Stephan Elliott--The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Stephan Elliott


STEPHAN ELLIOTT FINDS PLEASURE IN EASY VIRTUE OR…HOW I BROKE MYSELF IN HALF ON A SKI SLOPE, ADAPTED A PLAY BY NOEL COWARD, AND LIVED TO TELL ALL!
By
Alex Simon

“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” –Noel Coward

Most show business success stories follow a familiar paradigm: 1) Misunderstood artist struggles for years to gain recognition, to little or no avail. 2) Artist is on the verge of starvation/eviction/complete mental breakdown when he/she is suddenly discovered by famous director/actor/producer/agent. 3) Artist is universally hailed as a genius and “overnight success.” 4) Artist/star lives happily ever after, with a few bumps (and tabloid headlines) along the way. Fade out. Now, let’s consider the story of Aussie director Stephan Elliott…

Born August 27, 1964 in Sydney, young Stephan found his calling early, looking at the world through the viewfinder of his Super 8 camera, which graduated to video with the invention of the Betacam. It was 13 year-old Stephan who single-handedly invented the wedding video industry Down Under, and from age 13 to 18, Elliott estimates he shot over 900 weddings. Most of the final product was, in his words, “bloody awful, but I learned a lot.”

After high school, Elliott applied for a film editing course at the prestigious Sydney Tech. There were 2000 applicants for 12 spots. In spite of his impressive reel, all applicants were required to pass standardized math and English exams at the top level. Knowing that his dyslexia would shatter any chance of his being accepted, Elliott convinced his best friend, a top scholar in both math and English, to sign up with him, and swap names during the exam. Elliott scored an impressive 95%, while his friend was oddly at the bottom of the ladder with a 27%. Elliott was accepted, although he admits sheepishly “It didn’t take them long to figure out that I’d cheated.”
Elliott spent the next decade working on dozens of Australian films, most of which were unfortunate efforts that he says taught him “how NOT to make movies.” During a holiday in New Zealand, Elliott penned his first screenplay, Frauds, which was, through luck and serendipity, read by wine entrepreneur/film producer Penfold Russell, who had just launched his producing shingle, Latent Image. In spite of a grueling shoot (the financiers just went into liquidation as the cameras started to roll), Frauds was accepted for competition in the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Stephan Elliott was on his way.

While at Cannes, Latent Image producer (and wife of fellow producer Al Clark) Andrena Finlay asked Elliott if he had any low budget ideas she could pitch at the fest. Having just seen a Mardi Gras parade where a drag queen’s feather broke off her head dress, causing major drama, Elliott was struck with the idea of a Sergio Leone-style western set in Australia—with female impersonators. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, was written by Elliott in a feverish two weeks. The film went on to win awards at Cannes, AFI, BAFTA, and the Oscars. Years later, the stage adaptation remains a huge hit worldwide. Stephan Elliott suddenly found himself a “hot” commodity, able to pick and choose the projects he wanted. It was a disaster.

Elliott’s next two features, Welcome to Woop Woop and Eye of the Beholder, were unqualified bombs, both during production, and at the box office. The latter film was such a debacle that the behind-the-scenes documentary Killing Priscilla, shot by Elliott’s longtime friend, Oscar-winning costume designer Lizzy Gardiner, became more notorious, and noteworthy, than the film itself.

Embittered by his experiences, Elliott quit show business, vowing never to direct again. In 2004, while skiing in the French Alps, Stephan Elliott, an expert on the slopes, skied off of a cliff, breaking his back, pelvis and legs. The 39 year-old was literally broken in half and given 20 minutes to live by an attending physician. But, as luck and fate would have it, life (and the movies) wasn’t done with Stephan Elliott yet.

After three years of physical rehab (see the photos below), which included the surgical insertion of 11 titanium plates into his body, Elliott decided to throw his hat back into the cinematic ring, adapting (with co-writer Sheridan Jobbins) Noel Coward’s classic play Easy Virtue for the screen. The only previous film adaptation was done as a silent film in 1928—by Alfred Hitchcock!

Easy Virtue tells the story of the staid Whittaker family, British blue bloods who find their circa 1928 world turned upside down when prodigal son John (Ben Barnes) returns home with a flamboyant, liberated, very American wife named Larita (Jessica Biel) in tow. Kristen Scott Thomas and Colin Firth round out the stellar cast as the senior Whittakers. A biting mixture of comedy, drama, and social commentary, Easy Virtue arrives in cinemas May 22 from Sony Pictures Classics.

Stephan Elliott sat down with us while in Los Angeles recently to discuss his own unique story of being a true survivor in show business.

We should start out talking about your amazing comeback from a near-fatal skiing accident. Is it true you were literally broken in half?
Stephan Elliott: I didn’t want to make this a comeback story, but I guess it is, whether I like it, or not. I’ve been skiing for 35 years, and have never even broken a set of sunglasses. I just was pushing myself a bit more and a bit more every time I’d hit the slopes. I think part of it was my general disenchantment with the (entertainment) industry. I’d thrown in the towel. I’d given in, but I just kept pushing the boundaries (in other areas). And it’s interesting in that the moment where it all went wrong; there was plenty of time in that moment before the “snap.” There was this little voice inside me that was saying “Oh for God’s sake, let’s just get this over and done with.” (laughs) “I’ve got it coming, so let’s do it.” And I knew exactly how bad it was going to be. It’s really weird, all the shit that goes through your head at a moment like that. Time stopped, just like in the movies.

Was it an unconscious display of self-destruction on your part, based on how you were feeling?
(pause) I don’t know about that one, yet. I think there’s a little bit of truth in that, I suppose. I had a moment the other day in a car while I was talking with a publicist. Sometimes the memories of a traumatic event will come back to you in flashes—which is part of the beauty of morphine, what an amazing drug it is! (laughs) You forget large chunks, and it’s good that way, but then the moments come back and you can just feel your body locking up, and it’s bloody horrible. But ultimately it is actually what worked out. It wasn’t a life-stopper, it was a life-starter. It was the thing that told me “You’ve got to get up, and get back in the world, again.” I was completely rudderless, wandering with the faeries. (Sheridan Jobbins) and I had been writing for a couple years, and were polishing something for another producer, the sort of thing where your name doesn’t go on it, you turn it in, collect your paycheck and walk away. But when you write it yourself and you’re emotionally-invested from day one, it’s excruciating when people try to take that away from you and re-work it. So it was interesting, as an exercise, to work on something where we had a bit of distance from it, emotionally.

Photos of Stephan Elliott's recovery in the hospital. It took him nearly three years to recover from his accident.

So here you are in a hospital bed, literally cracked in half…Literally cracked in half, yeah. At the site of the accident, I knew I was hemorrhaging (internally) very badly, and I said to the ski patrol ‘Look, be honest, how bad is this?’ They said “If we can get you out of here and get you some blood, you’ll be fine.” But the problem was, we were halfway up a bloody mountain where they couldn’t land a helicopter to medevac me out, and they had to do it the old-fashioned way, which was to lift a man with a broken back and put him in a banana boat, then drag me down the mountain, which was bad news. I was very conscious of the fact that all there was present were these 21 year-old ski instructors and I said ‘Guys, guys! Which one of you is qualified to lift a man with a broken back?’ So one of them says (French accent) “Well, we can wait to see if paramedics come up to us, but if we do that you die. If we leave you here, you die. What’s your decision?” So they got me in a fire truck and said that an ambulance was coming towards us which was loaded with a blood supply, and that I’ll be fine. We could hear the ambulance coming, and by that time it was really bad, I mean I was in shitloads of agony. Finally the ambulance arrived, the nurse jumped out, opened the kit and it was empty: she’d grabbed the wrong one. No blood. I was watching it all, they were all screaming at each other and I turned to the doctor and said ‘How long have I got if I don’t get any blood?’ He said “About 20 minutes. Make your peace, because I can no longer make you any promises.” That’s a very weird moment to go through: to be told “This is it.”

What happens in that moment?
I was surprised at how much fun it was. (laughs) What, I’m going to go out thinking about all the bad shit? This stupid grin broke out across my face and I thought ‘You know what? This is hilarious. You died doing what you love to do. Fuck, I’ve had a good life!’ There were a couple people I wish I could’ve said goodbye to, but at that moment was a small price. So I went out with this stupid grin on my face, and then suddenly woke up a day-and-a-half later. The first thing I said when I came to, is I said ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ And so began two years of absolute hell! (laughs)

Stephan Elliott (R) on the set of Easy Virtue.

Did Sheridan approach you about the idea of doing Easy Virtue while you were still in the hospital?Yeah, she said I should get back to work as soon as possible, which I thought was a great idea, and the other thing that happened was that the stage version of Priscilla, which I’d been saying ‘no’ to for years, I thought ‘You know what, fuck it. Okay! What am I so scared about? If I can get through this, I can get through anything.’ So (producer) Barnaby Thomas came to us with the idea of doing Noel Coward. And where else was someone going to offer you material like this? My God, it was a gift!

At the same time, it must’ve been a daunting task to adapt Noel Coward, right?
Yeah, the big challenge being that the original was a melodrama, and we wanted to turn it into more what people think of when they think of Noel Coward, which is something lighter, more comedic, but with a bite to it, that bite of social satire that he was the master of.

Hitchcock did the only other film adaptation, right?
Yeah, as a silent film in 1928. It was one of his first features, and it was essentially a courtroom drama, if you can believe that! (laughs) Our two versions couldn’t be more different. Hitch chucked the original completely out the window. It’s also interesting because he did the film right before he “became” Hitchcock. You could see some of his brilliance in it, in spots, but he was still pretty green. We stayed respectful to Coward’s original, but just lightened the tone. We used the word “reimagined.” Coward said himself in his autobiography that he wasn’t happy with the structure of Easy Virtue, and that he didn’t want his work to ever be thought of as “museum pieces.” So hopefully that’s what we did here: reimagining one of his early works in the spirit of what his work was like in its prime.

You mentioned the “bite” of Coward’s work. That’s what has always made it stand out for me: on the surface, much of the work he’s renowned for are classic drawing room comedies, but Coward’s rooms have dark, shadowy corners in them, which you don’t shy away from here.Yeah, and again to use the word “bite,” he wasn’t afraid to bite the hand that fed him. He was a social critic, really. When I read his original play, I remember thinking, on more than one occasion: ‘Fuck! This is brutal!’ (laughs) The character of Larita in the play just doesn’t give a fuck. She’s just a bitch. She walked in, said “Fuck the lot of you,” and as the world is crumbling around her, she stays constant, even when she has a moment and goes to her room and has a tear, but then says “I’m not changing.” And then she walks out exactly the same person she came in as. So that was tough. I said to Sheridan, ‘We’ve got to humanize this a bit.’ Most of the characters in the play were pretty-one note, just speaking to each other in Coward’s trademark witticisms. At one point Mr. Whittaker, just as a throwaway, says “Yes, I fought in the war.” He was a Colonel and I said ‘Wait a minute; we’re talking World War I here. Nobody came back from WW I, and if they did, they weren’t casually smoking and drinking martinis.’ They were ruined, fucking men. So again, Coward gave us the seeds, and we developed it from there.

Was Larita based, do you know, on Amelia Earhart?Well, I can’t speak for Noel Coward, but we certainly did. (laughs) It was a racecar, instead of a plane, but that first shot of Jessica getting out of her BMW race car, taking off her goggles, that was based on a photo of Amelia that I saw, and said ‘That’s it!’ I knew that was Larita.

That’s part of why I feel that this story is so relevant today: Easy Virtue is about 19th and 20th century values colliding in the early part of the 20th century, just as now we’re faced with old traditionalists from the 20th century—the former cold warriors who are leftovers from the ‘50s and ‘60s—who are colliding with new thinkers like Barack Obama.
Yeah, that’s another reason why we wanted to bring it to the screen, there’s a lot of parallels between the late ‘20’s/early ‘30s and now. It’s a cycle that goes round and round. It gets very liberal, and then very conservative. Like what’s happening in Britain right now: they’re nationalizing everything. I’ve got to get out of there, because it’s just getting so ridiculous. There’s a bit more of a buffer against the world economy back in Australia, because we trade with China, and things like that. Plus, the attitude is so different. In Australia when people are unemployed, they’re like “Well mate, let’s go to the beach!” They’re relaxed, but very savvy at the same time. In England, everyone is so perpetually uptight about everything. I mean, you have to fight to get onto the tube, and there’s just this atmosphere where you feel sick, like everyone’s choking.

Jessica Biel as Larita and Ben Barnes as John Whittaker in Easy Virtue.

And getting back to the film, the character of Larita is almost presented as being otherworldly, emerging from this sleek, modern, silver race car into a very drab, crumbling world that’s stuck in the past.
Right, I always thought Larita was also somewhat based on the Chrysler Building: tall and shiny, and silver and glassy. So you’re spot-on: I wanted this silver spaceship to arrive at this crumbling…pile. (laughs) The future is right there, at the Whittakers’ front door. It’s like a Martian landing, and that’s how she’s perceived by most of the family. It’s funny, when that gorgeous, old BMW arrived on the set; Jessica jumped into it and just tore off! I was so bloody terrified, going “Oh my God!” (laughs) That was a weird moment, sort of “boys with toys” on the set when that car arrived. All of a sudden, these beautiful women like Jessica Biel and Kristen Scott Thomas ceased to exist. All the crew guys sort of gathered around that car, going “Ooh, she’s beautiful!” (laughs)

That era was sort of the first instance of the “reset button” in the 20th century, wasn’t it?
Yeah, exactly. Which is exactly what we’re going through again now. In the late ‘20s, you had industry in Britain really taking off and the cities were encroaching on the country. It was the era of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We weren’t specific about the year it took place for that reason: we wanted it to be as the roaring ‘20s were petering out, but the ‘30s hadn’t quite arrived yet, so if someone presses us for a year, we say “around 1928.”

I loved the way you brought two generations of actors together in this, with Jessica Biel and Ben Barnes on the one side, and two icons of British stage and screen like Kristen Scott Thomas and Colin Firth on the other. I don’t think anyone will look at Jessica Biel the same way again, do you?
No, and I’m glad you feel that way. Nobody had ever really let her bloom before. You take the weight of that beauty, and the baggage that comes with it, and it can get in the way of what’s really there underneath. You look at the light in that girl’s eyes and you see a highly intelligent performer who’s just bustin’ to get out. You take a gamble sometimes, and there are certainly a number of other actresses who could’ve done this part with their hands tied behind their backs, but none of them had the freshness that Jessica has here. I should actually take back the crapshoot/gamble analogy, because I felt really good about it from the beginning. And also, Colin and Kristen really took the lead with the younger actors, really took them under their wings: “Listen. Just listen to what’s going on around you.” Listen to how that line just came out of that person’s mouth, and react to that. Fuck what we did in rehearsals. Come to me blank. So they really were the buffers and it was interesting watching the generational thing, too. Colin even said “Look, I’m 50 years old. I’m at the point in my life where I need to start giving something back.” So it was great, and Ben and Jes were just so happy to learn. They were both really hungry.

Stephan Elliott and Jessica Biel hit the road on the set of Easy Virtue.

The other really clever thing about the casting was the fact that Jessica Biel has a very contemporary vibe, as opposed to a modern actress with a period vibe, like Scarlett Johansson.Well, the casting of Jessica and Ben was very deliberate for exactly the reason you said: the merging of two generations. Ben was coming straight off of Stardust and Prince Caspian. I thought the idea of having this collision was good. I knew there were two ways of making this movie, the first being the version that your grandma would love. And you know what? I don’t want to make that movie! (laughs) I’m not the right guy for that. I wanted to make this for a younger crowd, which is just how Coward had written the original play: for young people. He was only 23 when he wrote it.

Was it tough to deglamourize two such attractive actors as Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth?
That was really difficult, for Kristen in particular, I think. I mean, she looks gorgeous during the tango scene especially, but part of my job on this was to give her an ugly coat and a terrible wig…it was part mother and part schoolteacher. During the first week she struggled a bit with it and I said to her ‘Look, what can I do? How can I help?’ She said “This is really tough.” So I said “Use it. Be miserable. It will work for us.” So she did, and then she began to relax into it, which allowed us to take it to the next level, which was like ‘take her up.’ Then Kristen started getting concerned that her character was getting too “big.” She said “I’ve never been this big before!” I said “Yep. Take her up again!” (laughs) She said “I will never work again!” And she was having a blast by the end of it. She was sort of like an English Norma Desmond.

What was it like to step behind the camera again after nearly a decade, like riding a bike?
Frighteningly so. I said ‘When I come back, I’m gonna have the time. I’m gonna have the money,’ because most of the time, I’ve done micro-budget films. You work out of that environment and it’s a beautiful medium to operate in. I work really well when you pressure me. If you do that, I’ll fly. Don’t back me into a corner, and you’ll get the best results out of me, because it’s like this monster takes over. Never say “no.” “No” means “yes.” And it’s always been there. I said that this time, I’m not gonna do it that way but of course…they lied. (laughs) And the next thing you know, we’re shooting in England in the middle of the coldest bloody winter they’ve had in years, because that’s the only time we could assemble this group of actors, and even that was tight, because they all arrived at different times. So we didn’t have everyone on set until day nine, so there was no rehearsal. So from day two, I was right back in there again. We’d do an on-set rehearsal sometimes before we shot, but that also helped give it a contemporary feel, because if it had been too rehearsed, too mannered, that would’ve dated it.

Stephan Elliott confers with stars Jessica Biel and Ben Barnes.

I loved how the house was in disrepair and how a lot of the people had bad teeth, and bags under their eyes, especially the older characters. This deglamourizing was deliberate on your part?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, even today, a lot of these old estates are occupied by the families of nobles who’ve had them for centuries, but they live in two rooms! They can’t afford to heat and repair the remainder, but they also don’t want to sell it off to the government as an historic landmark, who then turn it into a museum, which is what many of the nobles have had to do over the years. They literally can’t afford that way of life anymore, and in our story, in the late ‘20s, that’s when that way of life first started dying out. So yes, that was all very, very deliberate. Life was harder back then, no matter how much money you had, and this family in our story is in the process of losing their, of losing everything, literally. And that’s how the three different houses were where we filmed: there were two rooms where the people lived and they were like “but you can’t go into the other rooms.” And I said ‘Ah ha! That means we’re goin’ in!’ (laughs) So the grubbiness and grittiness you see is literally authentic. We didn’t have to dress them down much. So they were all running at us to film at their estates so they could make some money, any money. They couldn’t afford to fix the windows, in some cases.

How did you choose the houses where you did shoot?
Basically according to whether we’ve seen them in lots of movies or television before. They took us to the Gosford Park house and all these other houses we’ve seen dozens of times, and I was like ‘Nope, we’ve seen all these, they're all bloody musuems, and I ain’t makin’ this movie, so let’s start seeing the other houses.’ So Giles, our location guy, had found this house that had never been filmed in before, he’d originally found it for one of the Harry Potter movies, and they’d wound up not using it, and we were like ‘That’s it.’

There is a movie god, isn’t there?
Oh yeah, absolutely. The drag queens call it “The Goddess of Synch.” She kicks in and suddenly your footing is sure, you can lip-synch perfectly and you can’t go wrong with the Goddess of Synch on your side. There’s a film goddess, too, who looks after us.

Maybe it was her who was looking out for you on that mountain.
(laughs) Maybe, mate. Maybe.


Theatrical trailer for Easy Virtue.