You can't pin down Stephen Frears's films. Though the English director of, among many others, The Queen, Dangerous Liaisons and High Fidelity works nearly non-stop, he's never developed a specific signature. You couldn't wander into one of his movies halfway through and know immediately who made it, the way you could recognize, for example, Woody Allen's realistic interiors and rat-a-tat chatter, or Martin Scorsese's fevered elegance, or David Fincher's ability to make painterly images kinetic.
Frears, 69, has chosen the opposite path. His movies differ from one another in every way: tone, style, subject matter. "It's the only way I can keep myself awake," he said a couple of weeks ago during the Toronto International Film Festival, where his latest, the gentle pastoral comedy Tamara Drewe, had its premiere. (It opens Friday in select cities.) So perhaps it's not surprising that in the several interviews I've conducted with him over the years, Frears himself has proven harder and harder to pin down. But more on that in a minute.
In the mid-1980s, when his work started to make a splash on our side of the Atlantic, it seemed that Frears was establishing himself as the chronicler of gritty London: My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid were all similar - intimate, nervy and bleak. Then the curve balls started: He made an L.A. noir (1990's The Grifters, which earned his first best-director Oscar nomination), and remade a relic of the Cold War, Fail Safe, starring George Clooney and Richard Dreyfuss, which was presented live on TV - in black and white - in 2000. He followed a film about London's poorest and most desperate ( Dirty Pretty Things, 2002) with a cheery, Blitz-era bonbon ( Mrs. Henderson Presents, 2005).
Frears then made The Queen, his most lauded picture - it won a BAFTA Award for best film, a best-actress Oscar for Helen Mirren and five other Oscar nominations, including his second for best director. But his next, 2009's Chéri, sank like a stone, despite the fact that he'd reassembled the team who'd made Dangerous Liaisons such a smash, including writer Christopher Hampton and star Michelle Pfeiffer, playing a courtesan in Belle Époque Paris.
"I had such a great time working with Stephen on Dangerous Liaisons, I would have done the phone book with him," Pfeiffer told me when Chéri came out. He'd approached her in a typically eccentric way: He called the hairdresser she was working with on another film. "That's Stephen," Pfeiffer said. "He couldn't just call my agent, he had to track me down in the makeup chair."The more I've spoken to Frears, the less communicative he's been - less willing to talk about himself, or even talk up his films. During our recent TIFF interview, he was almost hilariously casual. His hair was uncombed, his untucked shirt was stained with what looked like an entire Starbucks venti, and he couldn't muster a single anecdote about Tamara Drewe.
"It made me laugh," he said. "If I was an ordinary human being, this is what I'd like to see. Why would you not make it? What more do you want?"
Well, perhaps a bit more (though I did love that "if"). Over the next 15 minutes, I prodded him relentlessly, and he responded with crumbs of information: The seven-week shoot took place in the most beautiful part of Dorset, which is the most beautiful part of England, "and the weather decided to be good." He'd been able to cast Gemma Arterton as his title character before she'd become famous in the United States, and "she's got a very nice character. I wish she was my daughter." He was especially drawn to the sub-plot of the film, a writers' retreat peopled with eccentrics, because "I've spent a lot of my life with writers, so it's effortless to make fun of them. I don't think filmmakers are any better. We're ridiculous people. If I'm making a film, I drive my wife mad. If I'm not, it's even worse."
He was a tad more responsive to questions about the state of filmmaking in general, decrying the U.S. studios' relentless focus on big-budget special effects movies. "The economics have gone up a blind alley, but you can see they're absolutely impotent in the face of them," Frears said. "You end up competing with films like Avatar that cost over $200-million, and my budget is not a 10th of that." He was cheeky enough to add, "However, what we have on our side is wit and intelligence, those sorts of qualities."
Frears was once offered a Harry Potter film, but turned it down: "I said I could easily put an end to a very successful franchise. Mainly because I would go out of my mind sitting there every day waiting for special effects to be rigged. As you get older you sort of accept your limitations. Which means I'm continually rolling the stone up the hill."
Afterward, as I thought about how Frears had sat calm as a Buddha while I twisted myself into a sweaty pretzel, trying to make him talk, I finally realized where he was coming from: He has been working for so long, and has made every kind of movie there is. Some hit it big, others waft away unnoticed, for no discernible reason. Perhaps he's stopped trying to sell himself because he knows it won't make a difference: People will respond to Tamara Drewe or not. He'll never know exactly why.
All Frears knows is, he liked making it. "It was a completely enchanted bit of my life," he said. "Some are blessed, others aren't. There's no logic to it."
And soon enough, he'll make something else.
Johanna Schneller