CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 5/22/09

Easier Said Than Done:
Easy Virtue's Stephan Elliott

BY PETER CLINES

Writer-director Stephan Elliott came out of quasi-retirement (and a hospital bed) to adapt the stage play Noel Coward wanted to write…sort of.

Unable to escape the constant shadow of his cult film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Australian writer-director Stephan Elliott decided to travel the world and give up on filmmaking. "That's when I quite famously proceeded to ski off the French Alps and snap my body in half," he recalls, "which was a really great way of doing it." While Elliott was still bedridden and recovering, producer Barnaby Thompson approached him with the challenge of working on something outside of his comfort zone. "He just got me in a vulnerable moment," says Elliott.

Elliott and his writing partner, Sheridan Jobbins, adapted Easy Virtue from the 1924 stage play by Sir Noel Coward. It's the story of Larita (Jessica Biel), a worldly American woman who marries young John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) after a whirlwind romance and is now coming "home" to England to meet her new in-laws. Alas, the frosty reception she recieves from John's domineering mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) is the warmest part of Larita's stay at the isolated Whittaker estate. Despite her best efforts to win over her new family, the only one she can bond with is John's father, Jim (Colin Firth), a man weary of life since stumbling home from the Great War. However, when little Hilda (Kimberley Nixon) decides to dig up dirt on her new sister-in-law, she uncovers a dark secret about Larita that the groom himself hasn't learned yet.

Elliott took some time on the phone from London to talk with CS Weekly about finding hidden clues in a story, looking back at World War I, and how a barbequed chicken can make killing a dog in your script not only acceptable, but funny.

Noel Coward's play is almost a century old. Are there elements in it that just wouldn't work for a modern audience?
Yeah. It was very early Coward work. He hadn't found his lighter side. This is one of his one-off, very early dramas that wasn't necessarily a lot of fun. It was very clever, but it was kind of vicious. I began to realize while reading it, "Man, this isn't funny, it's just…ruthless." So what I said immediately, and what the studio said, is the Coward that people know is a much pithier and happier Coward, and this is probably one of his less-known plays because it wasn't so much fun. They said to us, "In a perfect world, what we would actually like is a very pithy Coward comedy." So in fact we took a melodrama, started thinking like Coward, did as much research as we could, and then turned that melodrama into a comedy.

That was a big, major shift. And with that, I said, I'm going to take this even further in the comedy direction. Once I realized that, I told makeup and wardrobe this is very much about the past meets the future, and I took the Whittakers and I let them dress them as early as1910, and I told them they could take Larita right through to about 1935, and that's where the platinum hair came from. Once I did that, I realized we're in Preston Sturges territory. Comedy was going through its great, goofball, fabulous female leading roles. The first screwball comedians. So that was one level. I said, I'm going to open this up by another couple of years and start bringing in some real screwball comedy, specifically sight gags. 'Cause I can guarantee that can-can and that dog being sat on, it doesn't matter what language in the world that plays in, it works! A yappy little dog being sat on, it brings the house down every time. [chuckles]

Now, you changed it to more of a comedy. A stage play also has certain inherent limitations to it. Were there things you wanted to expand on?
All the way through Coward had just peppered little words. Sometimes you're looking for things, but every now and then you just get a word. There's one thing in the play, he says, "There's lots to do, Larita." But it was in a one-room play, the three acts all in one room. That level of "there's lots to do" said to me "Fine, what is there to do at that time of year?" We started looking. There were just little key phrases. Jim—the Colonel in the play—he says, "Yes, I fought in the Somme." That's as far as Coward went, and then we added everything else on there.

The play is very much about claustrophobia and that she's stuck. So one thing I did is, no matter what happens, even when we did go outside or somewhere different, I always made sure it was crowded. No matter where Larita goes. I love that sequence where she's revealed the truth about her past and then goes outside for a cigarette, and they're chasing her across the lawn, surrounding her. Even when she's outside in the middle of nowhere, I want people around her. That's very much taking a big leaf out of the play's book.

Monte Carlo isn't in the original play, is it?
No, that's all us. Larita is described by Coward as a very modern woman, and again, that's one of those peppers, those little plants. It was at that time in 1928, when we roughly set it, the first time Monaco had actually done a Grand Prix. At the same time, in Australia, a woman had snuck into a racecar event disguised as a man. So again, it was just a great way of modernizing, of looking at stuff in the period and pulling it in.

A lot of Larita's backstory changed from the play, especially what happened with her first marriage. Why make such a large change in a part of her life we never see?
If you look at the plant, some people say the big reveal comes from nowhere. Well, it actually doesn't. She actually tries to tell John five times that something happened, and he keeps cutting her off. She had something to tell. Interestingly, though, that big scene afterwards in the bedroom where John comes in and says, "Why didn't you tell me?" and she says, "I tried to." That's Sheridan and I arguing with each other, because I don't think she tried hard enough. It's so big. It's such a big, nasty mark on her past, she should've tried a little harder. In my instance, I think she really didn't try hard enough. Sheridan looks at it from the ladies' perspective and says, "He's a bastard, he kept cutting her off." So, it's interesting to watch two writers. If you look at that scene playing out, that is Sheridan and I arguing with each other. And we don't actually have a resolution for it.

You mentioned Jim earlier. What made you decide to humanize him and soften him up?
As Coward got older he got very involved in the war effort. Famously, it's only come out in the past 20 years or so, but he was spying right through World War II. And he took it very, very seriously. He was 17 when World War I was underway, and he was in his early 20s when he wrote this. When I look at his treatment of the war, of what he said about it, you can see it was an uninformed, younger man writing. Because he just said, "Yes, yes, I fought." Well, you know, nobody came back from World War I. It was the most horrific new war. It was new, technological warfare. The first time they're using chemicals. I mean, we talk about it as "the lost generation." Coward just touches on it once or twice, but I kept thinking, if the older Coward has a chance to re-address what he'd written, how would he have written that? All the way through, I kept thinking what the older Coward would've done if he'd got a chance to rewrite his work. When I realized how important the war effort was, we took those singular couple lines about the war and started to expand on them.

How do you write a character like Furber, the Butler, where so much of his character is in the nuances of his performance?
To tell you the truth, I wrote the part for myself and eventually realized I just did not have the time. If you look at any photographs, Kris [Marshall] and I have a very strange resemblance. I go to film festivals, people ask if I'm the guy in Love, Actually. I get it a lot. So when I couldn't play it myself, I said, "Right, I'm going to get the guy who looks like me to play me." And Kris said it was the weirdest phone call he'd ever had in his life.

Once on set, he and I sat down and I said, "Hate." Furber has nothing but disdain for these people, and that's why it works so well with an audience. If there's one person in the entire cast that people can relate to, it's Furber.

One of those screenwriting rules they always tell people—never kill a dog. Let alone, never sit on it four times in a row…
Yeah, it's cool isn't it? [laughs] Let me tell you the key to it. There's a single key, and I worked this out a long time ago. You remember the ping-pong ball scene in Priscilla? Everybody told me I'd never get away with it. I had the Australian government, who were funding the film, saying, "You cannot do this." What makes it work is the sound. You don't see it, it's all implied, but that actual sound is this POP. That's me. I made that sound. The sound is so stupid that it sabotages the gag. If you look at that dog crunch, what makes that so dumb and laughable is that crunch. It very much takes it to a level of such screwball and such stupidity that you can't take it seriously. If you let that go—there's a cut of this film that we did without the sound there—that sequence is horrific. By the way, the sound is in fact a barbequed chicken being sat on. It's wet and it's crunchy and it's juicy. We went through six barbequed chickens. I just kept sticking a microphone up their bums and sitting on them. Where else do you get a chance to do something like this? Squash a Chihuahua and sit on a chicken? [chuckles]

Now, without giving it away, I'd like to talk around the ending a bit. You made a large change to the very end of the story. Why?
Well, again, if you look at what Coward did in the original play, what we'd done all the way is look for keys. Coward had put the plants in there. It's like he decided to move forward on it but hadn't followed it up. One absolute key for us as writers was Coward's admission in his biography that he found it an imperfect play. The pushing over of the Venus de Milo, that happened at the middle of the second act, and Coward admitted flat outright that was a huge mistake on his part. So once we heard the words, that gave us some real license. But every clue to what we ever had was there. It makes sense. We don't know what happens next—we're just getting out. So again, that was a part of the puzzles planted for us by Coward, which we just took to the next level.

Noel Coward never really made any public comment about Alfred Hitchcock's version of this story. What do you think he would've said about yours?
Honestly… Well, I'm going to have to meet him at some point [chuckles]. I'll never have his wit, but I understand growing up in this environment, particularly in the UK. No matter what happens in this environment I live in here, being Australian, they will never accept me. At the end of the day I will always be a convict. In that instance, a lot of the top classes gave Coward a very hard time. They never let him forget that his mother was a seamstress and his father was a clerk. So I think that we'd have a common ground to at least talk about. Whether he approves or not, I certainly hope he does, because he did say one very major key thing in one of his biographies. He said, "I never want my work to become museum pieces." If Coward really does not want to have this locked away and wants it dusted down and acknowledges that he does, then I think he'd approve. But we'll find out someday. [chuckles]



Peter Clines grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and made his first writing sale at age 17 to a local newspaper. He currently lives somewhere in southern California, and can often be found ranting on his cleverly named blog, Writer on Writing. His first novel, Ex-Heroes, will be released in fall 2009.



Stephan Elliott, Easy Virtue courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

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