Only What Grabs Him

Stephen Frears looks like he just rolled out of bed. Unshaven, hair tousled, he sits down wearily to discuss his newest film, “Liam.” It’s 10 in the morning--clearly not his favorite hour of the day. His disposition also seems to reflect an ambivalence about his up-and-down career in films--box-office successes and total bombs, critically praised as often as he’s been lambasted, a resume consisting of major American films and small British ones.

At 60, the English director is a survivor. But continually self-deprecating and possessed of a dry wit, he’s also refreshingly candid about his failures and resigned to the industry variables that spell triumph or doom for any project.

“You know,” he confides, “you’re constantly trying to regenerate yourself. That’s why I do all these different things. Because I’m so frightened of getting stale or bored. You dread some sort of sterility.”

An Oscar nominee for “The Grifters” (1990), he has careened from the widely lauded “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985) and “Prick Up Your Ears” (1987) to the widely panned western “The Hi-Lo Country” (1998), from the critical and financial success of “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988) and last year’s “High Fidelity” to the creative disasters of Dustin Hoffman in “Hero” (1992) and Julia Roberts in “Mary Reilly” (1996).

With “Liam,” which he shot last year near Liverpool on a minuscule budget (“2 [million] or 3 million pounds,” he says, or $3.5 million to $4.5 million) with a cast made up largely of unknown actors, he returns to his roots as a director of small television dramas for the BBC. He persuaded the BBC to put up the money for “Liam” because, he says, “it seems to me that films like this ought to go on being made. It deserved to be made.” It was released theatrically by Lions Gate on Friday.

“Liam,” written by Jimmy McGovern (creator of the “Cracker” TV series and writer of the controversial movie “Priest”), is set in 1930s Liverpool. The title character is a 7-year-old boy (Anthony Borrows) studying for his first Communion in the midst of family upheaval: His father (Ian Hart) loses his job at the shipyards and blames the town’s Jews for his misfortunes; he joins the Black Shirts in a move that portends tragedy. The film contains moments of charm and humor, particularly the hellfire-and-damnation Catholicism classes that frighten little Liam, but it is also a vivid memoir of the Depression and the anti-Semitic madness that infected much of Europe in that era.

“The story got to me on a number of levels,” Frears says. “The childhood [scenes] reminded me in many ways of my own childhood, although I’m not working-class and I’m not Catholic. Dealing with the Jewish theme interested me, and the history of the rise of fascism made sense in a way that I’d never understood before.”

Frears’ mother was Jewish, a secret he didn’t discover until his late 20s. “That made me want to do it,” he concedes.

“Whatever curiosity was touched 30 years ago, it’s taken 30 years for me to get this far,” he says with a laugh. “Things go on underneath, inside you, don’t they?”

At about the same time that “Liam” came up, Frears was offered “Angela’s Ashes.” Similar in tone and milieu (poor 1930s family struggling to make ends meet in the wake of the father’s job loss in a story seen through the eyes of a child), the Frank McCourt best-seller seemed problematic as a movie to Frears, and he turned it down. “I couldn’t see the point of it,” he says. “It just seemed to me [about] a life of poverty. I mean, dead children, it was awful. I had the script of ‘Liam’ by then, and I preferred to stick to ‘Liam.’ It seemed richer and more interesting.”

Writer McGovern credits Frears for the fact that “Liam” exists as a film at all. Speaking by phone from London, he says, “The thing about Frears in this country is he’s huge. He’s got power and clout. I know it was because of his involvement that the bloody thing got made.”

Frears is unlike the many American directors who shoot for bigger and better, higher budgets and increasingly grand-scale projects.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to his choice of subject matter, and when asked about it, he laughs it off as “only like a child, doing what interests me. [It’s] a slightly Peter Pan-ish quality.”

In some ways, Frears is a throwback to the Hollywood tradition of the journeyman director. In conversation, he often mentions the names of some of the greats--notably John Ford, William Wyler and Howard Hawks--for their variety of output as much as specific films. “There’s a certain sense in which I’m a rather old-fashioned figure,” he says. “Ford used to make small films between big films.”

Frears says that he and Alan Parker, another fugitive from British television (and the director of “Angela’s Ashes”), used to talk about it. “Well, what do we do today?” “Let’s do a pirate movie.” “Oh, all right.” He goes on to explain: “You’d like to think of yourself as being capable of doing anything, really.” He believes that he “arrived too late” to adopt today’s concept of the film director as artist. “I don’t quite think of myself like that.”

Although he hasn’t done his pirate movie yet, he has tackled a surprising range of subject matter, with varying degrees of success. Frears’ views on them are unusually frank. For example:

The detective movie--”Gumshoe” (1971): “It’s a wonderful script. I didn’t know how to make films then.”

The social-consciousness film--”My Beautiful Laundrette”: “That changed everything for me. It sort of caused a revolution in England. Before that, films were about a kind of imperial past, and suddenly there was a film about what it was like to live in a multicultural Britain.”

The elegant period piece--”Dangerous Liaisons”: “I think it’s wonderful. I can’t believe I directed it. I’m just gobsmacked when I look at it.”

The contemporary noir thriller--”The Grifters”: “That was my first American film. Those three wonderful actors [Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening and John Cusack], it was really good fun.”

The seriocomic message movie--”Hero”: “It was so painful. It didn’t find an audience in America.”

The gothic romance--”Mary Reilly”: “I tried to make [the right] kind of film in the wrong place. If we’d made ‘Mary Reilly’ at the BBC, it would have been very, very good. But it was owned by a studio, and they were spending a lot of money [$47 million]. That kind of material deserved a different film. The two things were just completely contradictory. It just blew up.”

The modern western--”The Hi-Lo Country”: “A wonderful two years. I won’t hear a word against it.” To the suggestion that he could blame poor marketing, he replies: “Yes, but that’s sort of pitiful.”

The romantic comedy--”High Fidelity,” a popular British book whose setting Frears and star-producer Cusack shifted to Chicago): “Listen, in England, they were going to send me and [author] Nick Hornby to the Tower, it was such an act of treason. I had the same feeling until I read the script and realized that’s the least important part of it. It was very solidly based in people’s experiences.”

The live television drama--”Fail-Safe”: “The biggest adventure I’ve ever been on in my life. I kept saying, ‘Why don’t we record it two nights before and I’ll edit it? No one will ever know.’ People thought I was the devil.”

Frears’ collaborators describe him as demanding but committed to the material at hand. Writer McGovern likens him to the late John Cassavetes in creating naturalistic behavior. Says McGovern: “He’s the kind of guy who walks on set and says to the actors, ‘How do you want to do this?’ And the actors would come up with all sorts of ideas. He’d veto some, accept some and then turn around to the cameraman and say, ‘Can we accommodate this?’ He’d ask questions of the cameraman and accept some ideas and then he’d say, ‘Great. Let’s go.’ And that’s how he works on the whole shoot.”

McGovern was surprised by Frears’ fidelity to the script, which may also reflect the director’s TV background. “It’s word for word,” McGovern says, which is “par for the course in British TV but, in my small experience in film, that was most unusual.” McGovern bristled at some of the trims Frears subsequently made in the cutting room--”a handful of scenes he cut which hurt me”--but in the end says, “He made a film of that script and nothing else.”

Producer Colin McKeown liked the fact that Frears initially expressed reservations not about the material, but about his ability to handle it because he knew little about Catholicism. “I think he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to interpret the script correctly because it was laced with a lot of religious overtones, and particularly a religion he didn’t know anything about. His genuine fears and concerns,” McKeown says, made him an objective observer of the material.

However, he was “not an easy ride,” McKeown admits. Before every scene was a lengthy hashing-out process involving writer, producer and director in which “he would test his knowledge, our knowledge, about the scene, its connotations, what it meant, what significance it had in a religious sense, and we’d debate and debate.”

“And then he’d go and shoot it. Every nuance of everything that had to go on, he had to understand.”

Actually, Frears was able to draw on a bit of his past, albeit from a different perspective. He was born in 1941, and “the war was a great equalizing force in Britain,” he notes. “There was rationing, which meant that most people ate better. I was in the middle classes, so we ate worse. But I sat in a room in a big house, most of which was closed up because there was no heating, with my mother for some years, having baths around the fire. So I led a rather working-class life because there was such hardship after the war, such scarceness, such austerity.”

Frears was good with the numerous child actors, McKeown says, “in his own fuddy-duddy sort of way.” Frears’ rapport with 9-year-old Anthony Borrows, who plays Liam, was “an uneasy marriage. Frears isn’t in love with kids, and the kid was very sharp and bright and very questioning.

“But [Frears] was very, very patient,” McKeown reports. He shocked the crew by making Borrows cry at one point, but it was to “force a performance” out of him, says the producer. (Frears laughs and explains it this way: “We stood over him and shouted at him till he cooperated.”)

As to the vast difference in cost between, say, “High Fidelity” and “Liam,” Frears shrugs it off as inconsequential. “I’ve always found that not having a lot of money was a tremendous source of strength,” he says. “It forces you back onto your wits, your intelligence, your imagination and gives you a sort of defiance, which is very invigorating.

“If you make an American film that’s going to cost a lot of money, you apply those rules. You know that you have to do certain things and entertain a lot of people. And if you make a different kind of film, you just do it with different rules. It’s still just actors in front of a camera.” *