A veteran of the film industry, director Bill Condon has until recently been best known for directing the second installment in the Candyman series, 1995's Candyman: Farewell To The Flesh. Gods And Monsters, his new adaptation of Christopher Bram's novel Father Of Frankenstein, seems to be changing that. The film and book tell the story of the final days of director James Whale, the man behind the original film version of Frankenstein, as well as its sequel (Bride Of Frankenstein), The Invisible Man, and a handful of other notable films from the '30s. Ian McKellen plays the director, who made no attempt to hide his homosexuality, quit the industry in disgust in the '40s, and committed suicide in 1957, shortly before his films came back into vogue. Condon recently spoke to The Onion about the project.
The Onion: The view of horror movies that emerges from your film is that they come primarily from social ills, in Whale's case largely from WWI. You've made horror films. How much does this coincide with your own view of the genre?
Bill Condon: Well, I do think that... I think it's [horror scholar and Gods And Monsters consultant] David Skal who really put it best, describing how advances in medicine in WWI had let all these people who'd lost limbs survive, so people were surrounded suddenly by these disfigured, sort of grotesque people. And that did have a lot to do with Frankenstein, and certainly with Whale's experience. I think each time has its own images. Obviously, a movie like Candyman comes out of a slasher genre, and I'm not sure where that comes from, exactly. There are theories about some kind of lack of stability, and this sense of things coming out of nowhere and destroying you. That seems to be a popular fear. With the first Candyman, the interesting idea that [director] Bernard Rose had was that our contemporary haunted house is Cabrini Green. Which was pretty powerful, I thought. Unfortunately, in the second one, it became just a haunted house again, a great big New Orleans mansion. But I think in general, for me, the thing that's always been consistent from movie to movie is this sense of repression, that if you try to sit on something that's natural, it'll explode in some way. The more you try to hide it and repress it, the more it'll come back to bite you.
O: One thing that wasn't repressed in Whale's life was his homosexuality. I recently read Open Secret [David Ehrenstein's history of gays in Hollywood], and thought its description of Whale's uncloseted sexuality was interesting. What did you do to convey that on the screen?
BC: Well, there's [deeply closeted gay director George] Cukor. There are some people who knew Cukor who take a little exception to the portrayal in the movie, but I think he is our foil. He's the one to whom Whale's openness is compared. I thought it was fun... I remember a few years ago seeing Devil In A Blue Dress, and watching the way Denzel Washington played so beautifully in period: You kept expecting there to be a scene in which he was going to stand up for himself and step forward. And yet there was always a sense of politeness, of holding back. I thought it would be interesting to have Ian McKellen, who is famous in gay circles as an activist—he's a political figure, so we're used to that from him—playing an openly gay man 40 years ago, and seeing that even that kind of openness is circumscribed in some way. There's still a certain kind of passivity about it, a certain sense in which, even though he's completely open and happy to do it, it's a pre-political world. The word "out" doesn't have any meaning then. It's just that he was unapologetically who he was.
O: You had to spend a lot of time researching Whale's life. Was there anything in particular that surprised you when you were looking into it?
BC: The one thing, and I would say it sort of affected us... It's a slight change from the novel. Everyone I talked to who knew him talked first about this amazing generosity and kindness, and about this way in which he never took himself seriously. There were certain softer edges we put into the film because of that, even though, obviously, there's a great deal of rage and bitterness having to do with his illness and getting old.
O: I thought it was also interesting in the film how Whale talked about the horror films as things not to be taken seriously, except for the monster.
BC: I think that's true. A friend of mine, Curtis Harrington, knew him in the last 10 years of his life. [Harrington] actually was in London, where he and Gavin Lambert organized a showing of those films, and Whale was shocked that anyone would be interested. It was pre-Sight And Sound days and anything to do with the auteur theory. They showed those in London and got a great reception. Curtis was there and said Whale was actually very moved, because he spent all this time before that pooh-poohing the idea that there was anything serious in his films. I think that was our way of doing that, suggesting both that kind of pose that he put on and also that he did take them more seriously.
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