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 Stephen Frears, right, with Woody Harrelson, who stars in "The Hi-Lo Country." (Sidney Baldwin) |
It may be because the 57-year-old director has spent a career making unexpected choices, from the downscale British "My Beautiful Laundrette" to the period intrigue of "Dangerous Liaisons" and from the jolly Irish romp "The Snapper" to the caustic, witty thriller "The Grifters." His career veers between England and America, between huge budgets and minuscule ones, between historical pieces set in opulent mansions and contemporary love stories set in working-class row houses.
So for Frears, "The Hi-Lo Country," a classic tale of a cowboy making his own way on the American frontier after World War II, makes some sense. Still, don't expect him to give you much insight on this. When asked, Frears tends to offer considered observations such as this:
"Mmmmm. I read things. I like them." Pause. An assistant enters with tea. "Apparently I'm eclectic."
Frears is taking a break in a borrowed office in Beverly Hills between casting sessions for his next film, an adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel "High Fidelity." His hair is an unkempt brown mass, and his wrinkled trousers, un-ironed white shirt and sneakers give him the distracted air of a professor (which he is, part time, at London's National Film School).
"I really don't think about it, it's just the next film," he insists. "My life is a continued testament to the existence of God: I've been very lucky, and I've never planned it."
In many ways "The Hi-Lo Country" is a tribute to westerns of old. It tells the story of Big Boy, played by Woody Harrelson, an appealing, shoot-from-the-hip (literally) cowboy determined to do things his own way. Patricia Arquette plays his hot-blooded mistress who is married to a monied, boring rancher. She ends up making eyes at Harrelson's best friend, fellow cowboy and the story's narrator Pete played by Billy Crudup.
The story has been a couple of decades coming to the screen. It is based on a 1961 novel by Max Evans, who wrote about a real-life friendship. Sam Peckinpah, Charlton Heston and Slim Pickens were among the illustrious figures who tried and failed, for various reasons, to make the movie happen. Then a few years ago, director Martin Scorsese rediscovered the novel and decided to make it. But when the time came, he turned out to be too busy to direct and sent the screenplay by Walon Green, who co-wrote the classic "The Wild Bunch" to Frears.
Fresh off a tiny Irish comedy called "The Van," Frears was interested but knew virtually nothing about making westerns. Turns out, few people in Hollywood remembered either. The director immersed himself in the era, researching how and why westerns were made in the first place. Evans offered his own tips on authentic cowboyhood.
"I asked a lot of questions. I remember Max saying, 'Will they know how to hold the reins?' I said to myself, 'Blimey, this is much more serious than I thought,' " he recalls.
The western, Frears has concluded, has become an anachronism. "I would look at the actors and think, 'This scene was so long ago; the world has changed so much. The metaphor has been debased; the idea of the frontier has lost its power.' "
But, in fact, the metaphor still has much to convey, and Frears makes good use of the wide-open spaces, longing gazes and time-worn friendship featured in the film. The lyrical emptiness and moments of silence help re-create a time in which people communicated much differently than we do now.
"It's like learning a new language, and it's not a language that people are familiar with anymore," he says. "These people don't lie about on couches and say what they're feeling."
No, that would have been Frears's other films, like 1987's "Prick Up Your Ears," a black comedy about the murder of a nihilistic British playwright. Or perhaps "Dangerous Liaisons" in 1989, with the very dangerous John Malkovich seducing a virtuous Michelle Pfeiffer though in that film people lie about on couches and lie about their feelings.
Frears comes from Leicester in the English Midlands, the son of a physician father and social worker mother. The family's social conscience stayed with him during studies at Cambridge, where he earned a law degree but got sidetracked into student theater.
Moving to London in the swinging '60s, Frears got his first break as an assistant to Czech-born director Karel Reisz, who allowed his apprentice the chance to learn. For two decades Frears directed films for television and won a reputation for his quality work and interesting subject choices. He finally made the move to feature film in the 1980s, with a TV movie for the BBC that was released in theaters, "Bloody Kids," about two boys living out a violent fantasy.
But it was the debut of "My Beautiful Laundrette" in 1985 that finally got Frears noticed in America. The film takes on a volatile mix of racial, sexual, immigrant and class issues, portraying a gay relationship between a working-class Brit (Daniel Day-Lewis) and an Anglo-Pakistani immigrant (Gordon Warnecke). Frears continued to mine the working-class vein with anti-Thatcher films like "Prick Up Your Ears" and the provocative "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid."
Critics praised, among other qualities, Frears's spot-on sense of pacing, his unwillingness to belabor a cinematic point. In the '80s, critic Pauline Kael observed in the New Yorker that "Frears has refined a magical instinct for just how long we want to see a face and just how long a scene needs to be."
The director's first big-budget project for Hollywood was "Dangerous Liaisons." He followed with "The Grifters," a taut 1990 drama with Anjelica Huston and John Cusack, for which Frears was nominated for an Oscar.
The director has had a couple of high-profile failures, notably the poorly received "Hero" starring Dustin Hoffman in 1992 (they feuded on the set), and the expensive, dour "Mary Reilly" with Julia Roberts and, again, Malkovich. He then returned to England to direct two low-budget productions, "The Snapper" and, last year, "The Van."
Generally, the director tries to avoid working with actors repeatedly. "I'm not good at that," he says. "I don't separate the actor from the part. I just think of them as the character, and I find I'm always faintly astonished to find that they're not the character." He remembers being "offended" on coming across Day-Lewis with dark hair, rather than the bleached blond of the actor in "Laundrette."
But his tendency to vary actors is not unlike his attraction to widely diverse material. Frears is nothing if not inconsistent. Still, there is an important thread that ties together his seemingly unrelated subjects.
In each film Frears seeks to bring to the screen a complete universe, an image of community and family seen from a new angle, whether it's the world of con artists or French aristocrats. "Hi-Lo Country" evokes another world, an era and an ethos.
"I would argue that one does the same film all the time," says the director. "I like films about complete societies, complete worlds, even if I don't look for them."
All of this comes to the director only through occasional reflection, since he does not go back to look at his previous work. Why not? He sips his tea, and suddenly there is a hint at what goes on beneath the low-key exterior:
"All you ever do is wonder if someday you'll lose your talent. That's what I lie in bed and worry about," he says. "I might look at something and say, 'God, I can't do that anymore.' "
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