Sitting in the drawing room of a plush Galway hotel, Stephen Frears spots a bronze bust of Samuel Beckett on the bookshelf opposite. "I knew Beckett," he tells me. "I met him first in 1964, when I directed Godot." He would have loved to have directed one of the Gate's Beckett films, he admits, but just wasn't free to do so.
It's an appropriate starting point for a discussion with a film director who throughout his career has emphasised the paramount importance of the writer and the script in film-making, although he jokingly laments that his respect for writers is "a disaster, it's the downfall of my life!
"I'm going to say a terrible thing," he says, "which is that generally the problems with films are in the writing. If you're going to do as I do, which is give the writer primacy at the centre of the thing, of course the writing has to take that responsibility. So if there is a problem, it's in the writing, and it just hasn't been picked up in time."
Like his compatriot Mike Newell (Into the West, Donnie Brasco), but unlike other British film-makers such as Alan Parker or Ridley Scott, who came from advertising, Frears is rooted in the golden era of British television drama in the 1960s and 1970s. In TV, unlike the movies, the writer is king, and Frears has always publicly presented himself as a sympathetic interpreter of scripts rather than a cinematic auteur. At times, one wonders whether this self-effacement is as much a defensive strategy as anything else - after all, Frears's films, such as The Grifters or Dangerous Liaisons are as "cinematic" as any of his contemporaries' work.
For the first time in some years, he has a bona-fide hit on his hands, with his version of Nick Hornby's novel, High Fidelity. In this case, too, it started with a script, one developed by actor-producer John Cusack.
"The book was got to John by somebody at Disney, and he loved it, and got his friends to write a script," Frears explains. "John was absolutely passionate about it, and he asked me to do it. I was sent the script, and although it wasn't what we ended up filming, I could certainly see something in it. Whereas, when I first read the book, I just couldn't see the film. But after reading the script I went back to the book, and I could then see how it could be done."
I admit that my own initial reaction to the news that High Fidelity had been relocated from London to Chicago was one of disappointment. Rob Fleming, the underachieving, music-obsessed, commitment-phobic record shop owner of the book, becomes Rob Gordon, the similarly encumbered central character of the movie. The difference is that, whereas the novel seemed to delineate a specific kind of English (and Irish) ageing fan-boy sadness, which a lot of depressive thirtysomethings like myself related to, the film was going to transplant all that to the US, a culture where the difference between failure and success is far more brutal, and where pop music obsessions work in subtly different ways.
"I don't mean to be rude, but you were simply wrong," says Frears with the understandable satisfaction of a man with a critical and commercial success on his hands. "Those same kinds of record shops exist in Chicago and New York. The book was a `home book' written by Nick, and the movie was a `home movie', with that great burden of Englishness lifted off it. Being English is a problem, and it removed that problem."
The "burden of Englishness" in filmmaking is something which Frears has referred to before. I recall that some years ago he talked about how difficult it was to make a good crime thriller in the UK because the police uniforms looked so silly. Is that the attraction for him of working in Hollywood?
"Well, I think the problem with small countries, which applies both to England and Ireland, is that the material is very limited," he says. "What people will expect from Ireland is films about the Troubles or something like that, but not about ordinary people's lives. What was so great about Roddy Doyle is that he invented a new Irish subject for a while. "In England, if you make films about the upper classes or certain other types of film, you may be successful. But if you make a film which defies expectations, unless you're very lucky or very sensational, it won't happen. It's very difficult to make films about ordinary stories. When I started going to the United States, a whole set of possibilities opened up. It's bigger, and I find that somehow it has a sort of freedom. But, in this case, I didn't think there was any betrayal of the book. In fact, I think it stripped it down to what was really interesting."
There is of course, the hard-nosed commercial reality that American audiences - and international ones - react better to American settings, he agrees. "Ask Steve Woolley (successful British producer and long-time collaborator with Neil Jordan). He'll tell you that if you go to an English movie in America, the audience are reacting as if they're watching a film in a foreign language. People just like American films."
It could be argued, though, that whatever the good intentions of all those involved (including Hornby, who has expressed his delight with the movie), the transposition represents a form of cultural imperialism. "Well yes, of course," Frears says wryly. "It would be foolish to deny that there wasn't cultural imperialism involved. But it seemed to me to be benign and to have advantages. Here was I, the culturally exploited, taking advantage of the situation!"
One of the reasons the movie version of High Fidelity works so well is that Cusack and his scriptwriters bring their own personal fan-boy obsessions to the mix, the same obsessions they used in their enjoyable black comedy, Grosse Pointe Blank, a couple of years back. So a novel about an Englishman obsessed with American music becomes a movie about an American obsessed with English music - and, most surprisingly of all, it works. "Well, you'd know more about this than I would," says Frears. "The book is about R 'n' B, isn't it? Whereas these boys, being a few years younger than Nick, were obsessed by English punk, and it became a film about their own musical world."
Despite the fact that it's a major studio production, High Fidelity feels more like an indie film, with its morally ambiguous central character and its gritty, slightly grungy setting. "I know all the stuff people say about Disney, about power and control," says Frears. "But Disney said to me that I should make this like an independent movie, which was great. That doesn't mean you can do what you want, though, because I'm too puritanical to waste people's money." So what does it mean? "It means being sensible."
From Dangerous Liaisons to The Snap- per to High Fidelity, Frears has done his fair share of literary adaptations, and he knows the pitfalls and opportunities involved. In the new film, he breaks one of the most basic movie conventions and has Cusack regularly speaking directly to camera, explaining his feelings and motivations as the story unfolds. It's a bold stroke, getting around the perennial difficulty of literary adaptations, the loss of the authorial or inner voice.
"I don't know why people are so nervous of doing that," he says. "I liked it because it's so theatrical, and the stuff you could then get at was so enjoyable and well-written and essential to the story."
In recent years, his movies have not met with commercial success. The Van, Mary Reilly and The Hi-Lo Country were all met with critical indifference and audience apathy. His last sure-fire hit was his marvellous adaptation of Roddy Doyle's The Snapper, a low-budget TV movie which enjoyed unexpected big-screen success. When I ask why he thinks The Van didn't work, he draws a comparison with My Beautiful Laundrette, his 1985 state-of-the-nation TV movie which similarly escaped from the small screen to find a studio audience. Two years later, he had returned to similar terrain - but on a feature-film budget - with the unsuccessful agit-prop romance, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.
"I think it goes down deep," he muses. "I remember when I made My Beautiful Laundrette, which I imagine you'd say had the same quality as The Snapper. That film was made for the purest of reasons, and we made it immediately, and yes, The Snapper had that too. The idea that either of those films would be successful was ridiculous, until it happened. Of course, it seems clear in retrospect, but not while you're making it. Well, when you try to do that again, you can get caught. You make these things without a care in the world, then they make quite a lot of money and the genie's out of the bottle, and you can't get that back."
He has just finished shooting another "small" British TV movie, from a script by Jimmy McGovern, which he feels won't translate onto cinema screens (but then that's what he thought about My Beautiful Laundrette and The Snapper). But he values the space which these small productions allow for creativity.
"The most important thing is that they're made in a protected way," he says. "What matters to me is meeting and working with Roddy Doyle or Nick Hornby or Jimmy McGovern." That sounds very pure, I suggest, given what we all think we know about the compromises involved in making movies. "Of course, I'm not a naive fool," he responds. "I could certainly see that High Fidelity was a story which could appeal to audiences."
He also knew well before its release that the film would do well. "You show it, and you can see people's excitement. The problem is that you know before the film even opens. You show a cut, and then you alter it to get a certain laugh, then you show it again, because these films are made for an audience. But there's also some sort of divine hand at work. I remember reading the script of Dangerous Liaisons and thinking it was absolutely wonderful, exactly the sort of thing which I'd always wanted to see in the cinema. I made the film and it was very successful. Afterwards, you think, well it was an absolute fluke that it was a success. There was a very good marketing guy at Warners who knew exactly how to do it, and got it to a very large audience very skilfully. Well, if it hadn't been him, who knows? There is a sort of good fortune to the whole thing."
High Fidelity is on general release