Curmudgeonly Stephen Frears has a reason to be cheerful: Tamara Drewe, his distinctly British new film, looks set to make a little money, the veteran director tells Donald Clarke
STEPHEN FREARS has a reputation for being a bit of a grump. Indeed, a journalist from the Guardianclaimed recently that he had to arrange a second interview because the first was too monosyllabically uninformative. I like him a lot.
The director does, it is true, occasionally adopt a what-a-stupid-question tone. A few years ago, while being interviewed about The Deal, his TV movie on the rise of Tony Blair, he went so far as to snort angrily at the mighty Andrew Neil. But I've always found his strops playful rather than malevolent.
At any rate, Frears is in comparatively expansive (two or three sentences per question) mood at the press shebang for Tamara Drewe.His adaptation of Posy Simmonds's graphic novel – a contemporary version of Far from the Madding Crowd, set at a writers' retreat – played to strong reviews at Cannes and actually made money on its French release. The initial notices in these territories have also been strong.
“What more could you want?” Frears asks. “It’s a funny business. You realise, after a while, that what – ahem – foreigners like in British films is Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers. Tamara Drewe is a bit like that. They think the British are all loonies. I suppose they’re right.”
The film stars the unavoidable Gemma Arterton as a newspaper columnist, recently freshened up by cosmetic surgery, returning to the village where, as a child, she was taunted as an ugly outsider. Most of the action revolves around a farmhouse, within which various writers (a crime novelist, an academic, the odd literary lion) have gathered to pool intellectual resources.
Frears was once married to Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books. He's hung around with Alan Bennett and Hanif Kureishi. The universe of the blocked bohemian must surely be familiar to him.
“Well, it’s not unfamiliar to me,” he says. “I do have a second home in Dorset. So I’m a disgrace from the start. But I don’t live remotely like this. It’s not my world.”
A disgrace for having a second home? Over the past 30 years, Frears has directed such beloved films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, The Grifters, The Snapperand High Fidelity. He's made some money for his backers while retaining his artistic independence. Surely he's allowed a holiday pad.
Frears is, you see, an unshakable member of the liberal, Guardian-brandishing middle class. Later in our conversation, he admits that he cares greatly about not wasting money while shooting. Very sensible. Very mock-Tudor.
“I am quite a sensible fellow,” he muses. “I once said to Harvey Weinstein: ‘Why don’t you shout at me?’ He said: ‘Actually, you make sensible decisions.’ I care that, when somebody puts X pounds in, they will get X pounds back. I really do care. Yes, I’m a disgrace.”
Raised in Leicester and Nottingham, Frears is the son of a doctor and a social worker. An intelligent chap, he studied law at Cambridge in the early 1960s, but admits, with a theatrical yawn, that his heart was never in it. Coming from that background, one was expected to get a decent degree that enabled progress in a respectable profession.
While at college, Frears dabbled in stage management and eventually secured a job with Karel Reisz, the great British stage and film director, at the Royal Court Theatre. Assistant director gigs on Reisz’s Morgan and Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . followed. “Karel and Lindsay were great teachers, but very different,” he says. “Karel was, well, rather nicer.”
In 1971, Stephen made a decent little film called Gumshoe, starring Albert Finney. A satirical, anti-heroic detective story, it gathered a few good notices but failed to resurrect the rapidly dying British film industry.
Jack Clayton, director of The Innocentsand Room at the Top, offered some sage advice. "He said, 'Don't wait around like we did. Make another film as quickly as you can. That's how you learn'."
Unfortunately, the 1970s turned out to be the bleakest decade in the history of the British film business. Like Mike Leigh, Frears immersed himself in television until, a decade later, FilmFour, David Puttnam and Steve Woolley began to revive the corpse of UK cinema. In the interim, he directed a superb series of one-off pieces for the BBC's prestigious Play for Todayslot. Excellent as the material was, he must have been frustrated that he couldn't get back into cinemas.
“No. Not at all. Mike did it reluctantly. He was cleverer than me. He always wanted to be a film director. I just wanted to be a drifter. I was just a bright boy down from university who’d blundered in. Suddenly, I was working with Alan Bennett. What a privilege. The BBC was also like a nursery. You learn to direct films by doing the job. That’s the only way.”
The most important partnership in Frears's early career was, indeed, with Bennett. TV plays such as A Visit from Miss Protheroeand One Fine Daywere followed by their collaboration on Prick Up Your Ears, a brilliant 1987 study of the relationship between Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell.
Since 1984, when he returned to the big screen with The Hit, a fine thriller starring John Hurt, Frears has delivered movies with impressive, unrelenting regularity. Throughout that period, unlike Leigh and Ken Loach, he has shifted comfortably between genres and tones. Dangerous Liaisonswas big and flouncy; High Fidelitywas earthy and intimate. He has twice been on the Oscar shortlist: for The Griftersin 1991 and The Queenin 2007.
Alongside those hits, there have been failures, such as Mary Reilly(Julia Roberts is Dr Jekyll's begorrah maid) and Hero(Dustin Hoffman isn't really a hero). But, anxious not to seem precious, Frears refuses to mourn those that got away.
“Look, there are six or seven films that I am really proud of and that people like. You know which ones they are. If a film doesn’t find an audience then there probably is something wrong with it. Put it this way: I could tell you why those films weren’t successful. I can see what’s wrong with them.”
Whatever you may have heard, Stephen Frears has an admirable attitude. Defiantly self-deprecating, content to be seen as an Eeyore, he has weathered the past four decades without giving in to pretentiousness or creative hubris. What’s more, he still seems to enjoy it.
When discussing his time working in Ireland (he directed The Snapperand The Vanhere), he chastises Roddy Doyle for not writing a script set in some picturesque part of the West. "Yes, why couldn't he have written something in Galway? When you read a script it's hard not to think, 'oh this would be fun to do'."
The job is still fun, then? “Oh yes. It’s a miracle that, at my age, I can still get real pleasure from this job. A miracle.”
