Stephan Elliott makes dangerous movies. Not because they are laden with inappropriate material, savage gore or X-rated clinches. And not because they are the kind of movies that deal with terrorist plots, exploding buildings and the copious ingestion of illegal substances. No, Stephan Elliot makes dangerous movies because they oh so subtly push the boundaries of accepted society and brazenly take risks, casting a light on drag queens (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), con-men (Welcome to Woop Woop) and now, in his new film, Easy Virtue, Elliot takes on the English.
Easy Virtue is an adaptation of the Noël Coward play of the same name. ‘We looked at the original play, and the original play was Coward at his absolute most brutal and he wasn’t Coward yet,’ Elliott says of the process Sheridan Jobbins and himself went through in adapting the play for the screen. ‘It was 1924 and he was pretty big for his boots. He had had a couple of big successes. He was about 24 when he wrote it and he wrote the most scathing, brutal, cruel and unfunny attack on the English. It’s a pretty dark piece of work. So I understand why it wasn’t all that successful. In the end, we’ve taken the broad strokes of the characters and eight of Coward’s best lines and almost everything else is original. There is no way you could make the original play now because the English would kill you. It was so tough.’
What makes this movie dangerous is the fact that while it is based on the Noël Coward play of the same name, it essentially plays with the genre of a classic period piece by throwing in incredibly modern moments. The songs for one. Car Wash is made to sound like a 1920s flapper number while Tom Jones’ Sex Bomb gets the same big band makeover. And elsewhere, Jessica Biel’s Mrs Whittaker – an already tenacious blonde – up the ante by appearing in costumes 20 years before they are meant to appear. Its details like these which make this film a risk… plus incite the purists no end.
‘The look of the film is very rock n’ roll. We didn’t stick to our dates, which you are supposed to in a film. It’s 1928, it’s an ambiguous date. Larita, the whole family, we’ve actually dressed around 1925 and I’ve let Larita be right up to the 40s. She is absolute classic 40s movie star – the platinum blonde, which was a last minute decision of mine and was much further in the time scale of where we were.
‘So, we fucked with the genre, which immediately took you out of the rule book. The music changed it, and the film has so many special effects in it. I’ve never seen a period film with this many special effects and proudly special effects. We are having fun here. The dog sequence, we’ve have one or two quite classic that is just screwball comedy, thrown totally into a different genre. So, in one sense, we took a gamble in that we fucked with the genre, but there was also the chance to try to modernize it.
‘Colin (Firth) and Kristin (Scott Thomas) bring in their own audience, but Ben (Barnes) and Jess (Biel) are a completely separate audience. Casting those two was a bit of a gamble.’
The casting isn’t the only gamble – Elliot takes risks with many elements of the film, including the title, which has proven difficult to translate. ‘There is no such thing as easy virtue,’ Elliott provided of way of explaining the difficulty in translating the film’s title. ‘I’ve been seeing what they’ve been trying to translate the title to all over the world and we were in Abu Dhabi recently at the Abu Dhabi Film festival and the audience gave this collective gasp, and I said, “What is it called?†And they said “Whore!â€, to which I just pissed myself.’
Easy Virtue is currently playing at Luna Cinemas.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
