On an autumn afternoon in Soho in central Lon- don, UK director Stephen Frears is hard at work editing his new film Lay The Favorite, a gambling drama set in Las Vegas and New Orleans, starring Bruce Willis, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Vince Vaughn. Frears — who is receiving the European Film


Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award tonight — cuts a slightly dishevelled figure: he is wearing a T-shirt and his hair doesn’t look as if it has enjoyed any recent encounters with a comb. He recalls how he was at the founding meeting of the European Film Academy in Berlin in 1989 along with other stalwarts of European cinema includ- ing Wim Wenders, Krzysztof Zanussi, Bernardo Bertolucci and Claude Chabrol. “I remember I flew back from the Academy


Awards [to be at the meeting],” says Frears. “EFA wanted to be different from the Academy Awards and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t quite know if you can set up a different system.’” One of the suggestions from the UK film-mak-


ers in attendance was to present a prize to vision- ary and supportive European producers. Frears says the Polish-born Zanussi laughed at the sug- gestion. When they asked why, he explained that in Soviet-era Poland, the state was the producer. “And why would you give the state a prize?” he asked. EFA never introduced that award. Frears is passionate about European cinema


which, he says, has “completely different values” to those of American cinema. “The European values go back to Jean Renoir,”


he explains. “They are very… humanist.” And the Americans? “I don’t want to be unkind


to them. It’s just different. It is to do with enter- tainment.” But the UK director suggests he is not “a very


good example” of a European-style auteur. He doesn’t write or develop his own projects “like a proper European”, but directs films written by other people. However, he adds he and Bernardo Bertolucci tend to sing songs from The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg whenever they meet.


LEARNING THE ROPES It is nearly 50 years since the Leicester-born Frears started collaborating with the likes of Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz on stage and screen and 40 years since his debut as a director on Gumshoe in 1971. Since then Frears, like his near contemporaries Michael Apted and Mike Newell, has made films in every conceivable genre: comedies, social dramas, period pieces and hardboiled thrillers.


I like the whole experience of


receiving scripts. I like being surprised


“I like being hired. I like the whole experience


of receiving scripts. I like being surprised,” he explains. Ask him to define the “Frears stamp” and he


parries the question: “If there is one, I don’t know what it is.” Observers point to his craftsmanship, his


adaptability, his flair for working with actors, his mild subversiveness. And for his own part, Frears posits his apprenticeship in UK TV drama in what was the golden period of the 1970s and 1980s. His credits then included the Alan Ben- nett-scripted A Day Out, and Three Men In A Boat, adapted from Jerome K Jerome’s novel by Tom Stoppard and starring Michael Palin. “You were taught to direct what was in front of


you,” he says, recalling these early days. Like being made to eat vegetables as a kid? “No, it’s not as merciless as that,” Frears says.


“But I really come from a writers’ theatre, and tel- evision was a writers’ medium. You didn’t get ideas above your station. I was there to serve the writer.” Anderson and Reisz, arguably his two most


important mentors, were film-makers rooted in the European tradition. Anderson’s most cele- brated film If… (on which Frears worked) self- consciously harked back to French director Jean Vigo’s 1930s classic Zero De Conduite. Anderson was also inspired by, and supportive of, the Czech New Wave of the early 1960s. Reisz was from a central European background. He famously called Frears “a very bright chap” after hiring him for his 1966 film Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment. Reisz had a reputation as a kind man. Anderson


is less often described in that way. “Peppery,” is the word Frears uses. “But his heart was in the right place. He was very, very intelligent and a very good teacher of life.” It could be argued Frears has outstripped both


Reisz and Anderson. He has certainly made far more films than either. “I remember Jack Clayton saying to me after I made my first film, ‘Don’t be like us, don’t wait five


European Film Awards 2011 n 55


(From top) Stephen Frears’ debut as director Gumshoe, starring Albert Finney, and his 1985 breakthrough My Beautiful Laundrette, which introduced Daniel Day-Lewis


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