It is something of a critical convention to divide British film-makers into one of two categories: either Realists, or Dreamers (or 'Mad Poets', as they are sometimes called). It's recognised that these categories are fluid, subject to re-definition, and directors (like David Lean, for example) sometimes migrate from one category to the other; and that indeed these polarised qualities can sometimes co-exist in the same film. Nevertheless, there is a feeling that there are 'realist' directors who can be seen in a direct line of descendancy from Griersonian documentary of the 1930s, the Free Cinema of the 1950s, the British New Wave of the early 60s, gritty television drama etc: the finest contemporary exponents of that tradition would be Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Alternatively, the 'dreamers' and fantasists are descendants of Powell and Pressburger or even Hammer horror and, in place of subdued realism, they offer melodramatic excess, imagination, sensual escape: key British directors here would include figures like Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Ridley Scott, John Boorman.

But there is a kind of intermediate zone occupied by an idiosyncratic maverick faction that doesn't aspire to the extremes of the dreamers but at the same time offers realism with a slight 'kink', as if it could veer at any moment into surrealism. I'm thinking here of directors like Thorold Dickinson, Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti, Alexander Mackendrick- and Stephen Frears. 'Realism,' he once said, 'taught me how to make the best use of where you are', citing an occasion when the location prompted him on the spur of the moment to change the season in the script he was doing from Spring to Autumn: when the writer Peter Prince objected, Frears said, 'I just don't have time to sew leaves on all these trees.' A practical, pragmatic film-maker, then? Yes, but he goes further than just filming things as they are. 'I'm on the lookout,' he says, 'for imaginative solutions to familiar problems': and it's this capacity to give an unusual perspective on the familiar, so that the real can look fantastic and the fantastic can seem very real, that gives his work its distinctive edge and freshness. I also think that the way Frears straddles these two traditions of British cinema is peculiarly personal: indeed, I would say one of his principal fascinations as a film-maker is that he has proved what one might call a great straddler- that is, someone who has in his work bridged the styles of realism and melodrama, has mastered the different codes of film and television, has coped effectively with the different cinematic practices of Britain and America, and has managed successfully to be both director for hire and director as auteur. I want to explore these things in more detail in a moment but perhaps I should begin by saying something about his background.

He was born in Leicester in 1941 into a reasonably prosperous, socially aware family, who were Jewish (though Frears said he didn't become aware of this until his twenties). These were the war years, of course, and he was brought up mainly by his mother, with whom he seemed to have had something of a complicated relationship (I've sometimes wondered whether The Grifters is a disguised working out of this relationship in some form): she was suffocatingly loving but secretly unhappy, he thought, and, rather guiltily, Frears always felt closer to his father, who was very rarely around during this time. The family moved to Nottingham, which he found more congenial than Leicester, and Frears went to public school and then on to Trinity College, Cambridge to study law. But his interest was really in drama: apparently, the sight, when he was eighteen, of the actress Ann Bell walking down the street in Nottingham in red stockings clinched that ambition for him. So after graduation, he landed a job at the Royal Court Theatre in 1964, which he found quite intimidating: theatrical people seemed so intense and intelligent and informed, he thought. But Lindsay Anderson took him under his wing and crucially introduced him to Karel Reisz, whose debut film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had had an enormous impact on Frears, and Reisz became a kind of surrogate father figure, a huge influence on him not only as film-maker but also in terms of values: political, moral, ethical. He was an assistant to Reisz on Morgan-A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) and also on Anderson's If… (1969) and also on Albert Finney's Charlie Bubbles (1968), and from this association came the opportunity to direct his first feature, Gumshoe (1971). Prior to this, he had made a short film called The Burning (1968) about apartheid in South Africa- there's a South African dimension to Gumshoe, which gives a serious subtext to the film, and the issues of race and prejudice are to recur in a number of Frears'films- and this short had been shown as a supporting feature to Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black in the West End. On the basis of this he was offered a job by the BBC, and during the 1970s and early 1980s, he acquired a high reputation as one of the most gifted directors on television, establishing a particularly close working relationship with the writer Alan Bennett.

The cinematic breakthrough for him occurred in 1985, ironically with a television film he had made for Channel 4, My Beautiful Laundrette. When asked subsequently why it had not been made as a film for the cinema, Frears replied disarmingly: 'We thought, who on earth in their right mind would pay to go and see a film about a gay Pakistani in London who opens a laundrette?' He actually liked the idea of its being seen by a large audience one night on television where it might provoke discussion, in the tradition of Cathy Come Home. It was a huge surprise to him when it became an international film success and very popular in America, where I always remember it was picked up by the influential Pauline Kael in the New Yorker who was reviewing Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters at roughly the same time and who thought that, whereas Allen seemed to be doing his familiar routine, there was something very new and different and original about Laundrette. And, on the basis of his observations on the rather daring sexual tensions and infidelities in the class-ridden society of Laundrette, he was offered the chance to direct Dangerous Liaisons in America, and when that was a huge success, his cinematic status was established.

From then on, his career has maintained a rather unusual momentum, in that he 's somehow managed to sustain and combine both the British televisual independence and panache of Laundrette with the more high profile Hollywood gloss of Liaisons: his films have, in other words, alternated unpredictably between commercial star vehicles, with actors like Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston and John Cusack, in familiar genres like the thriller or even the western, with low-budget modest films more akin in style to independent rather than mainstream cinema. We have a representative sample of that kind of variety in this season- modest genre parody in Gumshoe, lavish period drama in Dangerous Liaisons (1988), existential British thriller in The Hit (1984), modern American film noir in The Grifters (1990), and two small but resonant films with the topicality of today- the political drama-doc The Deal (2003) and a thriller about illegal immigrants in this country, Dirty Pretty Things(2003). It is a rich selection indeed, but one could, of course, have selected a completely different half-dozen films, which would have given a quite different perspective on the director- his dark bio-pic about playwright Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears (1987), his western, The Hi-Lo Country (1998), or his comedy based on a favourite novel of his, Roddy Doyle's The Snapper (1993), or his Victorian mystery, Mary Reilly (1996), or his version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (2000), which is one of the few examples of the transposition of a British source into an American setting that actually works, or his remake of the nuclear thriller Fail Safe (2000), shot live on American television. (This is not to mention one of my own personal favourites of his, Liam, made in 2000, Jimmy McGovern's study of gathering anti-Semitism in a 30s working-class community that is, I think, magnificently directed.) So what do we have here- a versatile jack-of-all trades, a 'director for hire', in his own phrase, who can turn his hand to most things, but whose films' only common denominator is their impeccable craftsmanship? Well, admirable though that undoubtedly is, I think there is more to them than that.

And, in digging a little deeper, I would like now to show you an extract from Dangerous Liaisons.

As I mentioned, this was Frears' first American film, and it is worth remembering that it was made at the same time as, and in competition with, a film of Milos Forman, Valmont, based on the same Laclos text, and which was Forman's first film since his Oscar-winning, Amadeus: it is some tribute to Frears that his film totally eclipsed Forman's. The story is about desire and deceit amongst the corrupt aristocracy of late 18th century France, and particularly about the sexual machinations of two such aristocrats, a Marquise (Glenn Close) and Valmont (John Malkovich). The Marquise has challenged Valmont to seduce the 16-year-old Cecile (Uma Thurman) as an act of vengeance on a former lover of hers who is due to marry Cecile and believes her to be a virgin. But Valmont thinks that's too easy: he'll do it, but why not attempt something more testing: the seduction of Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is a pillar of moral rectitude, convent-educated, happily married? Now there's a real challenge; and what a triumph of his dark seductive arts if he succeeded. The game is on:

EXTRACT

Obviously there is a lot one could say about that sequence, but I want to confine myself to some brief points about its visual style and its thematic relevance to other works of Frears. Visually there are three things that particularly strike me about that sequence:
1) the matching of setting to theme and dramatic situation: I am thinking particularly of the path that has no turning, along which Valmont and Madame de Tourvel walk and which will become an ominous metaphor (without either of them at that time knowing it) of the irrevocable paths their lives are about to take;
2) the movement of the camera, so that in Valmont's final strategy in that sequence with Madame de Tourvel, he's almost waltzing around her in a literal attempt to make her dizzy, lose her equilibrium: the swirling choreography of the camera contributes to the sense of a character losing her bearings. But I think there's also a sense of Valmont himself being in danger of tripping over his own elaborate stategems: the camera movement gives a wonderful sense of a character in danger of becoming ensnared by webs of his own making;
3) perhaps most striking of all, the persistence of close-up, which was not something Frears worked out in advance but was developed quite spontaneously as the project developed: we are not invited to languish in period frippery, we're up close and personal with these people, trying to read their minds: think of the moment when the Marquise is reading Valmont's letter, which is ironically set across this seemingly innocent walk, and it closes on a close-up of her looking tense rather than amused (is Valmont getting too fixated on this game? is the Marquise getting a little jealous?). This tension translates itself into a rumble of thunder which not only carries us forward into the next scene but seems an omen of the Marquise's dangerous disquiet which is now hanging over Valmont's behaviour. But his close-ups are getting more ambiguous too: is it the predator eyeing his prey, or is he becoming hypnotised and infatuated by someone whom he thought was his victim? Everything builds to the moment in the sequence when he says: 'You don't have to speak, just look at me…', and they have to read each other's faces. She collapses; is at his mercy, as it were; and there's the close-up of him, then, when he stops. What does it mean: at that moment is he himself suddenly baffled? is it the moment of ultimate victory, the point where he could have her if he wants to but doesn't, leaving her writhing in abject humiliation; or does he stop because he is brought up short by the sudden realisation that his own feelings are engaged and that, almost to his surprise, he cannot take advantage of someone he has come to care about? After all, that's not part of the plan. Pauline Kael once said about Frears: 'Over the years he has refined a magical instinct for just how long we want to see a face and just how long a scene needs to be. If he could bottle this instinct, it could be called "Essence of Movie-Making"'.
There are two more general points I would like to make arising out of this sequence:
a) These strategies of seduction are not about love or even about sex, they are about power- the power to manipulate and dominate in your sphere of operation, whether it be familial, social, psychological or political. A lot of Frears' films are about the dynamics of power in relationships and as seen in carefully observed social landscapes that may seem disparate but where the same kind of power games are going on. For example, in Dangerous Liaisons, the Marquise, in her sexual dealings, describes herself as a 'virtuoso of deception'; but the phrase could equally fit the political context of The Deal .
b) The other thing I would say in relating this film to Frears' other work is a simple point, but one that had not occurred to me until thinking about his career for the purposes of this talk: namely, how many of his films are about dangerous liaisons. The Pakistani Omar and his affair with the white man, Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette; Joe Orton and his gay lover in Prick Up your Ears which will end in murder; the hitman and the gangster in The Hit, making contact in the context of impending execution; mother, son and femme fatale in The Grifters, a lethal cocktail of liaisons there if ever there was one; the precarious friendship at the heart of Dirty Pretty Things that puts them both in danger; and culminating in what you might think is the most dangerous liaison of them all, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in The Deal: there are actually about ten films of Frears where, at their core, is a relationship or a friendship or a liaison (and it's never a marriage) between two people that is dangerous because one could be the nemesis of the other. For all the variety, then, is this the auteurist thread that binds the films together?

I am aware that Frears would be resistant to this argument. In interviews he has been consistently anti-auteurist, insisting that his films do not represent a consistent directorial vision but are collective, collaborative creations. He has been assiduous in paying tribute to regular members of his film family, such as composer George Fenton, cameraman Oliver Stapleton, editor Mick Audsley. He is so much of a team player rather than an auteur that he has sometimes been led into a film against his better judgment simply because of the attraction of working with the same people again (e.g. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid with the Laundrette team, or Mary Reilly, because it reunited him with John Malkovich, Christopher Hampton, George Fenton from Liaisons). If anything, he subscribes to the idea of a writer's cinema more than a director's cinema and he has served the visions of some of the finest modern writers Britain has produced, including Christopher Hampton, Alan Bennett, Hanif Kureishi, David Hare, Steven Poliakoff, Roddy Doyle, Jimmy McGovern. 'I generally think that if you don't get the script right, then you can never sort it out,' he has said. When asked once where his inspiration came from, he replied bluntly: 'Through the letter-box.'

And yet: why these scripts rather than the others? These are the ones, he says, 'he fell in love with.' So what would they tell us about him? He made a very telling comment about the script for My Beautiful Laundrette, clearly a crucial work in his career and I think arguably the most important British film of the 1980s. 'It was as though I had been looking for that script for years,' he said, 'trying to find something that would express a lot of things inside me… liberating.' It was a script that spoke to his hatred of Thatcherism but it wasn't a polemical rant, it was an 'imaginative treatment of a familiar theme'; also an imaginative treatment of a familiar style, because the British realism of this film was not that of the usual white, exploited, working-class heterosexual male but that of the black, entrepreneurial, homosexual immigrant Pakistani which gave a whole new dimension to perceptions of Thatcherite Britain. It allowed him to smuggle in references to examples of a British film culture he loved- oblique allusions to Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers by a director he adored, Alexander Mackendrick, and to Great Expectations (another British movie he loved), where Laundrette's hero, Omar could almost be a modern version of Pip, rising through the barriers of class on the wave of criminal money, and where this film's Miss Havisham, the hero's supposed benefactress who is actually contaminating his soul, is surely Mrs Thatcher. ' Nobody had written from that perspective before,' he said, and I think there were two things about that particularly attracted him:
1) It gave a voice to people commonly marginalised in society- victims of prejudice and ignorance, immigrants, delinquents, the disenfranchised, the powerless- and what they have to do to survive: indeed, more than that- to assert and affirm their identity. You can feel the same urgency in one of his most recent films, Dirty Pretty Things. Yet it seems an instinctive more than conscious sympathy: he never preaches. When an interviewer observed to him recently, 'Would you say that your films show a concern for people living on society's fringes?', he replied: 'It would never cross my mind, but now you mention it…' There has always been an anarchic streak in Frears' make-up that finds its way into his work: he does like his hooligans…
2) Another thing that Laundrette liberated: not only does he like outsider-heroes, but he likes coming into films himself as an outsider. Many directors only like making films about things that they know. Frears is the exact opposite of that: he likes making films, he has said, about things he knows nothing about, entering an unfamiliar world (which is why he can make it look so fresh), becoming a tourist in other people's universe, in the process finding out more about that world but also, obliquely but inevitably more about himself.

'I'm irredeemably cheap,' he once said and that became a problem on his 1993 Hollywood movie, Accidental Hero (still a greatly underrated movie, though) where had a larger budget than he knew what to do with. Conversely, High Fidelity fell into place when the producer told him: 'Make this like an independent film.' Yet when a critic said the film had more psychological depth than the novel, Frears replied: 'Oh goodness, how depressing.' He has never made-is incapable of making- a pretentious film and, at his best, he has the truculent talent to open your eyes and prick up your eyes as he trains his iconoclastic yet compassionate vision on the powerful and profane and on the insulted and the injured. When on Desert Island Discs recently, Frears had a very interesting choice for his favourite record to accompany him on the island: the Groucho Marx song from Horse Feathers, 'Whatever it is, I'm against it.' May this stimulating subversive spirit in him endure: whatever he does, I'm (invariably) for it.

Neil Sinyard