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 Australian director STEPHAN ELLIOTT has been through hell – he faced financial ruin when his 2000 feature, Eye Of The Beholder, flopped, and nearly lost his life in a 2004 skiing accident – but he has returned with flying colours with an adaptation of Noël Coward’s EASY VIRTUE. ALASDAIR DUNCAN recently caught up with Elliott to get the dirt on the project, his first in a decade, and find out his future plans.
When Easy Virtue opened in The UK, it was savaged by critics, a reaction that director Stephan Elliott had anticipated. "I think they were offended that I’d come in as an Aussie, an outsider, and put my stamp all over a Coward classic," he tells me, as he prepares for the film’s Australian premiere that night. Elliott’s version is indeed a distinct departure from the original play – with far more comedy, and sex appeal in the form of Jessica Biel – but he stands firmly by the changes he made. "The fact is that I find most costume dramas really bloody boring – I go to a Merchant Ivory film and I’m asleep in five minutes. I wanted to create something that would be interesting to me as well as contemporary audiences."
Easy Virtue includes many risqué sequences, not least of these, a cancan dancing scene in which young star Kimberley Nixon inadvertently bares all, when her character is told that French girls do the dance sans any form of underwear. "Kimberley was so nervous she was almost crying," Elliott says, laughing "she was really uncomfortable, so I decided we had to find a way to cover her up. I called out for someone to get me a merkin of some kind, but the best the props department could come up with was an old man beard, a horrible, scraggly thing. We cut that to size with some nail scissors and stuck it on Kimberley, so that’s what you see in the finished film."
Elliott created much of the Easy Virtue soundtrack in collaboration with old friend Marius De Vries – determined for the soundtrack to match the irreverent tone of the film, the pair assembled an orchestra and re-recorded a selection of contemporary pop songs in a 1920s jazz style. Only three of these made it into the final cut – "the rights were just too bloody expensive to acquire", Elliott tells me – but the desired effect was still achieved. Indeed, after Easy Virtue, you’ll never hear the Tom Jones song Sex Bomb quite the same way.
As a filmmaker, Stephan Elliott is a fierce independent – he prefers to write and direct his own material, allowing a great deal of creative license, but shutting him out from the Hollywood game. Years ago, he spent two weeks at the helm of the first Charlie’s Angels, but stepped down because the politics were too much to handle. "I’ve been offered really big features and turned them down," he tells me. As for the future, he would consider coming back to Australia for a film if he could organise funding, but has not entirely given up on America. "I think, realistically, I have one more crack at making it big in Hollywood. I don’t want to talk too much about it, but I’m flying over in a few weeks. We’ll see what happens."
EASY VIRTUE is in cinemas now, rated [PG]. Check out www.easyvirtuethemovie.co.uk for more information.
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