened to have brought his family with him on this trip because it was taking such a long time, which was very lucky. He left his sisters and his mother behind, however. I just recently had their letters to him translated, which I’ve been carrying around for years, and that was an incredible experience for me, to lift the curtain on their lives. In fact, I think we’re going to do a piece on the radio, in England, based on the letters.

What did your grandfather and father wind up doing in England?

They both ultimately became taxi drivers.

So they had to become working class. What was that like for them?

I have no idea, and I can’t imagine what it must have been like, especially for my grandfather. It taught me one thing though, and that’s nothing is permanent. And no matter how established you think you are, nothing is permanent. And you have people who say “Oh well my family goes back 500 years…”

Whose doesn’t?

(laughs) Yes, exactly! Whose doesn’t? And on that level it seems the most aristocratic people in America are the black people, because we know all their families go back two or three hundred years.

Where do you think your artistic side came from?

I suspect it came much more from my English mother than my Russian father. My father was very intelligent and an intellectual, and was a classical musician before he became a taxi driver. My mother was working class London, from the East End. She had pretensions not to be working class, and she was very dramatic, my mother, so I suspect that’s where much of my acting bug came from. Although, two of the greatest actors that Russia ever had, had my family name, which is Mironoff. There was a man who died five or six years ago who was like the Olivier of Russia whose last name was Mironoff, so I think there must be a relation somewhere in there.

You started acting very young. When did you know you were an actor?

Well you don’t really know, do you? You kind of wish, or hope for, or dream. You never quite know. Certainly my parents were not of the “you must follow you dream” kind of attitude. They were much more “Don’t be stupid. You’ve got to be secure,” which I love in retrospect, because I think all that “you must follow your dream” nonsense, especially in those TV shows like American Idol, is so dangerous, because it’s a cruel world. So you must do both: you must follow your dream and be practical and realistic. But yes, fairly young, I loved the process of imaginatively going into another world. And I did do the pragmatic thing and go to teachers’ college for three years in London, which was really a complete waste of time. Also, I didn’t have any money to go to drama school. Plus, I just didn’t know how you became an actor then, so my options were limited.

You got your start at the Royal Shakespeare Company. What was RSC like?
It was a wonderful experience because it’s ensemble theater, for lack of a better word. You’re working with a huge group of actors, all of whom do very divergent roles and things in different plays. You’re all rehearsing together. You’re all getting drunk together. It was very communal, and very educative on that level, in terms of how to work with people, and how to be a gypsy. And the grander your level as an actor, the more of a gypsy you become.

24 year-old Helen Mirren in Michael Powell's Age of Consent (1969).

Your first film, Age of Consent, was directed by the great Michael Powell.

That was an amazing experience, very surreal! (laughs) I’d hardly been on an airplane before doing that film, and here I was in the first class compartment of a Qantas airliner on this long plane ride to Australia. Then we filmed on this tiny island, called Dunk Island near the Great Barrier Reef. And I was running around, hardly wearing anything and working with the great James Mason, who was very kind. So it was a completely wonderful, very strange, very surreal experience. It all seems a bit like a dream now. Michael was very kind to me, although he could be a bit of a martinet to others. I was very inexperienced, so he was very patient, as was James, who sort of guided me around.

Another great film you did a few years later was O Lucky Man! with Malcolm McDowell and Lindsay Anderson.

Yes, that is a wonderful film, and very much locked in its era in terms of the music and everything, but in terms of what it was saying about the world, it was very advanced, very ahead of its time. Lindsay had an extraordinary personality…maybe I just attract these weird directors. They seem to be the only ones who like me.

Why do you say “weird”?

Well you know, Peter Greenaway, and Lindsay, they’re very, very distinctive personalities. Visionaries, really. But Lindsay was very private, and yet intensely loyal to his actors. Very serious, and yet always you felt he was laughing at himself and everything else. He always seemed to be having this very dark internal laugh at the whole thing. He really put his inner being into his movies, I think. He really loved humanity, in a very Platonic way. He didn’t strike me as being very sexual, and he would seem to have this sort of Platonic love for the men he worked with, but also for a number of women. He adored Celia Johnson, for example.

What happened with Caligula? You had this script by Gore Vidal, and this dream cast, and it ended up being an epic porn movie. I know that Malcolm McDowell is ashamed of it, to this day.

Yes, I guess it did end up being that. Malcolm shouldn’t be ashamed of it. He’s wonderful in it! I’m certainly not ashamed of Caligula. In fact, I’ve always been very proud of it. Within its form, there’s a really great movie about Rome in there. The fact is, Gore took his name off it, but we made Gore’s movie. We really did stick to the script, and he wrote a really full-on, “out there” movie. It’s funny, when we all met together for the first time and Bob Guccione gave us lunch, and he stood up and said “This is going to be the greatest film because we’ve got the best actors, and the best director, and the best writer…and kept going on and on. And the director, Tinto Brass, was sitting next to me as Bob was talking and whispered “The best people, to make the worst movie!” (laughs) Tinto and I became great friends and we still are. He’s very devil-may-care, and there’s a wonderful excessiveness about him that appeals to me. Caligula may have been excessive, but it was never boring. I saw some of it recently again. Plus, it’s two different movies: there’s the version we shot, then there’s a great deal of hardcore sex footage that Guccione put in later. It didn’t need it, because what we had was quite enough! (laughs)



You did one of the great gangster films around this time, as well: The Long Good Friday. It was one of those scripts that just leapt off the page at you, where you went “God! This is just fantastic!” The one thing that was a problem, was my character Victoria, who was a terrible character, as written. I became a real thorn in the side of our director, John Mackenzie, in trying to flesh her out. But Bob Hoskins was incredibly supportive, which was great. So I was constantly trying to pull the character into the story. I’m glad that I made such a fuss about it, because I think it enriched the film. You’ve got to have something you can hold your head up about later on in life. But I was a bit of a pain for John, I think.

Right after Long Good Friday, you played Morgana Le Fay in John Boorman’s great King Arthur film, Excalibur, in an adaptation that I think is worthy of Shakespeare.

Yes, that was tricky on the page, actually. That one didn’t leap off the page. It was quite difficult to follow and I think it was very much to John Boorman’s credit that he crafted this very magical world out of what could have been a real mess! (laughs) Some of those scenes when we read them during rehearsal sounded absolutely embarrassing! We were all like “My God, how can we say these lines?” (laughs) But with all the other elements, it all started falling into place, especially the lighting and the beauty of the film.

Mirren as the evil Morgana in John Boorman's Excalibur (1981).

I heard that Boorman cast you and Nicol Williamson, who played Merlin, because the two of you didn’t get along, and it generated a very specific kind of tension on-screen.

We had done a production of MacBeth prior to that, and our relationship was horrendous. Nicol is a very brilliant, but very dark, troubled man. He has so much talent in so many different directions, but he just…he couldn’t bear me, and was very nasty to me. I don’t think I was nasty to him at all, but he just hated me. When I went to see John about the film, he said “I’m thinking about Nicol for Merlin,” I said I didn’t think I could do it then, because we had this horrible relationship. John convinced me that he would help to make it work, and of course, being greedy and wanting the role, I said ‘Fuck it. I’ll just put up with it.’ In fact, Nicol and I wound up becoming very good friends on it! (laughs) We were finally free of that play, and I’m sure the play had a lot to do with it. So I finished up loving him.

Let’s talk about Prime Suspect and DCI Jane Tennison. Jane is a great character. I’m doing just one more, which we start shooting this year. That was a gift of a role, that just landed in my lap. Of course at the time, you don’t know that. I thought it was a lovely script, but you never start our realizing how much it’s going to affect your life at the time. But I had the great luxury with Prime Suspect of only doing one about every eighteen months, so I was never trapped into doing a TV series full time, and could always go off and do other things, movie and theater, in between. In addition to being a great character study, the series has also been a real metaphor for how English society is changing. Yes, and as it’s progressed, I’ve been able to be more involved in the actual storylines, with the writers, and so forth. I always loved it best when the stories were contemporary as possible, and relevant to the world we all live in, rather than a sort of generic murder mystery.

It seems that from the beginning, you’ve always been very uninhibited and have never had a problem doing nudity on film.

Oh, that’s not true. I’ve always had a problem doing nudity. I hated it! I hated the fact that I hated it, however. It’s never a comfortable thing. It was quite nice in Australia, because one was out with nature, and Michael Powell was very sweet. But I’ve never enjoyed it, ever. It’s always mortifying. But I always felt it was something I should get over, as well. I might seem uninhibited, but believe me I’m not! (laughs) I’ve just never thought it was necessary, ever. My taste in movies tends toward the European, and I think when sex and nudity is dealt with in an adult or poetic way, it’s wonderful. It’s great. It’s a great extra tool in all those dramatic tools we have. But I didn’t want to be uptight, and I also always told myself ‘It’s okay, because you work in the theater, so you’re not going to get stuck with it.’ But of course, I have gotten stuck with it, in a way! (laughs)

You have to tell us about working with Brother Bob Altman in Gosford Park. Oh, God! Genius! Most directors basically do it the same way. They’re great, and many are great visionaries. But they basically set the scene up the same way and shoot the same way. Robert Altman is completely different. You never know if you’re on the screen or not, which is great, so you’ve all got to be “on it” all the time. There’s no such thing as “having your moment” with Altman. You look at your role, see that you have this big speech, show up on the set, and realize that the whole scene is about this dog running around the people in the scene, all of whom are having their big speech! (laughs) He’s the only guy who will start with what’s happening in the background, and then the main actors find their place within that. That’s why his screen is always so full of detail, because those details haven’t been put in at the last minute by the 1st A.D. He will very carefully set up, rehearse, and have all those elements in place before he shoots. But in a way, the background actors are more important than you are. Then he’ll have two cameras: one on tracks over here, then another on tracks opposite, constantly moving around the scene. I’ve never seen another director who does that. It’s great. He’s one of the great visionary American directors, without a doubt.

Mirren in her Oscar-winning turn as Queen Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears' The Queen (2006).

Any final thoughts?

Well, it’s been very interesting, you taking me through my whole career like this, and it’s gotten me thinking: I was very conscious during Elizabeth that this will probably be the best role I will ever have in my life. I was thinking ‘It absolutely doesn’t get any better than this, Helen. You might as well just go for it, and give it your all,’ and I think I did. Women’s roles don’t come along that often, anyway, so to play one like this, I never forget how lucky I am.


Helen Mirren in Don Levy's Herostratus (1967), one of her first films.

Stephen Frears: The Hollywood Interview

Stephen Frears: The Hollywood Interview

Tony Blair.  

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.