A Decidedly British Accent

Today on set, the heroine is encased in a stunning faux-leather body suit, while the hero’s body is draped in a dashing chalk-striped Savile Row suit, set off by an umbrella and bowler hat.

It can only mean one thing, right?

Yep, the Avengers are back. More than three decades after the British cult TV series made its debut, it is being adapted for the big screen.

Fans of “The Avengers” unquestionably have mixed feelings about this news. It is by no means the first TV show to receive a cinematic make-over, and devotees of the shows have sometimes felt the original spirit has been lost in the process.

For example, last year’s “Mission: Impossible” may have been a bravura piece of filmmaking but seemed far removed from the TV adventure series starring Peter Graves, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain.

A more obvious example was this year’s “The Saint,” based loosely on a likable, witty, if slightly tacky British TV series with its suave, nonchalant hero played by Roger Moore; it in turn was inspired by the novels of English writer Leslie Charteris and the George Sanders films. The film adaptation, starring Val Kilmer, de-anglicized its hero, removing him from his geographical roots and period context. The film suffered a lukewarm reception critically and commercially, and was widely reviled in Britain, where one critic called it “a series of errors in judgment from the start--entirely indigestible.”

So the folks behind the film version of “The Avengers” are employing an opposite strategy. Within the limits of broadening the TV series and making a movie with high production values and spectacular set-piece action sequences (“The Avengers” will be a summer movie from Warner Bros. for 1998), they are trying to retain as much of the original show’s flavor as possible.

“I was concerned with keeping the quintessentially English background and characters of the TV show,” notes producer Jerry Weintraub. “When you’re making a big action-adventure movie, your natural tendency is to Americanize it. I didn’t want to. I knew [the TV show] had a worldwide audience, and I didn’t want to bastardize these characters. You know that saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’? Well, these characters are certainly not broke.”

The characters he refers to are John Steed, the unruffled, elegantly clad British gentleman with bowler and brolly who works undercover as a British intelligence agent, and Emma Peel, his alluring, stylish and often leather-clad accomplice. Ralph Fiennes, the English actor renowned for heavy dramatic roles in films like “The English Patient” and “Schindler’s List,” ventures into the fields of action-adventure and light comedy for the first time as Steed, while Uma Thurman (fresh from vamping her way through the role of Poison Ivy in “Batman & Robin”) plays Emma.

It helps that director Jeremiah Chechik (“Benny and Joon”) is himself a longtime “Avengers” fan. “I grew up in Montreal, where the series played on [the Canadian Broadcasting Co.],” he recalls while standing on the platform of a crane inside a sound stage, preparing to shoot a scene on a spiral staircase surrounded by a tall cylindrical steel tower. “CBC got all the castoffs” from British TV, he says.

“I literally grew up watching that show. I was a major ‘Avengers’ fan early in my boyhood, which is a good time to have discovered Emma Peel. So with this film, I wanted to make it more of what it really was.”

So what was it? It turns out “The Avengers” is a classic TV series with an appeal that’s hard to define. “Its strength was its lightness, its wit,” offers Fiennes. Thurman talks of the naive quality of the old “Avengers” shows: “I love that there’s something cheap and charming about them, compared to today’s TV. But it doesn’t matter--they’re more than enough. I was impressed by the sophistication of them.” Eddie Izzard, one of Britain’s most popular stand-up comics, who has a minor role in the film as a villain called Bailey, adds: “I loved ‘The Avengers.’ It was very sexy and very English, and there isn’t much you can say that about.”

Production designer Stuart Craig uses the word “surrealist” to describe the TV show; on arriving at the set, the first thing he did was to pin posters by surrealist painters Magritte and De Chirico on his office wall for inspiration. (Coincidentally, one of Magritte’s most famous paintings is of a bowler hat.)

The TV show’s producers “were conditioned by not having any money,” says Craig. “So they’d shoot a scene at a deserted airfield, which was derelict and empty. It’s difficult for us to hang on to that spirit. We, of course, have a large amount of money.” (Weintraub will not disclose the film’s budget, but on-set estimates place it at around $60 million.)

Viewing some of those old TV episodes, one is struck by the modest budget of the series; many scenes do indeed take place against a backdrop devoid of features or extras. Yet the wit of the writing is delicious; there are understated yet palpable sexual sparks in the badinage between Steed [played by Patrick Macnee] and Emma (Diana Rigg). He always refers to her courteously as “Mrs. Peel.” It’s a whimsical show, played strictly tongue-in-cheek. Macnee dispatches bad guys with a deft flick of his umbrella and emerges from physical encounters with enemies without so much as a hair out of place.

Yet is it a tenable basis for an action-adventure film? Weintraub, producer of “Nashville,” “Diner” and “The Karate Kid” movies as well as less distinguished action fare like “The Specialist,” thinks so. Yet even he admits to the difficulties involved in adapting “The Avengers.”

“I thought the characters’ sexual tension, innuendo and the repartee between Steed and Emma was very important,” he notes. “But can you make a movie of this size with just sexual repartee? No. You can’t do a Noel Coward piece as a huge blockbuster movie. I wanted an action-adventure movie so kids will buy into it. But I also wanted it intelligent enough for adults.

“So what we have is a romantic comedy with an action-adventure background of five or six set pieces. And you could take out the set pieces and have a pretty good play. If it works, I think it could change the whole action-adventure genre. The audiences will require more of an investment in the characters.”

At the same time, he believes the film will appease fans of the TV series. Given this last aim, Weintraub has certainly hired shrewdly. Apart from the North American contingent (himself, Thurman and Chechik), the key players on this film are British and proven talents.

Apart from Fiennes, whose reserved manner marks him as a particular kind of Englishman, the cast boasts several distinguished Brits, including Sean Connery, making his first appearance as a screen villain. He plays Sir August de Wynter, a deranged meteorologist who lusts after Emma Peel and hopes to control the world by manipulating the weather.

Also featured are a clutch of outstanding British thespians more accustomed to playing Shakespeare on stage than wry comic characters in Hollywood films: John Wood, Jim Broadbent, Fiona Shaw, Eileen Atkins.

“They’re fantastic, all of them,” says Fiennes, creasing his features into a mock rueful expression. “They steal every scene they’re in, which is very much in the ‘Avengers’ tradition.”

The men responsible for the look of “The Avengers” are British talents at their peak. Production designer Craig has won three Academy Awards, for ‘The English Patient,” “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Gandhi.” Costume designer Anthony Powell is also a triple Oscar winner, for “Tess,” “Death on the Nile” and “Travels With My Aunt,” and designed Glenn Close’s costumes for “101 Dalmatians.” Cinematographer Roger Pratt is best known for his work with director Terry Gilliam, and for lighting Kenneth Branagh’s “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” and Tim Burton’s “Batman.”

Then there is writer Don McPherson, also a Briton, whose adaptation of Henry Fielding’s 18th century novel “Jonathan Wild” is widely regarded in the British film industry as one of the best unproduced screenplays around.

It’s a very British production, then, symbolized by the presence of Fiennes, looking immaculate in his stunningly fitted suit. “It’s Savile Row,” he says, looking faintly embarrassed. “We spent ages going through various pinstripes and weights of cloth.” And did he enjoy all that? “Yes, a lot,” Fiennes says. “I’d never been to Savile Row tailors in my life, and I must say it’s addictive.” (Weintraub confirms this: “I went for some fittings on Savile Row with Ralph, and he would stand in front of a mirror for almost an hour, obsessing about a little pinch in his waistcoat.”)

Fiennes points out small, exquisite details of his outfit, such as gold cuff links with a double-headed eagle on each side, a watch and fob fixed to his lapel, his black shoes in light, soft Italian leather: “The soles are really thin, so you feel light on your feet.”

“Ralph’s a dream to any designer,” Anthony Powell says. “He wears clothes very well. But I had to tread a fine line with him--he’s a very subtle, sensitive person, not flamboyant in any way at all.”

With this in mind, Powell added some subtle touches to Steed’s wardrobe to suggest a raffish soul lurking beneath those highly conventional clothes. For instance, the waistcoat of Fiennes’ suit has horizontal rather than vertical stripes. He also suggested unusual crescent-shaped pockets for Steed’s various tweed suits.

“In the original series, Steed was dressed in a way that was already anachronistic in the ‘60s,” Powell notes. “It’s interesting that in the ‘90s, apart from the bowler hat, a beautifully cut Savile Row suit is the height of fashion again.”

The bowler hat proved to be a problem. Weintraub presented Fiennes with one to welcome him to the production, but “he looked like a poor man’s version of Charlie Chaplin,” Powell recalls. The costume designer experimented with various hats and fittings, and persuaded Fiennes to wear the bowler at a slight angle for the right jaunty look.

Emma Peel gave Powell different problems: “Uma’s very bright, and at our first meeting she asked a good question: We all know about Emma’s leather cat suit, but where does it hang in her wardrobe? That gave me a clue as to how to approach dressing her.”

He decided the cat suit was what Emma would wear on dangerous, action-packed missions, but everything else she wore (suede dresses, a leather maxi-coat) would be linked to it, to make the donning of it somehow inevitable. Powell met the original Emma, actress Diana Rigg, who told him memories play tricks--she had not spent most of her time in black leather, because it was impractical for stunt and action work. “Look at those old pictures now, and the leather looks baggy and saggy,” says Powell. “Back then there was no access to fake leather, which fits with the body and moves with it.

“Leather also carries a different message now--it’s not just fetishistic any more, it’s amusing and fashionable too.”

It’s more than that, according to Thurman. “ ‘Batman & Robin’ was good training for this,” she complained good-naturedly. “These specialty costumes are very trying. They’re hard to get in and out of, they’re hard to wear. And mostly, they’re hot.”

Yet suffer she must for the look of the film, which Stuart Craig insists is vital. The script is set in London in 1999, and “Avengers-

land” is described as a place “where the ‘60s have never ended--they’ve just been going on for a very long time.”

“We set about asking ourselves how to honor the original intent, and chose not to have crowds of people in the background living everyday lives,” says Craig. “The only people you see are functionaries with a uniform--a nanny, a cab driver, a policeman, a scientist in a lab coat.

“We’ve created London as this empty world. We’ve controlled roads, kept traffic and crowds out. It’s a sanitized London, but in a stylish way, not a bland way. Our residential London was shot around Regent’s Park, with its stuccoed early 19th century houses and their perfect classical symmetry. Ministry London was shot at Greenwich Naval College, which again is classical and symmetrical. The images are uncluttered and crisp.”

Yet Craig was also allowed a free hand to create some extraordinary effects--because of Sir August de Wynter’s obsession with malevolent weather, London is seen beneath 30 feet of snow. For a scene in De Wynter’s underground lair, where he is manufacturing devastating electrical storms, Craig ordered an entire sound stage at Shepperton Studios, located just outside of London, to be flooded, importing wind and rain machines for a climactic fight sequence. For Emma’s apartment, the production took over the Chelsea home of Richard Rogers, Britain’s internationally famed architect, who bought two adjacent Georgian houses, gutted them and gave them a hi-tech interior. Steed’s home was conceived as an 18th century Belgravia bachelor pad, all yellows and golds, with battle prints on the wall, objets d’art and antiquities carefully placed.

“That’s where designers enhance character,” says Fiennes. “It’s the counterpoint between Steed and Emma which makes it work. Emma’s always the ultra-modern, independent tough lady, sexy and graceful. He’s the quintessential English gentleman. I have a line in this--”Tradition is all we have, Mrs. Peel.” The two are a perfect match. You mustn’t modernize Steed, and I admire Jeremiah for not wanting to make him trendy at all. He’s the way he is, which enables her to be what she is.”

Perhaps the best evidence that the filmmakers are being careful to honor the source material is the fact that Patrick Macnee, the original Steed, has a role in this movie version--though the nature of the role is something they prefer is kept secret until the film’s release. Macnee traveled from his Palm Springs home and spent the first week of production in scenes with Fiennes.

Macnee made his first appearance as Steed on British television in 1961. His first female partner was Cathy Gale, played by Honor Blackman. But American TV viewers did not see this first incarnation of “The Avengers”; the shows that aired on ABC in 1966-69 featured Rigg as Emma Peel and later Linda Thorson as Tara King, and enjoyed a popular afterlife in syndication. (Macnee revived Steed for the series “The New Avengers,” shown on CBS in 1978-79, co-starring Joanna Lumley, but the liberated Emma Peel was always Steed’s most popular accomplice.)

“Patrick’s the sweetest man,” says Fiennes. “On the first day of shooting, I walked on the set dressed like this, suddenly saw him sitting there and had this very complicated feeling. It was a mixture of almost shame and of a wonderful sense of elation--that by being there he was passing the baton on. Patrick was so generous about me playing Steed, which meant a lot to me, because the part was defined by him.”

Fiennes says he pressed Macnee for as much information about the character and series as he could. “He told me the umbrella came about because he hadn’t wanted Steed to carry a firearm,” says Fiennes. “He’d seen too many of his friends killed in World War II, and didn’t want Steed to be involved in such overt violence.”

A visitor to the set of “The Avengers” comes away with a strong sense that something ambitious is being attempted--maybe even pushing the envelope of the entire action-adventure genre.

“This isn’t an intellectual, psychological thriller,” says Chechik cheerfully. “It’s going to be a movie that’s a lot of fun to watch and experience. It combines the best of great romantic comedy and great kinetic action. To do action-adventure movies any more without well-defined characters--we’re chasing our tail trying to reinvent all that.”

Fiennes agrees. “This is a comic thriller, really. I’ve read about other films where they’ve tried to push the action genre in another direction--make it more extreme. And they do it with a kind of sweaty seriousness. The muscles are bigger, the explosions are more unbelievable, it’s all done with a pumped-up, gritted-teeth humorlessness.”

The ghost of a smile flickers across his face. “Like it all really matters. I think we’re saying in this film, ‘Isn’t it bizarre that Steed can be involved in a long, drawn-out fight, yet remain so immaculate throughout?’ I hope the strength of this film is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.”