Self-styled independent filmmakers abound these days, but few of them are so genuinely independent that they only film the subjects that interest them, with the casts and crews of their own choice, and without studio or producer interference at any stage of the process. One of those mavericks is Joseph Strick, the 77-year-old American film and stage director whose film of Ulysses has finally been passed by the Irish film censor, 33 years after it was first banned.
His production of the Aristophanes play, Ladies' Day, opens at the Granary theatre in Cork on Monday. It may well prove controversial, which will be nothing new to Joseph Strick. "There have been new translations of the Greek comedies," he explains, in a break between rehearsals in Cork. "For hundreds of years, they've been censored. I know it sounds like I'm fixated on the subject of censorship, but the fact is, the translations we had were all bowdlerised, simply because the academics who did them were afraid of those words. It turns out to be the bawdiest stuff you've ever read.
"It's extremely sophisticated stuff in that Aristophanes, in dealing with the war of the sexes, brings up issues that are being discussed today. In Ladies' Day, women have one day in the year of authority over the entire government in exchange for their fertility and the oppression they suffer because they can't vote, can't own property, are not supposed to read or write. "This one day the women have decided they are going to kill Euripides, because he's been writing these anti-women plays like Medea and Phaedra. It's such a foolish modern idea as well, that you can repress in order to improve. We have it today with women against pornography, which shows how little we have evolved. As if it would do any good. And who's going to judge?"
Unlike most staged plays, Strick's production of Ladies' Day will be quite different every night. "The play is, I think, very funny - and very experimental, and an attempt at extremely interactive theatre," he says. "We're going to involve the audience in all sorts of ways. The play is in rhyme and I hope the audience will be persuaded to supply some rhymes. "Then the audience is turned to when the anti-male things are said by the women, we expect the women in the audience to cheer and the men to hiss and boo. And the other way round when the anti-female arguments are made on behalf of Euripides. At the end there is a dance and we hope the audience will participate."
Strick directed the play in its bowdlerised version in California in the early 1960s and at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford in 1966. When he finished the new adaptation he advertised on the Internet and got about six replies, including one from Ali Robertson at the Granary in Cork.
"I went around visiting the different places and the Granary was obviously the best, the most adventurous and the most supportive," says Strick.
Born in 1923 to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Strick was raised in Philadelphia. He gained his earliest film-making experience as an aerial photographer with the US air force. After the war he made his first film, Muscle Beach, while he was working at the Los Angeles Times - "I went downhill from copyboy to make-up editor," he says - and it was shot on nights and at weekends. "It's a gently satirical spoof of all that narcissism and showing off that bodybuilders do. With that to my credit, I began to get offered different jobs as a director, doing junk. It's too bad to tell you about."
In 1959 he completed The Savage Eye, which was shot over five years, again on weekends and nights and with volunteer crews. A semi-documentary, it featured Barbara Baskin as a divorced woman trying to start a new life in Los Angeles. One of Strick's team was Haskell Wexler, who went on to become a great, Oscar-winning cinematographer, and Jack Couffer, who Strick describes as "the greatest natural history cameraman in the world".
The film, which won many international festival awards, was a labour of love - and hate - for all involved in its production. "Everyone who worked on it," says Strick, "did it to express our disgust with the Los Angeles scene and its vapidity, the dreadful architecture, the stupidity of the culture. Forty years on it hasn't changed. If anything, it's gotten worse in many ways." In 1963, Strick directed his film of Jean Genet's The Balcony, which featured Shelley Winters, Peter Falk and Lee Grant. "It's set in a brothel, and all brothels deal in illusion," he says. "However, this one specialises in giving their illusions to people who want to act them out. One man wants to be a bishop, another wants to be a judge, another a general. They act out these roles with the prostitutes. That's what they're interested in. They're not really interested in sex."
Genet himself loved the film, Strick says. "He was very taken by the idea of the movie studio as a brothel, which we know is true, and with the idea we showed the revolution through actual footage of revolutions. When I first met him he had just been released from a life sentence in prison, after a petition signed by Sartre and the major French intellectuals, except Camus who refused to sign, and Genet never forgave him. It was marvellous working with Genet. Such a brilliant guy."
Shelley Winters, Strick notes, had been a roommate of Marilyn Monroe. "The two of them had grown up accepting a lot of the illusions of Hollywood," he says. "There were things she could do better than anybody else, and there were things she couldn't do."
Strick met Marilyn Monroe just once. "She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman," he says. "It took a lot of takes to get a performance out of her. She grew and grew and grew, until finally, when she was doing The Misfits, she could act."
In 1967, Strick came to Ireland and made his controversial film of Ulysses. "I'd always wanted to do it," he says. "My parents smuggled the book in, in 1933, when I was six years old, and when I was 16 I read it. I just couldn't believe the extraordinary revolution in writing that it represented. I was hooked on it from then on. "In 1964 the film rights became available. The estate said there was a bidding and I should enter, because they liked my work. 20th Century Fox was bidding against me in the person of Jerry Wald, a very highpowered producer. He called me and said they would outbid me no matter what, so why didn't I pull out and not make it so expensive for them to get the rights. "Bidding had started at $75,000, which was way beyond my means. My pattern always has been to buy the material and develop it and then go to the studios. If you don't do that, you are victimised by the studio's investment and their control, and to me it's ludicrous to make a movie if I don't have control, if I don't have final cut, which very few film-makers get. I've just seen too many awful situations.
"When Jerry Wald died, I called the estate and they said I could have it if I paid the $75,000. So I got the rights and tried to make a whole 18-and-three-quarter hours, which is what you would have to do to take in the whole book."
HOW did he and his fellow screenwriter, Fred Haines, set about cracking as daunting a screen adaptation as Joyce's novel represents? "I made it just from the text," says Strick. "There are no new words. Who's going to rewrite Joyce? I know nobody that good. I couldn't raise the money for the 18 hours, so I worked within the money I could raise. "I was saved in the middle of shooting by the bank strike in Dublin which went on for about three weeks. We wrote cheques. British Lion, which was financing the film, was a consortium of six people, some of whom said the picture would get made over their dead bodies. The money was withheld, and they though they would starve us out, but we were saved by the bank strike. "For three weeks we made the film on cheques that could not be negotiated, and when the strike was almost finished, we phoned British Lion and said you have a contract to finance this film and here are the expenses that have been engendered. They honoured the cheques."
His cast for Ulysses reads like a who's who of Irish acting. Almost all are Irish with the exceptions of Barbara Jefford as Molly Bloom and Maurice Roeves as Stephen Dedalus. Milo O'Shea plays Leopold Bloom, with T.P. McKenna as Buck Mulligan, Anna Manahan as Bella Cohen, Maureen Potter as Josie Breen, Martin Dempsey as Simon Dedalus and Joe Lynch as Blazes Boylan.
The large cast also includes Fionnuala Flanagan, David Kelly, Maureen Toal, Maire Hastings, Geoffrey Golden, Chris Curran, Edward Golden, Desmond Perry, Rosaleen Linehan, James Bartley, Brendan Cauldwell, May Cluskey, Danny Cummins, Tony Doyle, Des Keogh, Eugene Lambert, Pamela Mant, John Molloy, Clare Mullen, Ann Rowan, Charlie Roberts, OZ Whitehead, Cecil Sheridan, Cecil Sheehan, Biddy White-Lennon and Tomas MacAnna.
Ulysses was refused a certificate by both the censor and the Film Appeals Board in 1967. Under the law, a rejected or cut film may be re-submitted after seven years. Ulysses was turned down by the censor again in 1974."It was humiliating for me to have this film banned in Ireland," Strick says. "I shot the film with absolute fidelity to the book." He recalls that, when it was first released in 1967, Ulysses was permitted to be shown in New Zealand only to audiences segregated by sex, and was banned outright in Australia for a short time. At the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, he was shocked to discover that the French sub-titles on the film had been obliterated with a grease pencil. "When I went to the projection room to protest, the committee was waiting for me," he said. "I was forcibly ejected, pushed down the steps and suffered a broken foot. I withdrew the film from Cannes."
Strick directed a series of monologues for RTE, drawn from stories by Jonathan Swift, Sean O Faolain and Mary Lavin, and he filmed Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with Bosco Hogan as Stephen Dedalus, T.P. McKenna, John Gielgud, Rosaleen Linehan, Maureen Potter and Niall Buggy. He did not return to Ireland for 25 years until coming to Cork recently for discussions with the Granary theatre regarding his adaptation of Ladies' Day. "That's how I found out how much Ireland had changed after all those years," he said, "and I decided to ask the film censor to reconsider the banning of Ulysses." Now that the film has been passed without cuts and with a 15 certificate by the present censor, Sheamus Smith, Strick feels vindicated finally: "It's such a relief. There were all those people I worked with on it who really looked to me to make a good film, and for them to be told it was something unworthy and dirty, that was not good."
The Ulysses screenplay earned Joseph Strick and Fred Haines an Oscar nomination. "I was sitting there at the ceremony," he says, "composing my speech, as we all do, and planning to give all the credit to Joyce. I was sitting next to Warren Beatty, who was just as tense. He was there with Bonnie and Clyde. We were so high on adrenalin." As it happened, Strick and Beatty lost out to that year's big Oscar winner, In the Heat of the Night
However, Strick went on to receive an Oscar three years later for his powerful documentary, Interviews With Mi Lai Veter- ans, which he made in the aftermath of the atrocities committed by the infamous Lieutenant Calley and his men. "I shot it in America, talking to veterans who had been there," says Strick. "The army had told them not to talk about it, so I said, to hell with that. My daughter is an anthropologist and she did a tour of America and met 105 men who between them had killed over 500 people in Vietnam. She talked to them and decided who was telling the truth. "The atrocities they committed were terrible and there was an enormous amount of self-denial going on. There was not a female left unmolested and there was not a male left complete. Interviewing them was really fascinating - how they got these young American kids to do these ghastly things - and it helped me to understand the Holocaust."
Resourceful as ever, Strick financed Interviews With My Lai Veterans from his profits as a producer on the wholesome family films, Ring of Bright Water and Living Free. He has spent most of the past 30 years living in Paris with his French wife, Martine, a scientist. He returned to the US in 1996 to make the documentary, Criminals, which he describes as dealing with "the reality of crime in America".
"I never was a studio man," Strick says as he prepares to resume rehearsals for Ladies' Day. "I've always done what I've wanted to do. I thought when I came out of the air force I could do what I liked. I really wanted to be a film director. And here was this gift of life presented to me."
Ladies' Day opens at the Granary theatre in Cork on Monday. Joseph Strick will give a talk about his work at Triskel Cinematek in Cork on Friday next, which will be followed by a screening of Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses will open at selected cinemas in Ireland in the New Year.