Triple player is calling the shots

On a temperamental morning at the Epsom Downs Racecourse 20 miles south of London, Stephen Fry stands wrapped in all-weather gear.

The actor, novelist, screenwriter and first-time director is shooting a windblown picnic scene from “Bright Young Things,” his adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 satirical novel “Vile Bodies.” The ensemble cast includes newcomers Emily Mortimer (“Lovely & Amazing”) and Stephen Campbell Moore, with cameos from a distinguished roster including Dan Aykroyd, Jim Broadbent and Stockard Channing.

Clutching a hand-held monitor, Fry roams in the lush, wet, lumpy, green grass a few feet away from his preened and powdered actors, gathered around the toppled ruins of a tented table laden with crystal and silver. Much of the set has blown down and been resurrected on this morning; the wind is so loud and insistent that Fry instructs Michael Sheen -- playing the camp dandy, Miles -- to mention it in his dialogue (“It’s cold and windy and I’m bored,” he’ll say).

Fry says that it’s rather convenient having the writer permanently on set. “Most of the time you have to phone the writer,” he says, “and then you always get his voice mail. And then they refuse to change the line.”

He shouts “Action!” not from a director’s perch but from a few feet away with his feet half stuck in the mud, dissolving the usually sacred zone that divides the director from the directed.

“This handy little thing allows me to be near the action and yet see it,” says the sad-eyed, congenial Fry between takes in his familiar, animated voice, showing off his portable monitor and bouncing from left to right to fight the chill. “As an actor, I hate when the directors are miles away in their own little area.”

In person, actors do not always live up to their on-screen charm, and people often seem smaller than they do in movies. Not so with Fry, a London native, who at 6 feet 4 towers over everyone and whose bright mind and sharp wit are as in evidence in the flesh as they are in his film roles or frequent radio appearances on the BBC. When Fry’s costars gush about him, and gush they do, you believe them.

The movie’s producers persuaded Fry to write a screenplay about Adam (Campbell Moore), a young aspiring writer in love with Nina (Mortimer), the two most grounded members of a much-photographed clique of bored, reckless, gender-bending friends in the era of irresponsibility in London between wars. Waugh wrote the book in 1928-29. He set it “sometime in the future, when things are much as they are now,” and ended it with a world war that we now know was a decade away. All of which seemed a little eerie on a November morning in 2002 when the movie was being shot.

Fry agreed to take the writing job but says he was surprised when the producers asked him to direct. “I didn’t sleep for a night or two wondering how I would cope with the two great unknowns for directing as far as I was concerned,” he says in his trailer. “I kind of knew what a director does on the floor. But I had no experience of what a director does in preproduction or postproduction. I wasn’t sure if I’d be bored or horrified by the endless meetings and questions that go on in the beginning, or whether I would have the concentration later for sitting endlessly in unlighted rooms watching the same action again and again and again and again.”

In the end he decided, “What’s the use of getting an opportunity like this and then turning it down? I could never face myself for being such a coward. I can’t pretend it was the long-term ambition, but I suppose if I was fondly looking into the future -- which I rarely do, either fondly or at all -- I might have pictured myself writing the odd screenplay here or there and then maybe directing one.”

Peaceful coexistence

Of course, taking on the revered Evelyn Waugh was not the most timid of directorial debuts, even for a man who wrote an article for London’s Sunday Telegraph titled “Why I Don’t Like Evelyn Waugh” (more on that later).

“I sort of decided in my head that while I’m making the film, it isn’t Waugh,” Fry says. “It’s this film called ‘Bright Young Things’ and is to all intents and purposes an original screenplay, by which I don’t pretend to have invented the characters or the plot.” Changing the title, he says, “just takes the curse off the feeling that you are re-creating something literary. It allows you to believe that you’re making your own film.” Fry points out Waugh had planned to call the novel “Bright Young Things,” deciding against it when the phrase became a tabloid cliche of the era.

“You read the book and read the book and read the book and do an adaptation, and then you have to sort of turn your back on the book,” Fry continues. “Even a really good and successful adaptation of a book doesn’t make a book disappear. The film ‘Sense and Sensibility’ has loomed larger than the novel in recent years, but as time passes the two will coexist in exactly the way they should. And in the case of less successful literary adaptation -- and there’s no point in naming names -- the book is in no way insulted.”

Most of the British cast had read “Vile Bodies” in school. Mortimer, 32, who calls Waugh one of her favorite writers, says that her character provided her with an opportunity to ask the question actors often ask themselves: “How does one manage to stay in a sincere relationship in amongst all this sort of nonsense.”

Many of the actors make a point of mentioning that it’s reassuring being directed by a much-admired and accomplished peer. “I think Stephen trusts actors,” says Campbell Moore, 25, who plays Adam. Fenella Woolgar, who plays the pretentious, slowly self-destructing Agatha, says that Fry’s calm, supportive demeanor makes it impossible to get too nervous.

“He knows the script back to front, but he’s not particularly precious about anything, so that when the director part of him needs the script to change for a certain reason, there’s no problem,” says Sheen, who met Fry on the set of “Wilde.” “And as an actor he completely understands what we’re all sort of going through and what we need and what sort of helps.”

Broadbent met Fry some 15 years ago while working on Fry’s radio program, “Saturday Night Fry.” He’s dressed in the clothes of the drunken major for an upcoming scene, and an alcoholic rosiness has been applied to his nose and cheeks by the makeup department. “He has such a wonderful natural authority,” Broadbent says. “He’s written it, and he knows the world -- and what he didn’t know about the world before he started writing it, he knows now. He’s pretty much a character out of Waugh in his own way.”

Later, as Broadbent performs a wordless scene in which he understatedly plays up the hilarity of bumbling intoxication while getting caught amid a marching band, Fry cracks up silently, the top half of his tall frame bopping up and down at sharp 45-degree angles.

A pace apart

Filmmakers attempting period films are always ready with the pitch about why their period film is not as period as the others. Says Fry: “So often when you say ‘period film,’ everything is slowed down. I was interested in the idea of a period film that was fast and jerky and broken up. Not in a gimmicky way just to make it look modern -- but that reflected the fractured, anxious mood of its age. This is not E.M. Forster. These people don’t move with languor and elegance. They take drugs and they drink too much and they crash cars and they end up killing themselves and crashing and burning. Except our hero and heroine.”

It is no surprise to readers of Waugh’s book that many of the Bright Young Things burn out like so many stars. But if the book ends in personal wreckage and the shadow of a world war, it also leaves Adam and Nina the option of choosing a slower -- but not necessarily less perilous -- road. Says Fry: “Love has always been a far more dangerous and terrifying and embarrassing public humiliation than sex.”

Getting back to the matter of his provocatively titled newspaper essay, Fry says: “I admire Waugh enormously as a writer. He makes me laugh; I think his dialogue is exquisite and almost unmatched by 20th century writers. But I don’t like his universe; I don’t like its indeterminate cruelty, its lack of connection between dessert and punishment.”

Nevertheless, Fry says that Waugh’s “brazenly modern, shocking” world view is part of what attracted him to the project. “We’re brought up to believe that fiction delivers a kind of moral equation whereby the destiny of characters is determined by their moral choices,” he says. “Fiction comforts us because we know that in real life very often extremely rich, greedy people die happily in their beds at age 90 sleeping peacefully away at night, and that people with great decency and joy are run over by buses and tortured by brain cancer when they’re age 20. Waugh provides these mixes of coincidence and cruelty and casual fate in ways that we’re not used to in fiction.”