Changing Frames of Reference

It’s a surprisingly tired-looking Stephen Daldry who calls a break for lunch on the set of “Dancer,” the first full-length film he has directed. For a decade, Daldry was not just one of Britain’s most brilliant stage directors, he was also known for a formidable work ethic that served him well in six high-achieving years as artistic director of London’s Royal Court Theatre.

Like so many leading British theatrical figures, Daldry, 38, has found the lure of film impossible to resist. Shortly after stepping down from his post at the Court in 1997, it was announced he had signed a deal with Working Title, the British production company behind such films as “Elizabeth,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Fargo.”

Some of his theater contemporaries have made the move into film look easy. Sam Mendes of London’s Donmar Warehouse made his film debut last summer with “American Beauty”--both he and the film are leading Oscar contenders. Nicholas Hytner, an ex-National Theatre stalwart, has been primarily a filmmaker since his notable film debut with 1994’s “The Madness of King George.” Anthony Minghella, a highly ranked film director thanks to the Oscar-winning “The English Patient” and the current “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” cut his teeth in obscure English fringe venues.

And still they keep coming. Matthew Warchus, another National Theatre director, has made his film debut with “Simpatico,” starring Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges and Sharon Stone (the film opened briefly for Oscar consideration in December). His National colleague Deborah Warner’s film debut “The Last September,” with Maggie Smith, opens this spring in the U.S. The stage-to-film trend isn’t even confined to the Brits: American Julie Taymor, who staged Disney’s “The Lion King” to enormous success on Broadway and in London, recently made her film debut with “Titus,” her outrageous adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.”

One might imagine Daldry, in many ways a starrier theater director than any of them, following his compatriots easily. Productions as varied as his radical staging of “An Inspector Calls” and playwright David Hare’s one-man tour de force “Via Dolorosa” (both of which transferred to Broadway) proved he’s good with actors and brims with ideas and visual flair. He also has the stamina and charisma needed to lead a team. Just the right qualities for a film director, then.

Yet Daldry, nearing the end of an eight-week shoot of “Dancer,” looks languid and exhausted. “The hours are very long,” he says simply. “It’s very stressful.

“It’s not that filming is more exacting than theater. But in theater you have more control if you’re running the show. You can create a context in which you can work more easily and shift resources around. In movies I have no control over finances. In small British films like this one [the budget is the equivalent of $5 million], you simply don’t have enough money.”

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Daldry says he took on “Dancer” simply because its story moved him. It is by playwright Lee Hall, an old theater colleague of Daldry. Set in the industrial northeast of England during the 1984 coal miners’ strike, “Dancer” is about Billy, a boy of 11 whose mother has just died. Billy is growing up in an all-male culture and finds solace and inspiration in dancing.

“You can imagine in those circumstances he has a battle on his hands,” Daldry says dryly. But a teacher (played by Julie Walters) offers Billy an escape route by training him for auditions at London’s Royal Ballet School.

Daldry’s casting director Jina Jay sent scouts around the northeast to find boys who could act and had some gift for dancing. “As you can imagine, it’s not the most popular activity for 11-year-old boys around there,” he says. “Jina ended up seeing 2,000 kids.” Finally the role went to 13-year-old Jamie Bell.

“We were lucky to get Jamie,” Daldry muses. “For eight weeks he’s held up, which is as well, because he’s in every scene. The biggest problem is he’s getting older. I think he’s 4 inches taller than when we started shooting.”

This day’s scenes are being shot inside a bungalow in tranquil Pinner, deep in the suburbs of northwest London. Daldry, very much a metropolitan man-about-town, is a fish out of water in such a conservative environment. He jumps into his small rented car and heads for an old, oak-beamed pub for lunch. As he drives, he grouses gently about right-wing attitudes in places like Pinner. But he quickly settles down to discussing the differences between film and theater.

“In theater, it’s essentially a collegial context in which you’re working,” he explains. “That’s almost a point of principle. And a theater director can have the confidence to say, ‘I don’t know.’ It can even rally and focus a group of actors. In the movies, to say, ‘I don’t know’ is exactly the reverse. It’s a disaster, the crew smells the idea that you don’t know what you’re doing, and they lose confidence in you. It causes massive anxiety.”

Currently completing shooting, “Dancer” is tentatively scheduled for release in England later this year; plans for the film’s U.S. release have not been set.

Given the startling originality of Daldry’s theater work, one imagines “Dancer” might be an audaciously stylized film. But he wants to play down such expectations.

“My plan on this was quite consciously to go with a very simple filmic language, just to learn what that language was,” he says. “I decided not to try to be clever, not to do self-conscious shots or move the camera around for no particular reason. It’s not that I don’t like films like that. I do. But for a first-time film director, the danger is trying to run before you can walk.”

By now he has relaxed into his normal interview mode--flippant, witty and provocative. Daldry, tall, slim, with spiky fair hair, rimless glasses and a dazzling smile, adopts a seductive, almost flirtatious stance with journalists, which makes him a popular if sometimes elusive subject.

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He has come to films relatively late in life. Had he enjoyed them growing up? “Only on a recreational basis,” he says, smirking. “I wasn’t a total addict. I didn’t inhale, as it were.”

On landing the Working Title deal, he admitted with disarming candor that he knew little of the mechanics of film directing. True, he spent time at Hytner’s elbow on a film set, but that was less educative than you might think--”a bit like watching someone write, if you know what I mean.”

Still, he thinks he should pursue directing a second movie: “I haven’t learned enough on this one, to be blunt. If you’re confident in one form and you go into another, you’re bound to be at sea a little bit. So you need to stick with it to find out how it works.”

This makes good sense. Several British theater luminaries have found that directing films involves more than treating them as an enjoyable sideline; Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, Adrian Noble and Richard Eyre all have had less success on screen than they did on stage.

Daldry admits missing the Royal Court: “It was great, but it’s always good to change, and I was there six years in the end. Still, I’m sure I’ll run another theater at one point. I love running theaters.”

Indeed, many London theater insiders maintain that he will finally accede to the biggest prize of all--artistic director at the National Theatre--when the current director, Nunn, steps aside. And Daldry proved himself shrewd and effective in the realm of public policy when he supervised the redevelopment of the Royal Court in London’s Sloane Square, which was achieved with some $35 million of public arts lottery cash.

“I love learning new things,” he says. “With the Court’s redevelopment, getting into architecture was another huge learning curve. I learned how to create and negotiate new lottery guidelines. It’s all genuinely fascinating. Not a lot to do with directing plays, but fascinating.”

While it’s unclear what he will do next, he seems certain to stay in Britain to do it. “I live in this country, and I’m culturally embedded here,” he says. “I don’t want to make films in America about Americans, for instance. I have no interest in American culture. I feel more association with Berlin or Paris than with Washington or New York. I want to stay and cherish this country [Britain] in whatever way I can.”

For once, he’s not being flippant.