A Director Who Bounces Around; Mike Newell Gravitates Toward Good Stories, From 'Mona Lisa' to Harry Potter
By SARAH LYALL
Published: December 29, 2003
Caught in a narrow window of inactivity between very different projects -- ''Mona Lisa Smile,'' released here this month and on Friday in the United States, and ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' which is to start filming in the next few months -- the peripatetic director Mike Newell was trying as hard as he could to come up with a coherent professional philosophy.
''Somebody once said to me, 'What's the big idea?' '' Mr. Newell said. ''I don't know whether there is a big idea. Does everybody have to have a big idea?'' He took some sips of his drink, a decaf cappuccino, and kept on talking. He is a nimble talker. ''Well, there is, actually. Of course there is. It's the characters.''
The director's search for a good story with vivid characters is a useful guide to explaining the almost random variety of his many films, which include ''Dance With a Stranger'' (1985), about the last woman ever to be sentenced to death in Britain; ''Donnie Brasco'' (1997), a mob movie starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp; ''Four Weddings and a Funeral'' (1993), which ushered in the era of the Hugh Grant romantic comedy; and ''Pushing Tin'' (1999), which starred Billy Bob Thornton and John Cusack as two highly stressed air traffic controllers.
''I hate doing the same thing twice,'' said Mr. Newell, who was trained as a television director during TV's golden period in England, in the 1960's. He spoke over midmorning beverages -- coffee, juice, water -- at the Groucho Club, an artsy food-and-socializing place in Soho, where he is a member. A tall, rumpled man with rimless bifocals and a sharp, articulate manner, Mr. Newell was having a few days off from his pre-filming Harry Potter duties, which include mapping out scenes using computer technology. The film is expected to open in November 2005.
''It's partly the way we were brought up: we were taught to be maids of all work,'' he said, explaining how he likes to bounce around. (After ''Goblet of Fire,'' his next project will be a small film about the relationship between Charles Darwin and his wife.) ''We had to do everything. You couldn't say, 'I don't do comedy' or 'I don't do thrillers.' ''
Thus it was that Mr. Newell found himself directing ''Mona Lisa Smile,'' a film about the efforts of a progressive teacher, played by Julia Roberts, to instill some feminist fire into some 1953 Wellesley undergraduates hoping above all else to leave school with Mrs. degrees. The film, which also stars Kirsten Dunst, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Julia Stiles, has received respectful reviews.
''What got me in the end is that I said to the producer that this was another version of 'Dead Poets' Society,' '' Mr. Newell said, referring to the film in which Robin Williams plays a wacky teacher who brings a daring dose of out-of-the-box thinking to a strict boys' boarding school.
''She said: 'No, that's really simple-minded of you, and the reason it isn't is that in this film, everybody affects everybody. Everybody's got their fingers in everybody else's emotional messes. It's a two-way street; the girls affect the woman as much as the woman affects the girls.' ''
Mr. Newell got his cast to read ''The Fifties,'' David Halberstam's sprawling social history of the era, and enrolled them in a crash course in 1950's etiquette, including ballroom dancing, table-setting and walking and sitting like the young ladies they were meant to be. The film also had relevance to his own life, he said. Mr. Newell, 61, was brought up in St. Alban's, Hertfordshire, the son of a construction surveyor and a housewife frustrated by the era's restrictions.
Mr. Newell's mother was an avid reader of the kind of women's newspapers and magazines that seemed to offer the key to a magic kingdom of domestic bliss.
Mr. Newell still remembers an incident from long ago when he came home unexpectedly and found his mother asleep. ''What I saw was that she was slumped over a three-bar electric fire which had browned her shin, she was so close to it. And she was slumped over like that, and her mouth was open, and there was a woman's magazine open on her knee. And it was an image of such hopelessness in the front room of this little house in St. Alban's. She was a very spirited woman, and she'd been driven completely desperate by having nowhere to go.''
On the cusp of his Harry Potter adventure, Mr. Newell knows that the new film is wholly different from anything he has tried before. The budget is much bigger (''you're making a film that costs roughly the equivalent of the gross national product of Guatemala,'' he said, although he cannily did not say how much that is); the special effects are dazzling; and then there is the matter of the eagle on the set, which is a revelation in itself, the size of a small city.
''I was standing in my office a couple of months ago and an eagle flew past the window,'' Mr. Newell related. ''I said to the producer, 'I think an eagle has just flown past the window.' He said, 'Yes, yes -- that's probably from the zoo.' ''
''Which means that the enterprise is so vast that it's got its own zoo,'' Mr. Newell said. ''If you want an animal, they'll just pop down and get you an animal. They have permanent owl residents, just in case you need one.''
Though he seems to be at a particularly pleasant pinnacle at the moment, Mr. Newell, who is married with a son and daughter, has known fallow times. In the 1980's, he said, the only work he could find was directing pop videos. ''Don't avoid being down!'' he said of his career. ''We've all been down.'' Nor does he find much use in examining what he has done or what he intends to do.
''I try desperately not to look back,'' he said. ''I want to die in harness.''
Should he ever be tempted to feel too pleased with himself, anyway, Mr. Newell just thinks about his late father, whose passionate membership in an amateur theater group helped introduce his son to the joys of drama and a good script.
Interviewed by a local newspaper after the enormous success of ''Four Weddings and a Funeral,'' his father revealed himself to be proud, but not blindly so, Mr. Newell said.
''He said, 'Well, it's all right, but he's done a lot better, you know.' ''
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