Roland Joffé: a victim of his own success

[DB7]

Roland Joffé: Why the director is a victim of his own success
The director Roland Joffé tells James Mottram how The Killing Fields and The Mission are albatrosses around his neck

Friday, October 05, 2007

A few kilometres west of Moscow's city centre stands the Badayevskis beer plant. Long since abandoned, this relic from pre-Communist Russia today plays host to a little bit of Hollywood glamour.

Two upstairs rooms have been restyled as the lurid lair of a drug-dealer in a new film titled You and I, a tale of adolescent angst starring Mischa Barton, formerly of the popular TV teen soap The OC. The man dressed in a white polo shirt and jeans, whispering to Barton, is Roland Joffé. Once heralded as the saviour of British film, it's as if destiny has brought him to a building that appears as crumbling as his own career.

I'm reminded of what the late Spalding Gray said after he collaborated on Joffé's award-winning 1984 debut The Killing Fields: "He has the demeanour of Christ, the eyes of Rasputin and the body of Zorro." Now 61, he may no longer possess the latter, but it's not hard to see that mixture of piety and madness still burn inside him. Likewise, his intellect has not dulled. As his conversation zips between quantum physics and Paris Hilton, it's evidence of just how influential his early days living among London's Bohemian intelligentsia was: his father left his mother to take up with the daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein. From dining with Charlie Chaplin to briefly sharing a house with Lucien Freud and his wife, it led to a rarefied and privileged existence for Joffé.

This year, Joffé released Captivity, his first movie in seven years since the overblown French period-piece Vatel. Arriving on the crest of the so-called "torture porn" wave alongside Eli Roth's Hostel II and the Saw franchise, Captivity is the story of a Manhattan model (Elisha Cuthbert) who is kidnapped by two brothers and subjected to all manner of unpleasant psychological torments. It seemed below a man of his cinematic ideals.

Joffé must wonder how his career has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. After a successful period in television, he was taken under the wing of David Puttnam, who produced The Killing Fields. This was nominated for seven Oscars, including Joffé for Best Director. Two years later, The Mission was equally well received. Again picking up seven Academy nods, with Joffé again up for Best Director, this story of Jesuit missionaries in 18th century South America won the prestigious Cannes Palme d'Or.

Joffé was expected to go on and conquer Hollywood with more of the same. "The first two movies I made, The Killing Fields and The Mission, I loved making, but in some ways they've been an albatross round one's neck," he reflects. "Everybody thinks that's what you're supposed to doing." He remembers meeting Orson Welles in New York shortly after The Mission was released. "He looked at me for quite a long time, then he said: 'So now what do you do?' And he laughed like somebody who knew. My answer to that was: 'What I do is not have a career as a director.' My job is not to go around repeating myself."

Joffé moved to Hollywood at the expense of his marriage (his second, after a nine-year union with actress Jane Lapotaire) to Cheri Lunghi, who had starred in The Mission. There, he made 1989's Shadow Makers, a contentious story of the development of the atom bomb, starring Paul Newman. Lambasted by conservatives and liberals alike in the US, the film flopped – partly, says Joffé, because it was dealing with a guilt-riddled period of American history.

The 1990s were a decade of disappointment for the director. His 1992 adaptation of Dominique LaPierre's Calcutta-set novel City of Joy tanked in the States. Then, after producing the woeful Super Mario Bros, he delivered his much-maligned 1995 version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which almost single-handedly derailed the career of its star Demi Moore's . He continued the trashy tone with 1998's Goodbye Lover, a modern-day storywhich made less than $2m at the US box-office.

Yet nothing quite measured up to the spectacular failure of Vatel, a sumptuous yet substance-free tale set in the time of Louis XIV. Filmed on a lavish – by French standards at least – $36m budget, the end result was shot down in a blaze of publicity as it opened Cannes in 2000. It never recovered, earning just $49,000 in the US. As if Merchant/Ivory had directed La Grande Bouffe, it was everything Joffé's early films were not: bloated, excessive and – worst of all – uninvolving.

Now living in Amsterdam – although he rather pretentiously notes, "I'm based in my head in some respects" – Joffé evidently has little time for the British film industry.

"I understand that there should be a British film industry, and I think it's great, and I think Britain has an awful lot to say. But Britain has never really loved its film-makers much. It likes them when they win things. But it's never really supported them particularly. There is no film industry in Britain. There are just individuals who've managed to do well."

Joffé maintains that, with the exception of the work of Ken Loach, an "ironic cynicism" has "crept into the style of British film-making". You might say he and Loach are – or at least were – kindred spirits. After enjoying a brief spell directing theatre, following a time studying English and drama at Manchester, Joffé joined Granada television as a trainee director in 1973, where he was soon helming episodes of Coronation Street (just as Loach directed Z Cars over at the BBC). Joffé went on to team up with Tony Garnett, who had produced Cathy Come Home and Kes for Loach, to make the prize-winning The Spongers. Written by another Loach regular Jim Allen, this highly improvised story of a poverty-stricken mother who commits suicide was a prime example of Joffé's early, conscience-driven, work.

All the same, later in our conversation he distances himself from Loach, accusing him of often directing the same movie, "again and again making the same point. Ken is proving a political thesis," he says. "I've never really wanted to do that."

It seems that Joffé has tried to remain fashionable. Take Captivity, which according to Joffé, takes on that terribly trendy idea of what it means to be a celebrity. "Look at Paris Hilton – in many ways, she is captive and she's being brutalised," he argues. "It's not Paris Hilton's fault that she's a little ditzy and it's not her fault that she's rich. What's fascinating to me is the odd way she's in a public prison. So the question I suppose is, 'Who's the captive here?' Is Paris Hilton a captive? Or are we captive of some need to obsessively own other people."

Captivity was produced by the Russian American Movie Company (Ramco), which is also backing You and I. Originally called Finding t.A.T.u, in reference to the popular Russian singing duo who were presented by their manager as lesbians, it tells of a love story between a rural Russian girl (played by Barton) and an American ex-pat (newcomer Shantel VanSanten) who meet at a concert. Joffé sees this story of two teens trying to decide who they are as a metaphor for modern Russia, "an adolescent country trying to work out exactly how it might grow up".

Joffé says that he has other scripts ready to roll, all of which he wrote during the seven-year hiatus between Captivity and Vatel, and they sound more like the Joffé of old: a story about Opus Dei, one on Mata Hari, and even an Indian-set tale of reincarnation. Yet when I ask if he still considers The Killing Fields and The Mission as his finest hours, he seems taken aback, affronted even.

"Well, they weren't that fine when I was making them," he grunts. "I think it's a very dangerous thing for anyone to decide if there was a point when one was good, or that one may be good now. Each movie is a chance to do something different and interesting. That's what I mean by not having a career. I've not tried to be a 'something'. I've just tried to live."

'Captivity' is out on DVD on 29 October. 'You and I' is out next year

[dremble wedge]

Originally Posted by DB7 He remembers meeting Orson Welles in New York shortly after The Mission was released. "He looked at me for quite a long time, then he said: 'So now what do you do?' And he laughed like somebody who knew. My answer to that was: 'What I do is not have a career as a director.' My job is not to go around repeating myself."

He'd have done well to: Welles died a full year before The Mission was released!

[D Cairns]

That's not the only error in there. Portraying THE MISSION as some kind of hit is misguided, it took very little money and contributed to the collapse of Goldcrest. SHADOWMAKERS flopped not because Americans can't handle their own history, but because Joffe rewrote Bruce Robinson's script, and Joffe is no writer. And simply observing that THE SCARLET LETTER flopped is hardly doing it justice, it was a supreme embarrassment to all concerned.

[Cheeky Bob]

Originally Posted by D Cairns That's not the only error in there. Portraying THE MISSION as some kind of hit is misguided, it took very little money and contributed to the collapse of Goldcrest.

Actually, it performed decently if not spectacularly at the box office - the problem was that the writing was already on the wall for Goldcrest (courtesy of Revolution and Absolute Beginners) even before the film had finished production.

And the film was also a pretty solid critical hit - and a Cannes Palme d'Or is hardly to be sneezed at.

[D Cairns]

I wonder what the version of the film was like that the Cannes jury saw -- it wasn't finished at the time, and I've always wondered if that version was a bit better. My main problems: moments such as the one where a soldier, about to embark on the climactic massacre, remarks to his commander, "None of us wants to do this!" which is a truly appalling bit of writing and one with the stamp of Joffe all over it. and the other problem is that Irons tells DeNiro that there are two possible reponses to the coming attack, pacifism and violent resistance, and he's absolutely clear that only one of them can be right. You can't have it both ways. And then the film has it both ways: Irons actions are shown as noble and saintlike, DeNiro's are shown as heroic and Robin Hoody (and the beautiful score compounds this). A blinding example of a film failing to commit to a stance, even after telling us that it is completely necessary to do so.
Not as bad as "Imagine" playing at the end of THE KILLING FIELDS, but at least that was an isolated blip of kitsch in an otherwise sound film.
I remember reading that THE MISSION took two million in America, which means it can't possibly have paid for itself.

[Cheeky Bob]

Originally Posted by D Cairns I remember reading that THE MISSION took two million in America, which means it can't possibly have paid for itself.

According to Box Office Mojo (a site I've generally found pretty reliable), it grossed $17,218,023 in the US.

And bear in mind that's just the theatrical gross - this would have been considerably boosted by ancillary markets like TV and video, as well as international receipts. I remember hearing that it did particularly well in Catholic countries, which doesn't surprise me.

So it's not exactly a blockbuster, but a very long way from a flop. The problem was, Goldcrest was in such financial turmoil that it badly needed a blockbuster - which I don't think Puttnam and Joffé ever intended to deliver. (I remember an interview with Puttnam in which he said he was doubly annoyed by the Goldcrest débâcle - firstly, because his film was being lumped together with Revolution and Absolute Beginners, which clearly were critical and commercial disasters, and secondly, because of the weight of expectations placed on The Mission as a result).

[Cheeky Bob]

As for why it won the Palme d'Or, it was a simple case of politics over art. By general consent, the outstanding film at the 1986 Cannes festival was Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice - but this was shortly after Reagan bombed Tripoli and a lot of Americans refused to attend the festival because they were scared of terrorist reprisals (Cannes isn't that far from Libya - at least if you're looking at it from the other side of the Atlantic). As a result, the Cannes judges were loath to give the top prize to a challenging European arthouse film because they were desperately trying to attract the Americans back for 1987.

So The Mission proved to be ideal - it had enough cultural prestige for the award not to be a total embarrassment, but it was also in English and had major stars in Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro. So I suspect the incomplete version screened there wasn't far off what eventually got released - but the judges were happy to overlook minor defects. (Bear in mind that most of them would have been reading subtitles anyway, which does have a habit of smoothing over clunky writing).