Stephen Frears makes top-class films but the last thing he is inclined to take seriously is himself, writes Donald Clarke
Ooutraged apologists for British cinema will always trot out the names of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach when cornered by Frenchmen who equate cross-channel film-making with cross-channel cooking. They might go on to namecheck Terence Davies, or even Lynne Ramsay, but they will rarely mention Stephen Frears.
"Oh, I'm slightly vulgar," Frears laughs. "I went to America of course, that counts against me. But I can't say I lose any sleep over it. There's a great song Groucho Marx sings in Horse Feathers: I'm Against It. 'I've been yelling since I first commenced it, I'm against it!' That's me."
Part of the problem is that he does not have an obvious cinematic fingerprint. His British (and Irish) films have been characterised more by the voice of their writers: Hanif Kureishi's in the raw My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Alan Bennett's in the droll Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Roddy Doyle's in the, well, Doyleish The Snapper (1993).
The middle-class son of a Leicester doctor, Frears has yet to produce a film which emerges from his own world. If anything, his new picture wanders further from his suburban origins than before. As written by Steven Knight (the creator of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, bizarrely), Dirty Pretty Things is a propulsive thriller dealing with the trade in human organs among London's illegal immigrant community. Frears's work seems to have touched upon everything apart from middle-class England.
"It's not deliberate," he says. "But to me it's the most boring life in the world. I did everything to escape from it - why would I make a film about it? I don't know how to make a film set in my own back yard. I have found that the worlds I know nothing about appear in my best films, like Ireland or Pakistan, or France in the 18th century. I live a straightforward middle-class metropolitan life and I enjoy the educational experience of making those films."
The 61-year-old director still retains a mischievous edge to his voice. He gives the impression of someone who finds the universe slightly ludicrous and is daring you to prove otherwise. If one can find any common thread in his work it would be that dry English cynicism. It's a voice that was honed in a brilliant series of plays he directed for the BBC during the corporation's golden period for one-off drama in the mid-1970s. Didn't the partnership he formed at this point with Alan Bennett prove, contrary to his earlier protestations, that one can produce fine art out of boredom? All their plays, among them A Visit from Miss Protheroe and A Day Out, were small stories of small lives.
"Ah well, now forgive my English obsession with these nuances, but Alan was more working class than I was. So even then there was a certain displacement. But then Alan is different because he's a genius. Maybe I got that out of my system then."
After the success of My Beautiful Laundrette and Prick up Your Ears, Frears continued his investigations of new worlds in Hollywood. Dangerous Liaisons (1988) saw that brush with 18th century France; The Grifters (1990) was a magnificent slice of contemporary noir and Accidental Hero (1992) an uneasy media satire with Dustin Hoffman. But he kept coming back to make British films in between his jaunts to Los Angeles. One imagines he has less freedom on his American pictures.
"Well, freedom isn't the right word," he says. "I've never been badly treated by anybody. I can see that my own country must touch me in some way. I really don't know anything about America, but I do know about American movies. So those films are hidden in American movies. Making a film noir, it's an American genre, and that I know about. When I make English films I deal much more directly with English society."
So his American films are drawn from cinema while his British films are drawn more from life? "Yes. I have a wonderful time making the American films, but I can see that My Beautiful Laundrette or Dirty Pretty Things engage with society in a way those films don't. But Dirty Pretty Things, which I'm very pleased with, really shows the influence of working in America. It uses American popular forms."
In the film, Amélie's Audrey Tautou plays a Turkish immigrant, working as a cleaner in a London hotel, who is tempted to sell her kidney in exchange for a British passport and a new life in New York. Though dark and unsettling, Dirty Pretty Things drives its characters forwards with relentless energy, and never wallows in the misery they encounter along the way.
"What I like about it is that it's entertaining," he says. "It uses popular forms. It's a thriller. It's a horror story. It's a romance. When I got a star like Audrey into the film I was delighted. I want these people to be glamorised. And if I was a Turkish immigrant, I'd like to be played by Audrey Tautou. They want to be shown as funny, cheerful, sexy. They don't want to shown as being miserable all the time."
He goes on to agree that the subject matter could very easily have been dealt with in Ken Loach's grim, naturalistic style, but is insistent that he intends the film to have a more general appeal. "I want the whole world to see it," he says. The presence of Tautou, who delivers a performance of genuine weight, should help in that regard. Despite his claims that this is a genre picture, it certainly marks a change in direction for the actress after the Bambi-eyed sugar rush of Amélie.
"It was a very clever thing for her to do," he says. "One of the ways in which people like me survive is that we can sense when somebody wants to change and then offer them an opportunity. When I made My Beautiful Laundrette with Daniel [Day-Lewis], he finished with me and the next day he started on A Room With a View. I said to people, 'I didn't know Dan did stuff like that.' And they said, 'Oh no, that's what he normally does. You're the one who got him to do something different'. Well, nobody told me that. I was there at the point he wanted to do something different and the only credit I can really take is that I didn't stop him.
"The same is true of Audrey. She wanted to make a film in English; she wanted to get out of France. She's a comedienne, but she wanted to break something, to do something different, and I think she felt that I was a good person to help with that."
And he never felt concerned that he was casting a Frenchwoman in a Turkish role? That is the sort of thing pure-minded critics get a bit snitty about these days. "Well, when I was asked that in Istanbul, I was momentarily stumped," he says, descending into cackles. "Movie stars are international though, aren't they? They are a gift from God."
Tautou is just one member of a fine ensemble cast, which has, as Frears cheekily puts it, been "ethnically cleansed" of all white actors. "That made me laugh," he says. "I've never seen another English script where there were no white characters. Maybe we should have fought back a bit. We need Hugh Grant in this film."
Fine newcomer Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Tautou's African roommate, a doctor, now reduced to working as a taxi driver and night porter, who resists being lured into participating in the human organ sales business. Gripping as it is, one wonders just how true to life this side of the tale is.
"I was told of a Dublin lawyer today whose client disappeared for a few days, then came back and said he was in London donating a kidney. I mean you've got two of them, you get 1,500 quid for one of them, maybe it's a good deal." And he cackles again.
I think that his inability to take anything too seriously, something apparent in his films, might be why he is not treasured in the way that Leigh and Loach are. And certainly the last thing he is inclined to take seriously is himself.
"I grew up at a time where directors were anonymous people," he says. "They did what they were told and picked up an identity almost by default: people like Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock. So, to me, the intrusion of adirector's personality is something slightly vulgar. Why would anybody be interested in the director? It's the story that matters."
Dirty Pretty Things opened at cinemas yesterday