Crouse Richard - Raising hell: Ken Russell and the unmaking of The devils

To Andrea,

my favorite little devil

Prologue

Give Me Moody One: My Night with Ken Russell

It was the kind of email that sends a chill down your spine. On the day an ad appeared in the newspaper touting my live interview with legendary director Ken Russell at a screening of his cult film The Devils , I got a note from Phil Brown, a writer who had just had the pleasure of interviewing Russell on the phone. It did not go well. Not well at all. Brown was barely able to coax even yes or no answers from the cranky eighty-three-year-old.

Heres a taste:

Q: What did you base The Devils on and what drew you to the material?

Ken Russell: It was so long ago that I cant remember now.

Q: Do you consider it a horror movie?

Ken Russell: No.

You get the idea. Not promising.

I checked my contract. Id been hired to interview him for one hour after the movie. Desperation set in. I went online to see if there were any other recent Russell interviews I could read to gauge if he really had nothing to say or was simply having a bad day when he spoke to my colleague.

A quick Google search of the terms Ken Russell and interview returned some alarming results, several of which referred to the event I was hosting. Richard Crouse has the unenviable task of interviewing the tight-lipped Russell, said one search result. Others revealed him to be just as monosyllabic as I feared.

I called the promoter with an idea. Perhaps I should have dinner with Russell before the show to warm him up. Typically I dont like to meet with my interviewees beforehand Id rather get them fresh onstage but in this case it seemed like a good idea. A day or so later I heard back. Hed love to have dinner.

Things were looking up.

The night of the show we met at Southern Accent, just around the corner from the Bloor Cinema in Toronto where the show was being held. I walked past the theater on my way to dinner. There were a few hundred people already waiting outside. A cold sweat enveloped me, even though it was August and sweltering on the street.

At the restaurant we were seated at a large table with the promoter, several members of his entourage, Russell and his wife, Lisi Tribble. I sat next to Russell and introduced myself. He smiled but said nothing. I told him a story about how, as a twelve-year-old child, I snuck out of the house and hitchhiked miles to see Tommy , his 1975 rock opera. I told him I was grounded for a year afterward, but it was worth it. He smiled a bit more broadly, but still no sound passed his lips. The waiter came by. Russells wife ordered him a drink. He smiled.

At least he seemed to be in a good mood.

The waiter came back. More smiles and I thought I detected a nodding of the head but still no words. I was thinking of excusing myself from the table and faking a heart attack to get out of hosting, but I persevered. The silence at the table was deafening so I left early to check out the theater. It was sold out. Even the balcony was jammed. Nine hundred and fifty seats sold to hear my conversation with a mute.

Wed had to move the onstage setup of two chairs and a table to the auditorium floor because Russell wouldnt have been able to make it up the steep stage stairs. Trouble was, we were plunged into darkness down there. Great, I thought, sitting in the dark talking to myself for an hour. This would be the hardest-earned paycheck ever.

My phone rang. Russell was on the way. He moved very slowly, so I was told to chat up the audience before my intro. I told the Tommy story. I talk about The Devils , how it is one of the most controversial movies ever made and how lucky we were to be seeing it on the big screen. The audience was eating it up. Whooping. Clapping. I still had no idea if Russell was prepared to actually say anything.

I introduced him as he walked down the aisle, supported on one side by his wife, on the other by the promoter who got me into this mess. When the words Help me welcome Ken Russell slipped from my mouth, the audience jumped to its feet as though an electric shock was sent through every seat in the place. It was as if I had just said, Ladies and gentlemen, back from the dead to sing for you tonight, Elvis!

He nodded his now familiar nod to the audience but said nothing.

I took a deep breath and started with a general question about the film. He answered. Hooray! What he said didnt seem to make much sense, but at least I knew his vocal cords were working. I could work with that.

From there it was as if he fed off the energy of the audience and grew stronger as the night wore on. He was funny, eccentric and slightly cantankerous. Most of all he was long-winded! In short he was just like the movie he was there to speak about confounding, unexpected and entertaining.

When I asked what made Oliver Reeds performance in The Devils so special he said, Its a rather unique performance insofar as he really pulled out all the stops. I had a special working relationship with him. It was quite simple but very effective. He called me Jesus.

I directed him in a very simple fashion. Hed say, What do you want, Jesus? and I would say, Give me Moody One. Moody One was one of the simplest instructions that I could give him. Moody Two was a little more important and Moody Three was do anything you like. And that was what we usually did. [Moody Three] could be extremely dangerous. He was a very moody guy and I would often say, Careful, boy! There are women and children present. He would let himself go.

I followed by asking if Reeds unpredictability was what made him a great actor.

Great actor? he deadpanned. I never said he was a great actor. No, he was a terrible actor.

Why did you work with him over and over again?

Cause he was cheap. He did the movie thing to perfection and he never let me down, I must say. Once we had worked out Moody One, Moody Two and Moody Three, he was good as gold.

To wrap things up after a wide-ranging discussion about his life and films, someone in the audience asked who the filmmaker he most admired was. Without hesitation he said, Ken Russell! Cue the applause.

When it was over, fifty-five minutes later, his assistant hugged me. He hasnt done an interview like that in years, he said.

Writing in Esquire Chris Heath said, Its hard to remember now that there was a time, not just before Netflix but before VHS home video, when most movies were secrets. Movies with special images and weird dissonant ways of looking at the world could usually only be seen with great effort, typically when they came to the one cinema in town that catered to the arty college crowd; even the keenest movie fan might have to wait many years to see every film by a favorite director.

Heath was writing about Werner Herzog, but the words are even truer in regard to Ken Russell. His films, especially The Devils , are still hard to find even in the age of On Demand, Netflix and Blu-ray. His work is woefully underrepresented on video store shelves, and unbelievably the full, uncut version of The Devils has never been officially released for home consumption. Shoddy bootlegs exist, theres an Asian laser disc and in 2012 a DVD from BFI Video presented the original U.K. X certificate version, but still didnt include the films controversial moments despite the fact that the fully restored film is reportedly sitting, gathering dust, in a Warner Brothers vault somewhere. Even after four decades the movie is thought to be too controversial for release.

Considering Ken Russells fame as an auteur at the time of The Devils the London Observer listed him as one of Englands most influential citizens, ranking him higher than the prime minister, Harold Wilson it is quite shocking how little was written about the film upon its release or after. Contemporary writers (mostly) wrote it off stay tuned for some of the most scathing reviews ever and though interviews appeared in Time , Sight & Sound and others, surprisingly little ink was spilled on what is, arguably, Russells greatest film.