After 40 years in business, British director Stephen Frears was recently awarded the European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award. He looks back on his career with Paula Fleri-Soler and other journalists
Born in 1941, Stephen Frears’ career started off in TV. He made his first feature film, Gumshoe, exactly 40 years ago. His breakthrough came in 1985 with cult classic My Beautiful Laundrette and his prolific output includes the Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, The Snapper, High Fidelity and The Queen, in which he directed Helen Mirren to the Best Actress Oscar among many awards.
I think The Snapper is the best film I ever made
Looking slightly rumpled and, I suspect, a little grumpy before warming up to the interview, Frears was asked how he feels about receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award in ‘middle-age’.
“I’m 70,” he retorted, to giggles from the gaggle of journalists present. “Do you think that’s middle-aged?”.
“It’s both very flattering and you try not to take it too literally. It’s a compliment,” he adds.
Frears is currently finalising his next film Lay the Favorite, which stars Bruce Willis and Catherine Zeta Jones. Asked what differences he finds between working in America and working in Britain and Europe, he says, “Well, in America there is a film industry and the Americans like films. You feel less of an outsider in America”.
He goes on to explain, “When you make films in Britain, you feel like a sort of urchin, standing on a corner like a sort of brigand, like a freak. It’s so unnatural to make a film in Britain, as Truffaut said, and it doesn’t seem unnatural in America. You associate the Americans with cinema so much that I suppose you feel quite comfortable there. With Europeans it’s much more of an exception somehow.”
Given this, I commented that the top three films in the UK this year were British: Harry Potter... only for Frears to interrupt with a “Well... Harry Potter! What do you want me to say?” I pressed on, undaunted, “Harry Potter, The King’s Speech and The Inbetweeners. Doesn’t this say something positive about the British film industry?”
“It says first of all that we stumbled on a very successful franchise which was very well exploited,” he argued. “It doesn’t feel like a part of the British film industry...”
He then seemed to relent. “But I can see it it’s a British film... so, quite right! The King’s Speech was in a sort of tradition of British films and that sort of success is always a fluke, and this is nothing to do with whether the film is good or not, but it’s always an accident.
“I made Laundrette which was a fluke; I made The Queen, it was a fluke, they are always against the grain. I remember the producer of Four Weddings saying ‘what have I done right?’ So they’re not made with the expectation of commercial returns in the way that American films are. They are all eccentric in some particular way.”
Around the time Dangerous Liaisons won its Academy Awards 22 years ago, Frears flew to Berlin from Los Angeles to be at the meeting which gave birth to the European Film Academy (EFA). Has the EFA managed to make a dent in Hollywood’s domination?
“I’d be quite sceptical about that,” he says immediately, before adding, “But then you see a great European film and think, ‘oh, this is fantastic!’”. He remains committed to keep European film going, and believes that if films are good, people will go to see them.
Does he see himself as a European film-maker or a British one? “Sometimes, when it suits me... the British have always had this very ambivalent feeling about Europe,” he says, provoking another huge laugh. “I suppose The Queen was a European film,” he adds. When I ask what it is that attracts him to a project, he replies, “I haven’t a clue.” He says he is probably attracted to films that have humour, which may explain why he cites German director Ernst Lubitsch as an inspiration.
“It’s the surprise that I like when I read a script,” he elaborates. “Or someone says, ‘come make a film in Ireland’. That had never crossed my mind. And I never thought about making a film about the Queen”.
As for Lay the Favorite he says that it “came through my friend who wrote High Fidelity and he started telling the story and I thought it sounded great.” Does he like his job as much as he did 40 years ago? “Oh it’s much more interesting now, because you are not so frightened,” he replies. “I mean I spend a lot of time being afraid; but you are not consumed by it in the way I was in the beginning.”
Finally, he is asked which of all his films is his favourite. “I’ll tell you a story,” he says with a twinkle. “I was at the Élysée Palace and taken to meet Francois Mitterrand and they introduced me, ‘this is Stephen Frears, he made Les Liaisons Dangereuses,’ and he turned to me and he said ‘yes, but the one I really liked is the little Irish film The Snapper...’”
“I think The Snapper is the best film I ever made.”