In an era when the director of Bad Taste is selling lunchboxes and replica swords, it’s gratifying to know that Bernard Rose is out there, suffering for all our sins.
Today, as the august British auteur recounts the slings and arrows visited upon him professionally, you can’t help but feel that the crucifixion scene forming the denouement of Snuff Movie is a suitable visual metaphor for his tempestuous career.
I’m surprised when he tells me that he does not receive residuals from his 1992 hit Candyman and taken aback when he refers to one prominent film distributor as a “criminal”. Libel laws prevent me from elaborating further. The Machiavellian machinations surrounding the release of ivans xtc are something else again.
This highly acclaimed film, you may remember, was a retelling of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in which a smug, ambitious bureaucrat finds himself unequal to the task of dying prematurely. Rose relocated the drama to the sleazy world of self-serving Hollywood agents to splendid effect. Danny Huston’s central performance was applauded as the finest in that actor’s remarkable vita. But not everyone was happy.
When the Creative Artists’ Agency organised a swish screening of the film in 2000, the reaction from Hollywood’s movers and shakers was, reputedly, something akin to the audience seeing Springtime For Hitler for the first time.
Just six months earlier in November 1999, Jay Moloney, a former super-agent with the firm, had hanged himself. Moloney’s story was a classic Hollywood fable – a young hotshot who swiftly became agent to the likes of Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, David Letterman and Bill Murray before he was even 30. He was once tipped to take over from CAA head Mike Ovitz, but cocaine addiction would end his career completely in 1996. In 1998, when Bernard, a former client, attempted to discover what had happened to Moloney, he discovered that nobody knew nor cared, an indifference which inspired the callous supporting characters in ivans xtc.
“When there’s a whispering campaign against you and your film, you can’t prove anything”, recalls Bernard. “And I’m sure they’ve forgotten all about it now. But the film is still unavailable in the US.”
The controversy didn’t stop there. The project, made on high definition digital video, seemed to imply that the future of cinema was not on film or with the studios. Bernard’s enthusiasm for this new democratisation of the image would land him in further trouble with Universal Studios who had hired him to work on a $9 million fantasy feature, The Thief Of Always. They were evidently less than thrilled when the director gave an interview to a website declaring - “Film is dead. Long live cinema.”
“I’d just made Ivan and I was really excited about it”, he says. “I was busy thinking ‘Wow, now we can all make films without having to deal with the system’. The Thief Of Always was a very expensive movie, probably too expensive and risky, so I don’t think there was any real malice. But they did remove me from the film.”
At the time, Mr Rose seemed to be unstoppable. A precocious talent, his work had already appeared on the BBC while he was still a teenager. He made his name straight out of film school directing music videos for the likes of UB40 and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. His first film, Paperhouse, in 1988, led to work in America including Candyman which was recently voted as one of the ten scariest films by The Times. He went on to tackle the Beethoven biopic Immortal Beloved and Anna Karenina. The latter was taken away by Warner Brothers because they found Tolstoy’s portrait of an unfaithful wife to be ‘unsympathetic’. They cut the three-hour film down to a disjointed hour and 45 minutes.
Since then, it has been virtually impossible for the 46 year-old to get new projects up and running.
“We have simply been unable to benefit from our own films financially,” he sighs. “Even when you make your film outside the system, you are still at the mercy of a distributor and it’s common for people further up the food chain to just pocket the money. We haven’t been able to follow it up with anything. We’ve had a lot of creative and good ideas but we’re powerless because we have no operating capital.”
Snuff Movie, an intriguing horror touching on the darknet, Manson inspired killings and yes, crucifixion, arrives after a six-year hiatus.
“To be perfectly honest with you I’m not terribly attracted to the horror genre,” says the Candyman director. “But it’s an easy way to finance a film to stay within a genre, particularly that genre. In the case of Snuff Movie, it purports to be a horror film, but in many ways it’s an anti-horror film. I’m asking why is the audience attracted to that stuff.”
The film revolves around an eccentric auteur, Boris Arkadin, whose films look like Hammer horrors as directed by Polanski, until his pregnant girlfriend and some party guests are murdered by a strange cult of females obsessed with capturing death on camera. A disturbed Arkadin goes into reclusion for many years, blaming his own films for inspiring the murders, only to emerge as the director of a dramatization of these same events.
“Film has always been driven by two base spectacles – gore and pornography”, explains Bernard. “The first films were pornographic. The first videos were pornographic. But there’s also a nostalgia in there for the way movies were when I was a kid. People like Welles and Fellini and Polanski and Kubrick, their spin was that they were in grand control of epic films. Of course, any film is subject to chance unless you’re making a computer animation where you’re controlling every aspect of the frame. But they were larger than life. You believed they had power.”
There is, however, no truth in the reports that Snuff Movie is a bizarre riposte to The Passion Of The Christ.
”It’s more of a piss-take of Eyes Wide Shut,” says Bernard. “I actually admired Mel’s movie very much. The early symbol of the Christians was a fish. Christianity only took the crucifixion as its central image once the Romans embraced it. And it’s that Roman thing I’m trying to get back to – that obsession with sadism and masochism. I think Mel’s movie captures that very well – those carnival aspects of Christian imagery.”
He laughs.
“But I hope it’s done with a bit of humour really.”