John Maybury, director of disturbing shorts and cutting-edge pop videos, hits the big time with his second features, a psychological weirdie starring Adrien Brody. Maybury's gone Hollywood, he admits to Donald Clarke, but in his own peculiarly deranged way.
IN Shepperton Babylon, an entertaining new rummage around British cinema's darker corners, author Mathew Sweet describes a confrontation between Richard Curtis, the sultan of cosy romantic comedy, and avant-garde dandy John Maybury. "It is people like you who are ruining British cinema for people like me," Maybury, the director of the celebrated Francis Bacon portrait, Love Is the Devil, is purported to have barked at the Four Weddings man.
"I wish that story was apocryphal, but it isn't," Maybury says. "It was at a Robbie Williams concert and I was a bit drunk. Richard is a lovely man and it was meant in jest. Fuck it! He is laughing all the way to the bank. What does he care?"
Anybody who witnessed Maybury's appearance at the Savoy cinema on the last night of this year's Jameson Dublin International Film Festival will recognise the man described in Sweet's anecdote. Ambling louchely onto stage, scarlet lining spilling out of his pockets, the director, whose bizarre thriller The Jacket had just been screened as the festival's surprise film, appeared unwilling or unable to control what was coming out of his mouth. "What is that writing on the back of the seats on Aer Lingus planes?" he rambled.
The next day, lounging in the Clarence Hotel, he appears notably more together, though no less indiscreet. "I fucking hate British cinema. I hate the whole lie about it," he says, still musing on his disagreement with Curtis. "I like Richard, but there was a grain of truth in what I said. I find it so offensive, for example, that you can make a film called Notting Hill with no black people in it."
Maybury, a former punk who was once part of Derek Jarman's inner circle, celebrates the bits of England that Curtis's films tend to tidy away. Though his new picture, in which a veteran of the first Gulf War travels through time while under sedation, is produced by Stephen Soderbergh and stars Keira Knightley and Adrien Brody, the director still looks and talks like an awkwardly radical outsider.
Born in 1958 to working-class parents of Jewish and Irish descent, Maybury reluctantly attributes his artistic awakening to a strict Catholic education.
"I was educated by the Jesuits at St Ignatius of Loyola College, which interestingly is the school that Alfred Hitchcock went to. And then I was fucked by a Jesuit when I was 14 and that turned me into a queer. It gave me this sensibility that my other brothers didn't have. And I am very grateful."
He must be aware that many in the gay community are uncomfortable with the idea that one such event can define a person's sexuality.
"Well, maybe I was born a poof. Maybe I was born with that genetic structure," he shrugs. "All I know is that at 14 all my belief systems totally changed. Give me a boy at the age of seven and I will give you the man, the Jesuits say. They didn't quite mean it this way, I suppose. But you suddenly realised: here are these people preaching all that dogma and they are trying to fuck you up the arse. It really made you question everything.
"I was lucky because that coincided with Ziggy Stardust and, as a result, I thought being a poof was the most glamorous thing in the world to be."
While dallying in art college, Maybury drifted into the burgeoning punk scene. Every hip Londoner who was 19 in 1977 claims to have hung out with the Sex Pistols. Maybury is no exception.
"I was at school with Kenny Morris, who was in Siouxsie and the Banshees. And the reason I became a film-maker was that I went to see the Pistols at the Screen on the Hill. The Slits and The Buzzcocks were playing and, in between each band, they played Kenneth Anger's Magic Lantern cycle. That really inspired me to make experimental films."
Anger, the director of insidious, whacked-out films such as Scorpio Rising and Invocations of My Demon Brother, became a major influence on the experimental work Maybury created throughout the 1980s. But his prime magus in these early years was Derek Jarman, who first employed Maybury as a production designer on the chaotic 1977 punk fantasy Jubilee: "Derek, who I think of as a warlock or a malevolent aunt, picked me up at a punk gig. He wanted someone to do punk costumes and I seemed like the real thing."
Maybury's weird shorts - cheery beasts such as Pagan Idolatry and Tortures That Laugh - slowly built up a significant following among critics. In different times, Maybury, toasted in visual arts circles rather than on Wardour Street, could have looked forward to a career propping up the Colony Club bar in between trips to the labour exchange. But this was the 1980s and something odd was happening: the pop-video revolution had turned the short film into a commercial entity.
Maybury's first music promo, a lovely pastiche of Blue Note record covers, was for Everything But the Girl's Each and Every One. Highly praised work with Boy George, Neneh Cherry and The Smiths followed. But the strip of tape for which he is best known remains the famously blubby video for Sinéad O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U. (The handwriting on the sleeve of O'Connor's LP I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is Maybury's.)
"We filmed all this stuff of her zooming round Paris on a moped like Françoise Hardy that we never used. All anybody remembers is that famous shot," he laughs. "Sinéad was big on college radio in America at the time and big in Holland, but I still don't think the record company thought anything was going to happen. Then, after the video, she was No 1 in 35 countries before she stepped on a plane to promote it. I think she still blames me for that. She was a brilliant singer-songwriter and she was never supposed to be a pop singer."
Blames him? That's a peculiar thing to say.
"I think Neneh Cherry blames me for her success as well. Buffalo Stance went to No 1 in America, and when we were doing the follow up I said: 'Hey, you're the black Madonna.' And she gave me this fuck-you look."
Though the music industry moguls hated him - "I was too arty and pretentious for them. Fortunately the artists were my friends" - Maybury's pop video work gained him a degree of mainstream credibility. Nonetheless, it was not until 1998 that his first feature, Love Is the Devil, made it to the screen. Featuring Derek Jacobi as Bacon and Daniel Craig as his muse, George Dyer, the film was infused with the sordid power of the artist's grim work. Considering that Bacon's estate denied Maybury the right to show any paintings, the director's achievement was all the more significant.
"I got this call from Steven Soderbergh and he said, 'I have seen Love Is the Devil and I think it is one of the best films of the last decade. Come and make a film with us.' And I thought this must be one of my mates having a laugh. Who the hell?"
Maybury was hired to make The Jacket for Section 8, the production company set up by Soderbergh and George Clooney. "Their idea is to share their success with people like me - people on the fringes - and to give us access to movie stars and budgets, but also to protect us from those things."
So, was he protected? "No. Well, yes and no. I shared final cut with Soderbergh, which is unprecedented. And that meant I had final cut myself essentially. But we were working with Warner Bros, which is a big fucking machine."
The Jacket, which works as often as it doesn't, sees Adrien Brody, a prisoner of mad scientist Kris Kristofferson, being transported forward in time to fall in love with a stringy, convincingly American Keira Knightley.
"It was the first script I was sent from America that I didn't fling across the room. In fact I read it from cover to cover. I then changed everything about it. It was originally a $60 million Colin Farrell Vietnam movie to be directed by Antoine Fuqua."
It's still a reasonably commercial enterprise,though.
"I know you think it is a load of Hollywood nonsense," he says amiably. "But it is in fact loosely based a true story that became a Jack London story. I am proud of it because I have made a film that, as well as having a serious side, will appeal to internet geeks. I mean, Keira Knightley gets her tits out in it."
Maybury is so delightfully off-message, one feels that it will require only the slightest prodding to get him to say something actionable. I had heard that during an audition he told Knightley he simply wasn't interested in hiring her.
"I just told her the truth: 'I have met so many great American actresses, the last thing I want is some Roedean-educated, jolly-hockey-sticks kid.' She was brilliant. She said: 'If I don't do your film I will be stuck doing stuff in corsets forever.' She had prepared some scenes and she had a really good American accent. She is smart. She is 18 going on 50, that girl."
Happily, despite his big mouth, Maybury is still in demand. Hollywood being the strange land it is, he has had meetings about directing X-Men 3 and the film version of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. He turned both down.
"But what I really want to do is a film of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I am looking at two scripts of that right now. But, though I have done all this dark stuff in my time, I would really like to be Sam Raimi for a spell. In fact, what I would really like to do is a romantic comedy."
Really? Richard Curtis will be delighted.
"Something like Loathe Actually perhaps."
