Rolling Stone Brian Jones had the looks, the charisma, the wild side ... and the rock star death. Stephen Woolley tells Michael Dwyer about the 12-year odyssey to bring Jones's tragic life to big screen.
The subject of a retrospective tribute programme at the Cork Film Festival last month, Stephen Woolley was given a special award at the festival in recognition of his contribution to Irish film, as the producer of most of Neil Jordan's films and of other Irish productions from The Last September to Intermission. Woolley was wearing a second hat at Cork, introducing his first film as a director, Stoned, which charts the short life of Rolling Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones, who drowned in his swimming-pool, and in suspicious circumstances, in 1969 when he was 27.
Woolley has been a film producer for more than 20 years, working on 40 films. But why has it taken so long for us to see the credit, "Directed by Stephen Woolley"? "I was never one of those people who always wanted to direct," he says. "Any time I've done job interviews with people who told me that what they really wanted to do was direct, my heart sank. I think I was waylaid into directing Stoned because of my obsession with the project."
He describes the film's journey to the screen as "a 12-year odyssey" that began when he bought the movie rights to two books on the life and death of Brian Jones, and continued as he explored the suspicious circumstances of his drowning, which are addressed in the film.
"I became attached to it in ways that I didn't understand," says Woolley. "When I was a kid in the Sixties, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones meant so much to me. I never felt I came from a particularly poor family. I had a great childhood growing up in Islington, but all five of us slept in one room, we had a television, a small kitchen and an outside toilet, but we didn't have a fridge, a telephone or a car.
"I lived the Swinging Sixties through the music. It existed in my head, but not in my life. My dad and all my uncles had all fought in the war and lost friends in it, and they had this real feeling of being excluded, having bought into all this propaganda from Churchill that they were warriors who had defeated Hitler.
"The world in my head then was the world of Brian Jones with all the sex and decadence, glitz and glamour. I desperately wanted to be in that world. By the time I was 13 I had long hair, an Afghan jacket and velveteen pants, but I was far too young to belong in that world."
At the core of Stoned is the odd-couple relationship formed between Jones (played by Leo Gregory) and his handyman Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine), who come from similar working-class backgrounds but are worlds apart when they meet. In marked contrast to the majority of biopics on dead rock stars, Woolley refuses to airbrush the less-palatable aspects of his subject's history, unflinchingly depicting Jones as manipulative, narcissistic and essentially unsympathetic.
"I wanted to make a film that didn't have a hero or a villain, because the world isn't like that. It's much more complex. There are scenes where Brian is gentle and warm with his girlfriends or with Frank, and where his creative side is shown, but we also show his much darker side. Brian was alienated from his mum and dad at an early age, when he got three girls pregnant around the same time in Cheltenham, although in the film we only needed to show one of those girls. By the time he died at the age of 27, Brian had five children with five different women."
ONE OF THE screenwriters on Stoned eventually told Woolley that he should direct the film because no one else had the passion to get it made. "So I picked up a challenge. I didn't find it all daunting. I actually felt very calm and happy. I had a great cast and crew, many of them people who had become friends down the years and had a wealth of experience behind them. When you've got such a great team with you and you believe so strongly in the script, directing isn't as difficult as many directors would like you to believe.
"Some directors create a myth about what they do, but what it's all about is everyone knowing why they're doing what they're doing, and what works one day and what doesn't work the next. When people saw my shooting schedule for the film, they said it was insane, that I could never do so much in such a short time - seven and a half weeks."
He recalls shooting some scenes at Pinewood Studios at the same time Tim Burton was making Charlie and the Chocolate Factory there. "We had these seven small sets and then I saw Tim's huge set, a big jungle with four or five cameras going. I got lost on my way back to my own little set and stumbled into Tim's River of Chocolate set, and finally found my own set and shot a scene in a toilet."
Even though Stoned was well received by the public and the press at the recent Toronto festival, Woolley says that US distributors are reluctant to take it on. "They say it's because it's not black and white in terms of who the audience is meant to like, even though audiences are far more intelligent and sophisticated than they're even given credit for."
Woolley notes that he encountered similar problems 13 years ago in the US with Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, which went on to become one of the most profitable independent productions released in the US and won an Oscar for Jordan's original screenplay. "The script was rejected time after time, and then when it was finished so many distributors turned it down. American distributors rarely tell you the truth and they say they already have too many films to release or some other excuse. But there was one who asked me, 'Do you really think we're going to release a film with a terrorist as the main protagonist and who falls in love with a black woman who turns out to be a man? You've got to be f**king kidding!'"
WOOLLEY SAYS THAT he "fell into producing" through his close relationship with Neil Jordan. In 1982, Woolley, an avid cineaste, was setting up his own distribution company in London and went to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time, seeking films to release. Nothing he saw impressed him more than Jordan's first film, Angel, which was screening unheralded in the festival market.
"Neil brought such cinematic poetry to the story," he says. "As soon as I got back from Cannes, I went straight to Channel 4 and asked to distribute the film. They basically threw me out of their offices, saying they were putting it on TV in three months. I arranged to meet John Boorman, who was the executive producer on Angel, and told him about my distribution company, which was then about to put out its first two releases, Diva and The Evil Dead. John came back with me to Channel 4, and they were a bit more civil this time.
"By this stage I had read Neil's incredible collection of short stories in Night in Tunisia and had just fallen in love with his work. I rang Neil for the first time and he and John Boorman came with me to Channel 4. I had also set up a repertory cinema in London, the Scala, and I suspended the repertory programme for three weeks so I could play Angel. This meant that all the film critics reviewed Angel and it was regarded as a cinema film and not just as a TV movie, which was important in terms of Neil's career in film."
Woolley's first film as a producer was Jordan's second as a director, The Company of Wolves. "At that time," he says, "I learned about this other movie Neil was working on for David Puttnam and Warner Bros, which was called Michael Collins. That was in 1983 and I became fascinated by this character, Collins.
"As Neil and I carried on, stumbling from film to film, this passion Neil had for the Collins film was always there. Over 10 years later, when Neil had such worldwide success with Interview With the Vampire, we finally managed to make Michael Collins. It was an extraordinary experience. Neil was working so fast that I was worried the sets wouldn't be ready in time for the next scenes."
The differencebetween producing and directing is "quite extreme", Woolley says. "When you're producing, so much of your work is diplomacy. There's always some crisis along the way, all these small fires to put out, but as a producer you have to remain as calm as possible and deal with the problem, and you don't turn it into a forest fire that alarms everyone else.
"So Neil has no idea of some of the problems we've had on various films. He had no idea we had no money when we started The Crying Game. I never involved him in the day-to-day problems because there was no point to putting all that extra weight on the director's shoulders." The relationship between Jordan and Woolley continues with Breakfast on Pluto, based on the novel by Patrick McCabe and due to open here in January.
"I think it's an amazing film, one of the best Neil or anyone else has made," Woolley says. "Someone said to me here in Cork that the relationship between Neil and me is like that between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but I think it's that combination of Neil and Pat McCabe that is more like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers."
In which case, I suggest, Woolley is perhaps Cyd Charisse to Jordan's Astaire.
Stoned is released next Friday