Extra virtue

6:03pm Thursday 6th November 2008

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Steve Pratt talks to director Stephan Elliott about directing a re-make of Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue, which dragged him back from retirement.

AS director Stephan Elliott tells it, a decade ago he gave up the movie business, retired to the French Alps and promptly skiied off a cliff.

He broke his back, pelvis and legs, but defied the odds and the doctors who said he wasn’t going to live.

During his time in a hospital bed, he took to his computer and had his first crack at Easy Virtue and an adaptation of his 1994 hit movie, The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, for the stage.

Easy Virtue arrives on screen slightly ahead of the London opening in March of Priscilla, already a big hit in his native Australia.

This British-made movie adaptation of Noel Coward’s play marks a comeback for a director who first found a degree of fame directing Phil Collins in the thriller Frauds and whose films post-Priscilla – Welcome To Woop Woop and Eye Of The Beholder – proved duds.

Elliott seems unperturbed by all this history. “So, what’s the verdict?,” he asks after one of the first screenings of Easy Virtue. If he really wants to know he can read the review on Page 11, but let’s just say here that the film is a lot of fluffy fun as American Jessica Biel is brought home by her new husband (Ben Barnes) to meet the family, including his icy mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and war traumatised father (Colin Firth).

Part of the fascination of the project were the two Masters – Coward, known as The Master for his witty plays, and Alfred Hitchcock, The Master of Suspense who filmed Easy Virtue as a silent movie in 1924.

“The original Hitchcock film was just bloody awful,” he says with typical frankness, adding that he kept imagining how Hitchcock would have filmed the same material later in his career.

Little of Coward’s original remains in the film adaptation (which he co-wrote with Sheridan Jobbins). “I’ve actually had a couple of criticisms from people who’ve read the play and say that it’s so vastly different.

But there are no laws to this and I think Coward would have approved totally.

“They don’t have to be museum pieces any more. So we took the characters, the arcs of the story and some of the best lines and beyond that everything else became very Cowardesque.”

He sees giving up making movies as the right decision for him at the time. “I’d made two bad movies and in the last one, basically, the financiers took off with the money in the middle of the film and I lost everything – my house, the lot,” he recalls.

“At the end of that I said I wasn’t going to work again.

Then I broke my back in a skiing accident. It took me four or five years to learn to walk again and in that period I found my mojo back.

“It was a good decade off, a lot of time to retrospect and the perfect way to turn 40 – which is on morphine. I don’t remember any of my midlife crisis, apparently I was spectacular.”

Making Easy Virtue wasn’t without hiccups. He’d just bought a house in Barcelona and was planning on permanently retiring. He got to the airport and his phone rang, it was the producer telling him they’d got the money and shooting began in six weeks.

“It was a big decision – do we do it or not? I thought I’d give it one last shot. Because of that we had no prep time, no rehearsal.

The first day I just turned the camera on. It was a bit scary, I just let them roll and there’s an energy that comes out of that because you don’t quite know which way it’s going to go.”

The film set his actors challenges too. After singing in Mamma Mia, Colin Firth had to dance the tango in Easy Virtue.

“Mamma Mia almost killed him.

He talked about it and when the day came, he couldn’t sing. We got to the dance too and he said ‘I can’t dance’. There was an amazing moment on like take three when he kicked in. It’s like crossing the fear barrier. He just let go. It’s there, you can see him do it.”

Casting American Jessica Biel, more noted perhaps for her looks than her acting ability, was a risk but one that pays off richly.

He calls it thinking outside the box, as he did when he asked Terence Stamp to play an overthe- hill transvestite in Priscilla.

He says: “She’s very smart, doesn’t say anything and Kristin had a lot of problems with that.

Kristin came flying on to the set and Jessica didn’t give an inch.

The two were like cats circling each other.

“It was ‘do you want to befriend each other?’ It was better not to because of their roles. They didn’t cross the line at any point during the shoot, they just circled each other and you can see it on screen.”

The question that needs to be addressed now is whether Elliott is planning to retire from movies again? “I don’t know,” he replies.

“I’m going to do the stage show in London and that could be it. That’s the thing I learned about going through a major accident is that life is really short. I’ve never done an American film. Every time I’ve attempted one, I’ve quit. I might give that a go and not quit this time.”

■ Easy Virtue (PG) opens in cinemas tomorrow