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Stephen Fry is hosting BAFTA’s Film Awards night for the third time running. Meanwhile, down at Pinewood, he’s got a new day job. Quentin Falk reports.
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Photo: Jim Broadbent and Stephen Fry on the set of Bright Young Things
Stephen Fry loves to talk and adores words. As a performer on stage, screen and radio or as a writer of scripts, novels and autobiography, language seems to be the very stuff of an already extremely varied working life.
He’s certainly getting plenty of dialogue of a very different kind as he makes his debut in a brand new ‘role’... that of feature film director on Bright Young Things, a new £7.5m romantic satirical comedy.
It’s Fry’s own adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s second, and remarkably prescient, 1930 novel, Vile Bodies, about that between- the-wars generation of... well, bright (and not so bright) young things who had, in Fry’s words, a quite startling propensity to “crash- and-burn in their endless search for newer and faster sensations.’
The talk, as Fry has discovered, is endless and, of course, not just about the script and the perform- ances. It’s the questions that began way back in the earliest days of pre-production when the faxes, emails and memoranda started fly- ing to and fro. Then the meetings started and, “suddenly you’re going, ‘Oh my lord, this is real.’
“Slowly the right tranches of money appear and suddenly you have offices in Pinewood. Then one day a photocopier’s wheeled in and within a short space of time that room’s become the art department and there are plans all over the floor. More and more parts of the wall are being cov- ered with photos of actors who’ve hopefully said ‘yes’.
“Then, as suddenly, you don’t have a single minute in a single day. It’s now full pre-production. The questions come one after the other. You’ve just had a long con- versation with someone about trousers and then you’re having a conversation about music. You put the phone down from that and someone comes into the room offering you seventeen dif- ferent types of cigarette lighter. You’re suddenly matching props to characters.
“Then there’s photographs of seventeen town houses – which one do I like the door of best? It’s both terrifying and overwhelming – but also fantastically exciting.”
Then the actual shooting begins and Fry, towering over most of his cast and crew, seems to be perfectly in his element as he directs with a quiet but author- itative hand, only too happy to lis- ten carefully to suggestions from his very supportive crew.
Given his reputation, it’s per- haps not surprising that Fry has attracted an astounding Anglo- American cast, including Dan Aykroyd, Sir John Mills, Stockard Channing, Peter O’Toole, Jim Broadbent, Imelda Staunton, Julia Mackenzie, Richard E Grant and Hugh Laurie.
As for the BYTs – boasting evocatively Waugh-like names such as Adam Fenwick-Symes, Miles Malpractice and Eddy ‘Ginger’ Littlejohn – they are played by a mixture of familiar (Emily Mortimer, Michael Sheen) and unknown (Stephen
Campbell-Moore, Fenella Woolgar, James McAvoy and Guy Henry).
Fry has long been keen to direct, not just for the sake of it but only if “there was something right. I had been offered scripts in the past. Perhaps arrogantly, I felt there were things I felt I could bring to this that other’s couldn’t, that there was at least some dif- ference I could make to it. With a lot of scripts one sees you think this is perfect material for some- one else and don’t feel you can actually add to it.
“I have the luxury, I suppose, of being able to think there were certain things I could want to direct but I don’t actually have to be a director, someone who hangs around all the time waiting for a script to be sent to them because that’s all they do. I can get on with other things in life.”
In fact, this project started haltingly about five years ago – simply as a writing job. Fry re-read the book, thought it would be interesting and wrote a draft script. About three months after that he was lunching in Hollywood with “one of the hottest directors around” and he phoned the producers to ask them if he could show the direc- tor his script.
“Oh, no,” they said, “we have another director in mind.” “Who’s that?” Fry asked. “You”, they said. So he called them back about ten minutes later and said, “Okay, let’s try it.”