Stephen Frears on the Freedom to Embellish the Story: “When you make a film about real people it’s always, you know, you’re always more circumscribed in some ways. So it’s better to be able to use your imagination and invent the whole thing. There’s a bit of each, really, in this case.”
Stephen Frears and the Research Process: “I depend on the writer to have done the research but I met a number of the women who danced there originally. And it’s alive and it’s still going so there wasn’t a lot more to learn, really. I mean you’re concerned with the details of how the girls stood and what they looked like and things like that.”
Stephen Frears on Meeting the Real Windmill Girls: “Well they all talked about Laura Henderson. I mean, they all held a great affection. Even though they were posing naked, it was like a family. It wasn’t like a sort of modern strip club. It wasn’t about exploitation or anything like that. It became a kind of family and she was, I guess, the mother.”
The Real Story of the Windmill Mouse: The naked women weren’t allowed to move once they were on stage, so stage manager Vivian Van Damm would occasionally employ subterfuge in order to stir things up a bit. “Well you know the whole thing was about the girls couldn’t move. It was literally illegal for the girls to move, which is bizarre and I apologize for the English. And I remember hearing the story about the mouse. Van Damm - the man who ran the theater - would always blame the mouse, not himself. The mouse got the girls to move rather than he did. I’ve been hearing that story, yes. Somebody told me the story about the mouse. I can’t remember who it was now. Somebody told me the story and it made me laugh.”
Stephen Frears on Casting Judi Dench as Laura Henderson: “Somehow the older Judi has got, the more wicked she’s got - and the more mischievous. I knew she’d be very, very funny. Because she’s playing someone who’s so politically incorrect, I knew that she would be very, very entertaining doing that and that it would appeal to her.”
Stephen Frears on Staging the Nudity: The secret to getting his actors to trust him with the nudity was to be very straight forward about what he expected from his cast. “You say, ‘This is going to happen. If you don’t want to do it, I quite understand.’ And you have to be kind to them. You have to treat them like grownups.
We took a lot of trouble choosing the girls so they wouldn’t feel embarrassed. If there was any suggestion of exploitation or making people do what they didn’t want to do, it seems to me that would be very unpleasant.”
On the Mix of Drama, Comedy, and a Musical: Frears said the toughest part was directing the musical portions. “That was very, very difficult. Why was it hard? Because nobody knows how those films are made anymore and you have to learn. You have to go back to school and learn what all those values are and how clever the people were who made those kind of films. So I went back to school.”
Frears feels that musicals fell out of favor because of the money it takes to stage them. “It’s an expensive game and people became more interested in the realistic - in the modern way. They wanted films that dealt with their own lives in a way that they haven’t before. Films ceased to be more escapist. Then they wanted films that dealt with their own lives more. And maybe things are changing again.”
Stephen Frears on the Choice of “Pop Idol” Winner Will Young as One of the Film’s Leads: “I learned that one of the things if people are going to start singing in films, they have to be very, very good singers, which he is. You can’t just put anybody singing a song in a film. The audience won’t listen – they’ll just get up and go. So I learned that the hard way. Then when I met Will, I thought he was very well suited. And of course when you meet somebody that famous – he’s very famous in England – a pop singer – you become very, very cautious. I auditioned him very carefully, you know, in both dance and acting. I didn’t want to put him in a situation that he couldn’t handle. He’s a most wonderful fella, really sweet and very smart. Everybody adores him.”
