Having already scored a huge hit with The Commitments, Alan Parker has now returned to Ireland to take on a very different book adaptation – Angela's Ashes. Paul Byrne talks to the British director as he prepares himself for the inevitable anger his latest film will incite here.
Alan Parker is no stranger to controversy. Films such as Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning and Evita all packed a political punch. And when the message up onscreen wasn't confrontational, Parker was always more than willing to be confrontational about his work off-screen.
Having emerged out of the British wave of young guns who began beating Hollywood at its own game in the early '70s, Parker revelled in confounding critics with a series of brazenly commercial and hugely successful films. His gangsters'r'us debut Bugsy Malone was followed by the powerful Turkish prison drama Midnight Express, which in turn was followed by the dancing teens flick Fame. Over the years, Parker has continued to keep his finger on the pulse with a series of films that have invariably exasperated his agent and delighted his bank manager. It's hard to think of any other successful director who would have the nerve to take on Pink Floyd's bombastic rock opera The Wall. And it's hard to think of any other successful director with the necessary neck and cinematic know-how to take on Frank McCourt's bleak childhood memoir Angela's Ashes.
As with most of Parker's work, Angela's Ashes the movie is a lavish, beautifully shot affair, the blues of a cold Irish night a deep, ice-cold blue, the red in Papa McCourt's bloodshot eyes as he staggers home from the pub once again a fiery, anger-filled red. That the rain and the misery rarely let up may not come as a surprise to anyone who's read the best-selling book, but the fact that there's some extra-added rain and some extra-added misery here won't please those who have read the book and dismissed it as a poisoned love letter.
PAUL BYRNE: It must feel like the lull before the storm once this film is released in Ireland; the good people of Limerick are unlikely to embrace the grim portrait of their city.
ALAN PARKER: "I'm sensitive to that, but it is something that's only relevant to Ireland. This problem doesn't exist anywhere else obviously. It's a different kind of problem for me outside of Ireland. It's a creative difficulty elsewhere in that this is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, colossally successful book, and there is an expectation on the film, particularly from the book's many fans, who will be the early audience. That's the difficulty certainly in the United States, because the book's such a big success there, you know. The funny thing is there's a groundswell which has been very positive for us in the United States at the moment. When we put the posters up three weeks before the American opening – these posters of little Joe Breen – the paperback shot back up to the no.1 spot again. Just because of the film posters. So there's a great expectation there.
"The critics of the book in Ireland - or should I say the critics of Frank McCourt – don't seem to realise that Angela's Ashes is a memoir not an autobiography. They feel he's taken too much of a creative license and he's exaggerated things. That's a different difficulty for us, and the same people who didn't like the book are probably not going to like the film. They're going to say, well, it wasn't quite as bad as that back then."
How wary were you of over-romanticising the poverty?
"Yeah, well, my first responsibility is to make sure that the film has an integrity that satisfies me. And to make a film that I'm proud of, and I am proud of it. That's the first thing. The fact that there's going to be people who don't like it is going to be fine by me, because I've never done a film that didn't have somebody who didn't like it. You know actually, The Commitments was the only film that I made where everybody liked it, even the hard critics. But my second responsibility after satisfying myself creatively is to Frank. To be loyal and truthful to his book, and I believe that I have been. And thirdly, my responsibility is to the audience, and my responsibility to them is that the film shouldn't be too unrelentingly painful and bleak. And I don't think it is.
"I think that the beauty of the book was this wonderful balance that Frank has – which I think that from an English or American perspective we always think of as Irish, but which you don't see in yourselves sometimes. It's the ability to deal with quite sad and serious situations but always being able to see the humour in them at the same time. I think that's particularly Irish. And I think that the film has that, and so I try and put as much levity as I can in there to counterbalance the misery. Even though there were some very serious situations going on, there is always some humour to make it palatable. And ultimately the film is about this boy overcoming all this adversity, which is a classic dramatic structure for any film. It's a classic Hollywood situation really we're talking about here. You know, the boy who succeeds in the end, against incredible odds."
As you say yourself, the critics have rarely warmed to your work, dismissing much of it as populist cinema. Do critics still bother you, or do you simply make movies for yourself and the audience?
"I don't think I'm quite so blasé about it. When you first start out, you always think your first film is going to be your last. I've always said, you blink, and suddenly you've made a dozen films. And you hope that you will be judged for the body of work. I'm very proud of the work that I've done in that I've always done it for the right reasons. I've never done it just for commercial reasons. By the same token, I've always felt very strongly about the fact that I do have a direct responsibility to find an audience. That means a particular kind of film sometimes. And I was at odds particularly with British critics early on because I think that a lot of alleyways were gone down creatively that were wrong. And I think that they were very narrow. God, that's a terrible metaphor - double metaphor - but I think critics are much more broad-minded now.
"When I started out, I wanted to kill them all; anyone who said something bad. In the early days when I called the critics predatory scum or whatever - I don't feel that anymore. Because there will always be people who don't like my stuff. All I ask for is the criticism to be well reasoned. What pisses me off is bad writing, and bad reasoning. And those I dismiss, because I feel that a work of art – which a film is – deserves good criticism, even if you don't like it."
Your relationship with England was strained for much of the seventies and eighties, but you took over the chairmanship of the British Film Institute recently, and made the move back to London. What changed, you or the country, to inspire this sort of homecoming?
"A little bit of both, I guess. The critics that I had a problem with are mostly gone now. Most of the loonies have gone. The new generation has a love of film that is much more multi-various. People don't have just one narrow idea about what's a good film and what's a bad film. Your generation can look at a commercial American film and still see it as creatively valid, you know. And not everything that comes out of the Czechoslovakian Republic is great. I think those days are gone. The cahier du cinema bollox finally is gone. And that's what I was fighting really; pretentiousness.
Narrow pretentiousness. "The BFI was something where, well, I needed a kick up the bum to come back to Britain. I was living in Los Angeles for the last ten years, and I was at an age where if I didn't come back now I probably never would have."
There's a sense too in Ireland that you've come to treat it as something of a second home, or is that an assumption based on the fact that you've now made two films here?
"Well, making The Commitments was probably the most enjoyable experience I've ever had making a film. I'm not saying it's the best film that I ever did, but it was the one where I'd wake up in the morning and I couldn't wait to get to work. And you don't always feel that when you're making a movie. I had a good time. I feel that I have a rapport with the Irish. I know the Irish hate the British, but it isn't always the same in reverse. I've always been comfortable there, and I enjoy the people very much. So subconsciously I may have been looking for another Irish film to do, and then when this came along, I thought, this would be great.
"I was criticised about this recently, actually. I did an interview yesterday with Barry Norman, where he said, 'You haven't made a film in England in 25 years; what's wrong with you?'. And the funny thing is, when I'm shooting a film in Dublin or Limerick or wherever, I feel, well, I'm certainly closer to home than I would be shooting in Philadelphia."
Angela's Ashes is a long and harrowing movie, full of children, rain and misery; was it a long and harrowing shoot too?
"Having three Franks was difficult for each schedule, but it wasn't a particularly difficult shoot, no. Because we were in Limerick and in Cork and in Dublin, and in the Ardmore Studios, moving around a big unit is always difficult. We had to build Roden Lane - which we built in Dublin - and it was quite a big build. For a small film too, we had a reasonably large budget. It wasn't a Channel 4 film, and it wasn't a James Bond budget either, but it was comfortable enough."
What was the budget in the end?
"It's twenty five million. Which is pretty small, when you look at the movies we will be going up against. Most of the Hollywood movies cost anywhere between a hundred million and two hundred million."
Fame, as you pointed out with your 1980 kitsch classic of the same name, is a fickle thing, something the kids from The Commitments have obviously learnt now. Do you see many of them still?
"I've kept in touch with most of them, and I think it's very interesting to see what happened to them all. In a funny kind of way it's not too dissimilar to the film itself. A lot of them had their chances, had their record contracts, and some of the kids from the band tour as The Stars From The Commitments, and they're still at it. Some have succeeded quite well in acting, but it's weird, in the end, my job is to give them a chance and then it's down to them. They have their own lives."
I guess it would be fair to say that there's no such thing as a typical Alan Parker movie; is that something you've deliberately set out to achieve?
"It happened by mistake to start with in that when I first started it was a very bad time for filmmaking in Britain. I couldn't get anything made, and the stuff that I was writing, everyone kept saying, 'oh, it's too parochial'. So I thought, well, fuck it, I'll write an American story. I think I'd visited the States once before this, and so you end up writing about something that you have only the vaguest notion of really. I was writing about what I'd learnt through the movies, and in particular, the gangster movies and the musicals. So I mixed the two of them together - and at that time I had some young children of my own - I ended up making Bugsy Malone, which was a totally and utterly made-up kind of movie. It was done for totally pragmatic reasons. It wasn't really who I was as a director. So having made it, and then to be suddenly winning BAFTAs and goodness knows what else, I thought, well, this is not who I am at all.
"So I did Midnight Express as a complete antidote to that, to prove to people that I wasn't the kind of director that they thought I was. And the moment you do that, critics get really uppity. They want you to be in a pigeonhole, and I didn't want to work like that. And after doing Midnight Express, which was so controversial and difficult - and that won Oscars and things - I thought I'd do something totally different again. By then it was mischievous. And then I did Fame, and then walked away from that kind of film.
"I started out making films when I was quite young really, so what happens is you grow up making films and so you become a different person whilst you're making films. And things in your life cease to be important to you. I wanted to do a very serious dramatic story about marriage and divorce when in my own life that was what was going on. Each time I've decided to do a film, it's usually a reaction to what I've just finished. I don't know what I'm going to do next, but it will be very different to Angela's Ashes."
You've never succumbed to the idea of a sequel, even though you've had some incredibly successful movies. Is there a sense of been there, done that for you when you've made a film?
"Absolutely. The most obvious case was The Commitments, which was based on Roddy Doyle's book. Because he didn't write a sequel, that was good enough for me. I had to respect that, and to me it was a one-off thing anyway. It didn't have another life after that. Other people have been trying to get a Commitments 2 going since then, and all sorts of scripts have been written. But I won't be a part of it."
Angela's Ashes does have a sequel though; would you be tempted to take on 'Tis if the opportunity arose?
"Well, 'Tis is a very different book anyway to Angela's Ashes, and I think, quite frankly, 'Tis will only be made if Angela's Ashes is a success as a film. Whether it'll be me doing it, I doubt it, because I feel that I've done my bit. It should be a different kind of film too, if it's made, because it deals with his years in America. And life would have been quite different for Frank then.
"Maybe Woody Allen could do it? People might be glad of something light-hearted after my grim outing."
Paul Byrne
