HOLLYWOOD, Nov. 22, 2000 — He chronicled the birth of the space program in “The Right Stuff” (1983) and remade the sci-fi classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978).
But even as he talks about his upcoming film “Quills,” director Philip Kaufman just couldn’t seem to get ignore the notoriety of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and “Henry & June” (1990).
And it’s no wonder. After all, “Quills,” like its two eyebrow-raising predecessors (The Milan Kundera-based “Unbearable” follows the tryst between a sex-minded doctor and a monogamy-minded woman, and “Henry & June,” about the life of writer Henry Miller, was the first film ever to get branded with an NC-17 rating), has at its core the same potentially touchy topic: Sex (of course), but as bound up in the imagination of a literary outlaw whose oeuvre included titles such as “The 120 Days of Sodom” and the same man whose name would later inspire the term sadism — the Marquis de Sade.
“I just respond to all kinds of things if they’re good,” said the 64-year-old Kaufman by way of explaining his taste in projects. “Look, I am interested in sex but no more than any of you. And [what I want to know is] why don’t we have more films that are adult sexually oriented or sex films that are about sex in America.”
But that’s not to say that Kaufman (and by extension, “Quills”) is merely obsessed with the three-letter word. If anything, the film — which revolves around the Marquis’ institutionalization in the asylum Charenton during the mid-18th century — uses its taboo topic to reflect upon freedom of expression, state censorship and the meaning of art, issues still relevant to our times.
Call it an allegory, if you will.
“I think that the Marquis de Sade is very potent Rorschach and has been for a lot of writers. I think to suggest that our movie is the definitive portrait of Sade is preposterous because he is lost to us,” said playwright and screenwriter Doug Wright, who penned the original play whereupon the film is based. “I think I’ve done what other writers have done in the past and I’ve plucked the mythological Sade from history and plunked him down, I hope, in a parable about our time and the nature of violent art in an unstable culture. So I’ve taken those aspects of Sade that most intrigue, titillated and appalled me, [and] I’ve incorporated them into a character I called Sade and placed him in our story. This is very much the Sade of ‘Quills.'”
A successful Off Broadway play in its own right, the stage version of “Quills” was bore out of the National Endowment of the Arts funding struggle between conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and controversial belated photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that erupted in the late 1980s.
Perhaps surprisingly, the process of adapting the play into its current cinematic form proved to be much less of a difficulty than its potentially controversial nature may have otherwise foreshadowed.
“There was something that arrived at my doorsteps [one day], which was sent to me by Fox Searchlight. So by the time I got into it, there was a studio that wanted to do this, which, in my experience, was an extraordinary thing. I usually spend years, like in ‘Henry and June.’ … But in this case, the gods shoned upon us and sent us the Marquis de Sade,” Kaufman said. “It’s just one of those fortuitous things.”
With funding and distribution in place, the next step was to find an actor with the right chops to embody the Marquis on screen.
And the search would eventually lead the director to Academy Award winner Geoffrey Rush.
“The minute I read the script, I also said I was going to get great actors. I know it will draw great actors and it did draw them, all as a labor of love,” Kaufman said.
“When I met Geoffrey … [I thought] not only is he a great actor, but every time I see him I don’t recognize him. … In other words, we have this, as Doug [Wright] described it, this mysterious Marquis, and the chance to have an actor who isn’t readily identifiable in a starring role was great,” Kaufman continued.
Besides Rush, Kaufman also enlisted an ensemble cast that includes Kate Winslet (as the chambermaid who smuggles the Marquis’ manuscripts for publication), Joaquin Phoenix (as the good-hearted young priest overseeing the asylum) and two-time Oscar winner Michael Caine, who plays a morally questionable doctor who has been dispatched by Napoleon to “cure” the Marquis.
“I think everyone knew that it was material that had to be met head on. You could diminish the piece or the dimensions of the argument by shying away from it and delivering safe, comfortable and not very dangerous performances,” Rush said of the challenges that came with taking on such a project.
“[The character] has got a mouth on him. He is going to say, ‘I am not going to sweep it under the carpet, we’re going to air this stuff. We’re going to talk about it. It’s going to be out there.'”
And with that, the actor has provided the best summation of what “Quills” has set out to do.
“Quills” opens Nov. 22 in L.A. and N.Y.
