Director Stephen Frears: ‘Hollywood was like making films in a circus. But I got back alive’

When I ask Stephen Frears how he is, he stares at me as if the answer is obvious. “I’m old,” he says. This is true, relatively speaking. The British director is 81, seasoned enough to have lived through many golden ages of television and multiple deaths of cinema. Age has not mellowed him, to put it mildly. “I’m sure as I’ve got older, I’ve got more unpleasant and less deferential,” he says later, speaking at the FT Weekend Festival in London.

Frears much enjoys playing the grand curmudgeon. Even the public politesse directors usually adopt when speaking about each other’s work is not a given. Christopher Nolan’s wartime epic Dunkirk was, he says, “very loud”. He once saw a James Cameron film. “Was it called Avatar?” It was. “That was jolly boring.”

His onstage appearances can be memorable. I first met Frears years ago at a prize-giving for schoolchildren interested in film-making. Introduced with reference to his Oscar nominations for The Grifters (1990) and The Queen (2006), 200 young faces gazed up at him, awaiting the wisdom of the great director. Frears squinted back. “Stay out of prison,” he offered.

The peevishness is also mostly a knowing comic turn. Today, he quotes Billy Wilder, who once told an earnest interviewer: “This is all very kind of you — but I think you’re mistaking me for somebody serious.” 

While he has never been a diplomat, Frears still long ago became an elder statesman of British cinema. “You’re only allowed to make a film in this country now if it’s about the royal family,” he says. For him too a late-career niche has opened up in faintly subversive movies about or adjacent to exactly that subject. Witness his new film, The Lost King, retelling the 2012 true story of amateur historian Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), who helps find the remains of Richard III under a car park in Leicester.

Frears says he saw and promptly forgot the original news story. A decade on, it underpins what feels a very Stephen Frears kind of movie: a wryly sympathetic study of a determined eccentric, with a subtle lesson about England’s inner workings.

His own line of royal descent stretches back not only to The Queen, but to Victoria & Abdul, Frears’s 2017 study of the friendship between the British monarch and her attendant Abdul Karim. Another director his age might have spent the years since recovering their energies. Frears has used it to make a striking amount of high-end TV, including Quiz, which dramatised the exposé of cheating on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, and A Very English Scandal, about the trials of 1970s Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe (Hugh Grant).

Long before streaming, Frears was a multi-platform operation, shuttling at will between film and TV. The competing fortunes of the forms interest him only in that he has to know how best to keep working the way he prefers: agreeing to direct a pre-existing script from a writer he rates, about a subject that happens to engage him, a category that might include nuclear brinkmanship (Fail Safe), sexual intrigue in pre-revolutionary France (Dangerous Liaisons), or the downfall of Lance Armstrong (The Program). “You need to know who’s got money,” he says.

Frears admits he doesn’t go to the movies as much as he once did. But his loyalties are not hard to gauge. Does he have Netflix? He does not. “But I was in Vienna the other night, and we screened The Third Man.” (The picture is nuanced only a little by Frears being in the Austrian capital to shoot The Palace, a new TV drama about a fictional European dictatorship, starring Kate Winslet and being made for HBO.)

Frears is too much his own man to be anybody’s creature, but a relationship with the BBC has endured from professional beginnings in the 1960s to the broadcast of yet another recent project, the comedy State of the Union. Political debate about the corporation’s future has, as he says, been around as long as he has. Now, however, he does sense higher stakes. “I can see this government will take away the licence fee. And that does seem particularly stupid.”

His eye for a story has long doubled as an ear to the ground. The 1985 landmark film My Beautiful Laundrette dealt with the gay relationship between a young Pakistani entrepreneur (Gordon Warnecke) and a rascally white punk (Daniel Day-Lewis in his breakthrough role). It caught something of the Thatcher years and prefaced more recent conversations about race and sexuality. A generation on in 2002, Dirty Pretty Things spoke to the new international flavour of London and its satellites. “I remember standing on a train platform at Beaconsfield [the prosperous Home Counties market town] and hearing Russian being spoken. And I thought, ‘Hmm, why are there Russians in Beaconsfield?’”

He had just returned to the UK after more than a decade working in the US. Hollywood was like “making films in a circus. But I got back alive”. His career shifted register with another return: to TV. The Deal, written by Peter Morgan, related the infamous pre-electoral victory pact between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but went out with the pair still prime minister and chancellor. Westminster was abuzz.

Frears and Morgan set even more cats among pigeons with The Queen, fact and fiction blurred behind palace walls. Now, such stolen glimpses of the heart of British power are commonplace: Morgan turned The Queen into The Crown; Kenneth Branagh has just starred as Boris Johnson in Sky’s This England. “And it’s all my fault,” Frears says. “I was wondering when you were going to mention that.”

Non-fiction (or something like it) has made a neat fit for a film-maker whose trademark has always been the clear presentation of the story at hand. The idea of the director as visionary auteur tickles him. The truth, he says, is closer to a manager of other talents. “Once you’re on the floor, the cameraman is very good, the designer is very good.” He leaves a perfect comic pause. “Although, of course, I do do everything.”

He even likes to keep writers on-set, which is anathema to most directors. The Lost King reunites him with writers Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, with whom he made 2013’s Philomena. As in that film, Coogan co-stars, playing the estranged husband of Hawkins’ Langley. She in turn joins Judi Dench’s tragicomic Philomena Lee and Meryl Streep’s amateur soprano Florence Foster Jenkins in Frears’ catalogue of singular women. He dismisses talk of feminism. They’re just good stories, he says. Still shorter shrift is given to the idea that The Lost King might represent a homecoming, despite Frears having himself grown up in Leicester.

“Sentimental rubbish,” he says. Most of the filming, he gleefully explains, took place in Edinburgh. Yet not quite all. There was also a brief shoot in the Midlands. And in the process, yes, he finally concedes, a small personal pilgrimage. “I did go back and see the home I was born in.”

The softer centre appears too when I tell him young film lovers are rediscovering his work, My Beautiful Laundrette not least among it. At the time, he says, he only knew the film had promise. “It is extraordinary that people talk about it 40 years later.” And he beams out at his audience, still happy to help keep the next generation out of prison.

In UK cinemas from October 7

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter