I like Stephen Frears. He’s a bloody hard interview, but a marvellous thinker. The 65-year-old director roams into the office in bare feet wearing dignity as lightly as his crumpled shirt. Frears claims he has no real appetite for satire or despair, yet in the past five years he’s made films riddled with both. His latest,
The Queen, is destined to be a box-office sensation. I don’t say that lightly. It’s a portrait of royal power that is as topical as
Desperate Housewives.
Helen Mirren, fresh from picking up an Emmy for playing Elizabeth I for Channel 4, now appears as Elizabeth II, frozen in indecision when the Princess of Wales smashes into a concrete pillar in a Paris subway on August 31, 1997. The Queen’s shocking failure to rise to this crisis is the alarming nub. The nervous saviour is Tony Blair (a dithery Michael Sheen), who uses his instincts, popularity, and spinners to avert a constitutional disaster. What on earth are the royals doing in Balmoral? Why the hell don’t they fly the flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace? It’s not easy to forget the sheer anger and pin-drop grief his newsreel images conjure. What’s strange is how pure those feelings still are. Peter Morgan’s brilliant script throws the three People’s Champions — Blair, Diana and the Queen — into the melting pot, and watches them squirm on the evening news. The fresh-faced Prime Minister feels honour-bound to interfere. The lack of an immediate royal response to the Princess’s death is treated with withering contempt by the guilty press. It’s an absorbing account of how wounds and history congeal; how the media turns its own sins into weapons; and how the dumbstruck royals must engage with a Government that is barely three months old.
Morgan is very much the scribe of the moment. His sizzling stage play, Frost/Nixon, about the famous public grilling of the President, has just opened at the Donmar Warehouse in London to rave reviews. He has cashed in on the way that time plays unusual tricks with memory, and that history is the plaything of perspective. I doubt either notion has ever kept Frears awake at night.
When you’re on a creative roll you don’t worry about logistics. The Queen feels like a natural sequel to The Deal, a restaurant cause célèbre that Morgan and Frears devised for television in 2004. So why the leap to the big screen, I wonder? “It’s the Queen!” says Frears sounding like Colonel Mustard. “You have to show a little respect.”
Personally, I’d marked Frears down as a die-hard republican after My Beautiful Laundrette (1984), and the string of Irish films he shot in the 1990s. But he has cultivated a career of unpredictable twists, and his politics have followed suit.
The spooky joy of his latest film is how closely the performances are modelled on the facts and lives of these breakfast-table characters. Mirren is a revelation as the Queen: a prim, mannered matron who wears her regrets like tea stains. The yards of television news footage spliced into the film make you wonder how much of the film is reportage, or cheeky speculation. Scenes of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in the bedroom are fascinating glue.
As is the director’s point blank refusal to cast anyone as the Princess of Wales. “The result is very peculiar,” admits Frears. “The film hinges on a conflict between one woman who is portrayed by an actress, and another woman — Diana — who is played by documentary footage. You might think that the pressure was to bring Diana alive, but quite the opposite happened. It would have snapped credibility.” The subtle stew is the way Frears blurs facts with fiction. His research, apparently, was forensic. Anyone who would leak was milked. But Frears insists he was always clear about where he drew the line. “I haven’t talked to any major character in the film,” he rumbles. “It could only have clouded matters. Once you feel you’re behaving responsibly, it’s all right.”
That said, Prince Philip gets royally stuffed, I argue. “An interesting point,” replies Frears. “But why do you think I cast (the American) James Cromwell as Prince Philip? If I had cast an English actor he would have been a clown. I thought of casting Geoffrey Palmer, or Bill Nighy, but the moment they walk on screen you know every pantomime tick.
“The real battle about the making of this film was avoiding parody. So I cast slightly against the grain. There has to be some licence to create an imaginary world. As a director you set up an instinctive set of rules. I took out a lot of shots because it seemed like they were “our” prejudices. When I filmed Helen Mirren (the Queen) crying from behind it seemed absolutely right. To swivel the camera on her face would have been intrusive. But I doubt I actually thought that through until the moment arrived.”
The compelling magic of the film is that it is both critical and sympathetic at the same time. There is a sweet nostalgia for the golden age of Labour landslides. There’s also a vertiginous memory of how close the royal firm were to polar isolation and total collapse. The small miracle is how these facts have been turned into meaningful fiction.
I wonder if Frears is a reluctant royalist. “The tragedy of the monarchy in Britain is that is so closely tied up with the class system,” he muses. “They are brought up in a ridiculous way. I’m in favour of a ‘bicycling monarchy’ like they have in Sweden and Holland, where the royal family behave like ordinary people.” I can almost see Norman St John Stevas throwing himself off a cliff in despair at the notion.
“Oddly enough I see Prince Charles as the most privileged and least privileged person in the land. He has been completely denied the ordinary things in life while at the same time he has been given anything he wanted. By the same token I always imagine the Queen was happiest being a motor mechanic in the Second World War. In a profound sense all they’ve ever wanted is anonymity and the right to live like other people.”
The Queen is arguably Frears’s most rigorous piece of populist film. There are unexpected angles and layers that surprise the director himself. “The Queen is someone who has been in my life far longer than anyone else. Longer than my children, my wife, or my brothers. So of course I’ve got complicated, unconscious feelings. Oh God, it’s deep stuff.”
The Queen is on general release from Sep 15
