From ‘Hackers’ to Highbrow

LONDON —  There wasn’t much on Iain Softley’s filmography to suggest him as the right person to direct a handsome costume drama based on a literary classic.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Softley made a name in Britain directing music videos before making two films with strong pop-culture links. First was “BackBeat” (1993), the story of ex-Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, who quit to become a visual artist in Germany before the band became famous. Then, in 1995’s frenetic “Hackers,” a teen flick about kids causing havoc in cyberspace, New York’s skyline was depicted as computer circuitry.

This suggests a man drawn to a certain type of material, far removed from the formal, psychologically complex novels of Henry James. So it is surprising that Softley has directed Hossein Amini’s adaptation of James’ 1902 story “The Wings of the Dove” (which opens Friday) with such feeling and empathy. The $15-million film, financed by Miramax, stars British actors Helena Bonham Carter, Linus Roache and American actress Alison Elliott. It is visually ravishing in a manner that makes Oscar speculation inevitable.

Softley, 40, is an articulate man with forceful opinions, but he is quietly spoken and calm in manner. Seated at his desk in a cramped set of offices three floors above Soho, the heart of London’s film industry, he acknowledged people might do a double-take when they see his name on a film like “The Wings of the Dove.”

“I’m not in love with the 19th century on film,” he said. “There are too many people talking in drawing rooms. I like films about people on the edge of society, in the back alleys rather than the polite drawing rooms. So I had a bit of a distance to travel.”

This became clear when he first read “The Wings of the Dove,” urged on by producer Stephen Evans of Renaissance Films, formerly a partner of Kenneth Branagh. “Stephen had a passion for the book and wanted to put it on the screen,” Softley recalled. “But I had a look at it, and thought it user-unfriendly for adaptation.”

Still, he was given writer approval, though Evans suggested he meet Amini, who had previously scripted Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel “Jude the Obscure” for film as “Jude.” “We met, became keen to work together, and realized we wanted to make the same kind of film,” Softley said.

“What became clear in reading the book was, although it was cerebral and the text was a psychological narrative, it had ambiguous, complex, contradictory characters. So that seemed true to life.”

It also intrigued Softley when Amini pointed out analogies between the plot and the conventions of film noir stories; both men were interested to learn that Dashiell Hammett, the writer of hard-boiled detective fiction, named James among his favorite writers.

By now Softley was hooked. “The Wings of the Dove,” set in England and Italy, revolves around Kate Croy (Bonham Carter), a smart, spirited young woman who is taken in by her wealthy aunt (Charlotte Rampling) when her mother dies. Her aunt aims to marry Kate off to a rich, appropriate suitor. But secretly she is in love with a man who is neither: Merton Densher (Roache) is a journalist with radical views who is decidedly outside polite London society.

Kate meets and befriends Millie Theale (Elliott), a wealthy American heiress who turns out to have a life-threatening illness. Merton accompanies the two women to Venice, where a complex web of passions and betrayals is woven.

“There was a dark side to Kate and her web which drew Merton in,” Softley said. “It made it appropriate for us to use noir imagery--lots of light and shade, and silhouettes.”

The fact that the film’s denouement takes place in Venice clinched the deal for Softley. As a student he had visited this extraordinary city built on water, and had painted its buildings and canals; it made a huge impression on him, which in the film is echoed by Eduardo Serra’s lush, almost trance-like cinematography.

“The city’s like a metaphor itself,” he said. “It’s all light and space and shapes, steeped in an atmospheric, rather sinister history. Venice is like a map of a thriller plot. You come to corners and you don’t know if you’ll meet a lover or assassin round the corner. Nicolas Roeg’s film ‘Don’t Look Now’ exploited that brilliantly. Beyond that, I liked the idea of presenting a world that was a map of the inner world of the characters and their dilemmas. There was a scene of a pagan carnival, and these funereal gondolas gliding along the canals as if on their way to Hades. It was incredibly potent as a setting.”

Venice was a dream for Softley, though he concedes the film crew might feel differently: “They had to carry boxes from canal to canal, down alleys, off barges. But the effect of traveling on water had an incredible effect on people. It’s as though we were all hallucinating together.”

Filming in Venice took place in August last year, which presented the threat of being surrounded by 20th century tourists. “But at midnight Venice goes quiet and returns to the past,” Softley observed. “So we shot night shots between midnight and 5 a.m. We would then change for daytime shooting, and had between the sun coming up at 6 until people arrived for work at 7:30 for our wide shots.”

Softley and Amini had decided to adapt Henry James boldly. For one thing, their adaptation of the 1902 novel is set in 1910. Why did they do it?

“I wanted to give people the view that this was the beginning of the world we know,” Softley noted. “What underlies the dilemma faced by the characters is brought into sharp relief by what was happening in history. It was the point where the Old World met the New World. There were big forces at work in 1902 which influenced how people were thinking. The idea of votes for women was just starting to break through. People were starting to think about abstract art. There was a challenge to the old political order.

“But the visual representation of that world hadn’t broken through. Look at a snapshot of London in 1902, and it isn’t so different from how the city looked 10 or 20 years earlier, in terms of the clothes people wore, the number of horses and carriages on the streets [as opposed to cars].

“By 1910, fewer women were wearing corsets--and in fact the designs for women’s clothes mirrored some of Issey Miyake’s pleated dresses from two or three years ago. There were more telephones, more cars, women traveled on the Underground [Bonham Carter is seen doing precisely that in the film’s opening scene]. So it was a question of trying to show the explicit manifestation of what was implicit in 1902.”

Another notable departure from Henry James’ text is the inclusion of a sex scene late in the film, with Kate and Merton naked on a bed. “We went into that with our eyes open,” Softley said. “We had no qualms. We felt it was essential in indicating the sort of scene it was, and making it relevant and familiar in the most stark way possible.

“There is true sexuality [in the equivalent scene in James’ novel] in a way that’s psychologically explicit. The scene has a rather antediluvian feel--it’s like Adam and Eve seeing themselves naked for the first time. Throughout the film Kate has been seen through grids and veils, little coverings and deceptions. By the end they’re all removed.”

“I first met Iain just before ‘BackBeat’ came out,” recalled producer Stephen Evans. “I liked him. He struck me as a thoroughly professional, genuine guy. And that was borne out in the making of this film. As a producer I tend to look at potential directors as people rather than what they’d done--though I thought ‘BackBeat’ was well made, and I actually liked ‘Hackers’ too.”

The Miramax people were less convinced about Softley, according to Evans: “But we stuck with him until they relented. Yes, I feel vindicated. On the back of this film, he’s going to do really well.”

Evans also approved of Softley’s take on James’ story: “He’s brought a modernist point of view to it, and Hossein is a modernist adapter. Ismail Merchant and Jim Ivory had already asked me to make the film for them--but I wanted to shake out of the Merchant Ivory way of filming stories like this.”

Finally, Evans applauds Softley’s financial responsibility; he delivered “The Wings of the Dove” fractionally under budget.

Henry James is currently the classic novelist of choice among movie makers. Jane Campion’s adaptation of his “Portrait of a Lady” won wide praise on its release last year. And director Agnieszka Holland’s film of James’ “Washington Square” opened in Los Angeles last month.

Softley, having noted that neither he nor the two female directors is American, thinks he knows why James is the flavor of the month: “He writes strong complex women, who are rare in mainstream cinema today,” he said. “Here are characters with doubts, who aren’t necessarily sympathetic in a facile way, but are more human in their contradictions. So the emotional hold they have on you by the end of the story is more intense.”

It might seem “The Wings of the Dove” would feel like a big leap for Softley after “BackBeat” and “Hackers.” But he insisted it wasn’t so: “The budget was about the same as ‘Hackers,’ which cost $15 million and was a demanding film. It was supposed to be an entertainment, but it was conceptually quite complex and logistically tough.

“In New York, we closed down 10 blocks of Park Avenue for a 66-car stunt, and shot at the Empire State Building and Grand Central Station. Shooting computers, screens and projections was incredibly demanding.

“In a sense I felt on firmer ground with ‘The Wings of the Dove.’ I felt I knew these characters, I’d been in some of these situations--the central dilemma of the degree to which you need material security, whether to follow your head or heart.

“I also knew the environment. I was familiar with Venice. I had its architecture, images and visual vocabulary in my mind. ‘Wings’ may be perceived as a bigger film, but to me it felt like a comfortable process.”

This sounds confident and assured for a man widely assumed to be relatively new to movies. In fact, Softley has been making films of one kind or another for the last 15 years. He was born and grew up in western London, and became interested in music and painting. He took a year out of academic work at 18 and went to France where, he said, “I painted a lot, traveled around, and first saw cinema in a different way. I got my film education in little independent cinemas in Paris.”

At Cambridge University he studied English, and directed and designed theater productions: “I realized quite soon I was overloading them with visual trickery and had a yearning for that dimension offered by film.” While still at Cambridge, he made a couple of small films.

He spent a year as an assistant designer, then began work with a local documentary unit at Britain’s Granada TV, a breeding ground for filmmakers. In later years he joined the BBC in Southampton, on Britain’s south coast, and made 30 “auteur documentaries” for TV, usually short subjects about some aspect of pop culture, over a two-year period.

While still at the BBC, he started looking for a rites-of-passage story to make into a feature film, and came upon photographs of Stuart Sutcliffe taken around 1960 by Sutcliffe’s girlfriend, German photographer Astrid Kircherr. They gave him the inspiration to start developing the film that would become “BackBeat.” He probably wouldn’t deny that “The Wings of the Dove” is, in a very different way, a rites-of-passage story too.

“I was adamant, and Hossein agreed: It was a film for young audiences,” Softley said. “This is about people in their 20s, making decisions early in life. I didn’t want to make a literary adaptation for a more genteel audience. ‘BackBeat’ was about a love triangle, a film which worked on an intimate level of human relationships. And in ‘The Wings of the Dove,’ that’s exactly what’s at the core.”