DIRECTOR FREARS: LIFE IS PROVOCATIVE ENOUGH

Disheveled and unshaven, Stephen Frears was searching his disorderly Manhattan hotel room for some semblance of a wardrobe for a dinner date with a film producer and, at the same time, groping for sensible answers to questions about his movies that he would rather dispense with.

In other words, the director of “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Prick Up Your Ears” just doesn’t see the provocative aspects of his films. As far as he’s concerned, they’re just a reflection of life.

He was on his way to one of the trendier, to-be-seen-in restaurants in town--but it wasn’t his choice. As he pulled a rumpled brown sweater over a T-shirt and tightened the laces of his tennis shoes, it was immediately clear that the English director did not stand on ceremony or care about pleasing the crowd. Just as it was when he talked about his movies.

“You have an obligation to tell the truth about people’s lives,” he said, impatiently. The quick answer was to a question about the direct approach he has taken on-screen to dicey subjects such as homosexuality and racial and class conflict.

“Oh, please don’t have me using words like truth, “ Frears pleaded of the reporter, having heard himself sounding, as he put it, “grandiose.”

Frears spoke of the importance of “illuminating life” in films, but he didn’t seem to put on any grand manner. He spoke straight-out, sometimes defiantly, about what he sees as the truth. Whether railing about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative policies, or the decline of human values, or bloated movie budgets, Frears seemed to stay true to his artistic roots in the British bohemian society of the 1960s.

Frears’ work, an unusual blend of art and social politics, has been seen widely by film and TV audiences in Britain since 1971. But he has just begun to be exposed to wide American audiences with the release here last year of “Laundrette” and with “Prick Up Your Ears,” a film about the life and death of another English iconoclast, playwright Joe Orton, now in a staggered national release. (It opens Friday at the Westside Pavilion.)

His latest film, based on the 1978 biography of the playwright by John Lahr, deals with Orton’s relentless efforts to shock straight and stuffy English audiences of the 1960s with plays like “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” and “Loot” as well as with his unconventional personal life. Like Orton in the way he mixes wit with sobering reality, Frears seems determined to make today’s audiences turn from mere escapist entertainment to take notice of significant issues facing them and the world.

“Knowledge is always better than ignorance,” said director, who was born, like Orton, in Leicester, England.

Frears said he was drawn to “My Beautiful Laundrette,” an original screenplay by Hanif Kureishi that earned an Oscar nomination this year, because “it got right what Britain looks like at the moment.” Set against a drab, economically depressed landscape, the film depicts working-class white British youths and their hostility towards an influx of rich, corrupt Pakistanis in London--”all victims” of today’s social problems, according to Frears.

The film also depicts in explicit terms the homosexual relationship of its two protagonists: a young, working-class Brit, played by Daniel Day Lewis, and the Pakistani owner of the laundrette, played by Gordon Warnecke. But unlike the way homosexuality traditionally has been treated on screen, as a problem, it is treated in Frears’ film as a salving attribute of character.

Frears said the relationship was important to the film because it shows “the triumph of private values” in a hostile world. And he said the presence and the treatment of the relationship was “entirely consistent” with films like “Laundrette” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” which he termed “radical films.”

After all, Frears, 46, having read law at Cambridge University, received his early training as a director at the hands of some radical practitioners, first at London’s Royal Court theater, where “angry young men” like John Osborne--and Joe Orton--first came to attention, and later as an assistant to director Lindsay Anderson on films like “If . . .” and “O Lucky Man!”

Frears’ latest film focuses on the 16-year relationship between Orton (played by “Syd and Nancy’s” Gary Oldman) and Kenneth Halliwell (Albert Molina), which came to an end in 1967 when Halliwell bludgeoned Orton to death before taking his own life. The film depicts their relationship, not unlike more conventional marriages, as a mixture of devotion, dependency and destructiveness. And in spite of some extreme behavior, including Orton’s wildly promiscuous and often dangerous sexual conduct, the film takes a casual attitude toward their homosexuality.

“Their life together was as natural to them as a more conventional, heterosexual life is to others,” said Frears. “Clearly, theirs was a gay relationship, and we’ve said this right up-front, with no excuses, explanations, or parentheses. But the fact that they were gay is absolutely secondary to their story.”

It was to protect the Orton/Halliwell story from “stupid exploitation” that Frears said he, Lahr and English playwright/screenwriter Alan Bennett optioned Lahr’s book in 1978 and “held out” from film offers until they could produce the film themselves.

“It’s about marriage, with many of the same problems as any other marriage that goes wrong, except that it happens to be between two men,” he continued. Frears drew a parallel between Halliwell and “wives” who are left behind--and sometimes enraged to the point of murder--by their husbands. In this case, Orton’s success in the theater drew him further and further away from Halliwell.

Frears reluctantly acknowledged that there are risks to be run in taking a forthright approach to his film subjects. By depicting Pakistanis as corruptable in “Laundrette,” he recognized he might encourage racial prejudice. “But I thought the material justified the risk,” he said. “I was just trying to show a part of society people might not know and anything that explains or humanizes tends to undermine peoples’ prejudices.”

In referring to the “cautionary” element in his latest film, Frears joked that the abusive Orton/Halliwell relationship “hasn’t corrupted me . . . I’m nicer to my wife!”

After the 1971 release of his first feature, “Gumshoe,” starring Albert Finney as a Philip Marlowe-type private eye, Frears retreated to TV “because it taught me how little I knew.”

Over the next decade, he made highly praised TV films such as “Bloody Kids,” about London street urchins. He worked with the most celebrated British writers of the time, like Christopher Hampton, David Hare and Alan Bennett, and with other rising film makers, such as cinematographer Chris Menges, who earned his second Oscar this year for “The Mission.”

“It was my training ground, and it allowed me to make serious, quality films for large audiences,” recalled Frears, who returned to features in 1984 with “The Hit,” a film about gangsters and their code of conduct that starred Terence Stamp and John Hurt. But he insisted on returning to TV with “My Beautiful Laundrette” because he thought it was “too strong for the cinema” and “for television, we could keep the price down.

“You couldn’t seriously have gone to investors and said, ‘I’m going to make a film about a gay Pakistani laundrette owner,’ and be confident that there would be an audience,” said Frears, who eventually shot the film for under $1 million for Britain’s Channel 4 before transferring it to 35-millimeter film for theatrical release.

Frears conceded that the unexpected success of the film has given him confidence to press on in films. He recently completed shooting “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” another film written by Kureishi, about a married couple, a Pakistani man and a white Englishwoman. “They think of themselves as progressives,” explained Frears, “but they have a rude awakening.”