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 eleased in 1969, Midnight Cowboy is the only X-rated film ever to receive a Best Picture Oscar. The story of a naive New York hustler and his self-styled manager, perhaps its greatest feat was luring two brand-name Hollywood stars — Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman — into a film about gay prostitution. Such provocative material was par for the course for director John Schlesinger, whose unnervingly frank portrayals of sex saturate his best-known films. In Darling (1965), a directionless model fucks her way to fame, pregnancy and abortion; Julie Christie picked up an Oscar for the unsavory role. In Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), a bisexual love triangle reveals the complex changing mores of the decade, and Day of the Locust (1975) was ahead of its time in its indictment of the rabid celebrity worship that engulfs Hollywood today.Though Schlesinger would keep directing films until he became ill in the late 1990s (he died of complications from a stroke in 2003), by the time he made Marathon Man in 1976, many considered his best work to be behind him. When he directed The Next Best Thing, his last film, in 2000, he'd lost his health and the ability to wield control over the project.
You were on the set of your uncle's films? Several. I think at least five. How did you feel about being related to him? It made us all proud. He was very involved with his family, so we were always invited to the premieres in London and so on. We followed his career like that of one's own father. In your book, he makes it clear he disliked being pigeonholed by his sexuality. With the attention gay subject matter receives in Hollywood today, do you think he'd feel differently now? No. His attitude was basically that love is love, whether it's gay or straight or anything else. He certainly wanted to show more gay subject matter, but he didn't have any agenda. He didn't want to be pinned down to that, no more than he wanted to be pinned down by anything else. In his relationships, he also resisted being pinned down in terms of monogamy, even though he was with the same partner for many years. I think he felt loyalty was important, but sexual fidelity was not so important. He expresses this in his films. He felt there were many different ways of having a relationship, and his was not based on sexual fidelity. Is there more pressure today in Hollywood to show gay relationships in a positive light, or to emphasize that most gay relationships are normal and monogamous? [Even in the '60s and '70s], he got a lot of flak from gay activists for showing homosexuality in all its nuances. I don't know if filming in the '60s allowed him to show more of a dark side, though I do think there was more freedom to tackle any subject matter that was dark or controversial. Now, it's not just gay subjects [that can't be portrayed negatively]. Darkness generally is avoided as much as possible. I think in that sense, the '60s was a freer period in which to experiment. Today, a film like Midnight Cowboy might have trouble getting financed. Either that, or it would be made into something redeeming. And it would certainly be less dark. Was he concerned about censorship? Well, what worried him was that, at an earlier stage in his career, Hollywood producers — and again, this is where the difference between Europe and the US comes in — would insist on cuts he didn't really want to make. Like in the case of Darling: the nipple. Somebody from one of the American distributors had noticed that in one scene, you can just see the nipple, and they insisted on taking that out. Nobody else had even noticed it. Some gay audience members found the depiction of homosexuality in Sunday Bloody Sunday too tame, the main character a bit too saintly. Well, he himself thought the character was a little too saintly. On the other hand, his view was that that was precisely what made the film bold at the time. He said Sunday Bloody Sunday was his most personal film. As someone who knew him well, was that apparent? Absolutely. Of all the characters he's filmed, the character of the doctor [who sexually pursues a younger man] was by far the closest to himself. In that way it was somewhat autobiographical. He collaborated closely with the screenwriter, there was a lot of his input in the script and they did use things from his own life. A lot of people had a strong reaction to that first kiss in Sunday Bloody Sunday. Did you? It didn't faze me, and I think this is what made it an original film. He showed it in a completely matter-of-fact way. Nothing coy about it, not trying to make it prettier than it is or hide it. That is what some people found so shocking about it. He didn't mean it as a shock effect. He meant to show it as something that was totally normal. Did he feel that the advent of the '80s blockbuster cramped his style? I don't think he felt his filmmaking was altered, but he felt increasingly uncomfortable with [the industry]. The responses of the directors of so-called serious films were all different. Some directors, like Lindsay Anderson, simply turned their backs on it and spent years not making any films. John was different. He couldn't stand not working. I think he tried to be commercially successful on Hollywood's terms, as well as make the films he wanted to make. And he struck a kind of compromise, which he wasn't always happy about. The blockbuster age was rather alien to him. He didn't say much about his last film, The Next Best Thing. Because he hated it. He was already quite ill. He had liked the subject and he hoped that it would be a success, but from a very early stage he felt he wasn't being given the freedom to do it the way he wanted. It was just a wretched experience for him. Because it was a star vehicle? I don't think Madonna was especially difficult to work with. There was a problem, but that came a bit later when he was too ill to cope with post-production. She changed the music around and it sort of ran completely out of his control. That's when he really felt the film should never have been made. But he certainly never blamed Madonna for it. He made a compromise that he shouldn't have, and he regretted it. Very close to his death, you asked him what he was thinking about, and he was barely able to get out one word: "sexuality." You asked him if he was trying to say he thought he hadn't gone far enough with exploring sexuality in his films and he confirmed: "Not far enough." What else would he have liked to do? He would have liked to have done more with subjects like in his last film, but with more control over it. He regretted not having tried more subjects like that. What about a film like Brokeback Mountain? The success of something like Brokeback Mountain is interesting, and I'm not sure that would have been made in the '60s. But I think he would have liked that film. n°
©2006 F. Russell and hooksexup.com.
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, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
