Stephen Daldry is Lord of the Rings

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10 April 2012

Stephen Daldry doesn't do downbeat. The award-winning director of the bittersweet Billy Elliot, and the sombre films The Hours and The Reader, is in person a natural enthuser, and as such is a logical choice to oversee the opening and closing ceremonies of London's 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.

The appointment of Daldry and three eminent co-producers was announced this morning, along with the news that Danny Boyle — the director of Slumdog Millionaire, and like Daldry an alumnus of the Royal Court Theatre — will be the artistic director of the pivotal opening event. I meet Daldry for an exclusive chat about it all at Three Mills Studios in Bow, the atmospheric Victorian complex where the Olympic shenanigans will be planned, where Boyle makes films, and where Daldry has been workshopping a possible musical of Bridget Jones with Lily Allen.

Daldry, 49, promptly waxes lyrical about the appointment of Boyle, "an East End boy who can see the stadium from his window, a man full of integrity and a great artist, who people also love". He says he and Boyle both relish big, public, celebratory events, and have taken the Olympic jobs — less lucrative than film deals — out of a sense of "civic duty", and for the challenge. He promises that London will host "the best party, the best celebration, and the best Games there have ever been". It seems, however, that he envisages something more intimate and smaller-scale than the opening spectacle at Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium in 2008.

"We have probably seen the end of that level of extravagance. I think it reached its natural peak in Beijing," he says. "I wouldn't call [London's opening event] an austerity ceremony, but I don't think we should have to compete with Beijing. We have to take into account the time we are living in. We need to find new ways of seeing these ceremonies, rather than have an international competition to outdo the last one."

London's 80,000-seat stadium in Stratford, he says, feels "cosy, warm, generous" compared to the "intimidating" Bird's Nest. Besides, he'd like to "look at how we take that opening event outside the stadium and into the city itself, and how we bounce it into the country as a whole, so it's a national, not just a stadium, event. How we do that, I don't know."

He talks in safely general terms about tapping into the wealth of creativity in the country and its multicultural richness: Boyle is newly appointed and "at the start of his thinking"; there are three more ceremony directors to find, and two years to go. He mentions his co-producers: designer Mark Fisher worked on the Beijing Olympics, Catherine Ugwu has produced many major sporting events, and broadcaster Hamish Hamilton will help maintain "control over the image" of the opening ceremonies. He uses the words "rethink" and "reimagine" a lot.

Does he feel the need to extirpate memories of London's last big, hoped-for knees-up, the ponderous and botched opening of the Millennium Dome? "Well, I hope the ticketing situation that was the main problem of the Dome show isn't repeated," he counters, drily. What about our embarrassing segment of the Beijing handover ceremony? The gyrating bus queue, Leona Lewis and Jimmy Page singing Whole Lotta Love, Beckham hoofing a football into the crowd, and Mayor Boris waving the Olympic flag like an overfed schoolboy.

"People have said a lot of harsh things about the handover, but the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Games are not related to that," Daldry says, more tartly. "Do you know that 60 per cent of the opening ceremony is laid down by the International Olympic Committee (IOC)? How much we can engage with them to explore reinventing it is something I'm going to be involved in."

He says he'd like to look at all the ceremonial aspects of the Games, even the medal giving, but stresses that his role is that of producer, and his main job is to keep all the stakeholders — Boris, the IOC, the Government — off the backs of Danny Boyle and the other ceremony directors.

I can't believe he'll resist the urge to tinker creatively. Surely, he must have sounded out Billy Elliot's composer Elton John as a potential star of the opening ceremony, perhaps surrounded by boy ballet dancers from the musical? "There will be no Billy Elliot dancers," he says, sidestepping the Elton question. Which I take to mean that Daldry has let Boyle know the channel to Elton is open. But for now, his stated position on the creative side is "hands off".

Hmm. Although Daldry claims to have loved the administrative side of his six years running the Royal Court from 1992-98, pushing through its £26 million refurbishment and wrangling for Lottery money, he also has an avowedly low boredom threshold. He once told me at an awards dinner that he was giving up film and returning to theatre because making films is so maddeningly, frustratingly slow. This from the man who helped Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet to Oscars on two of his films, and was himself nominated as best director for all three he's directed.

He says he can't imagine he'll get bored with a job as big as the Olympics, but describes his role, slightly worryingly, as "a part-time job, although it will get heavier as 2012 draws closer".

It seems unlikely he could release a film or stage a play before then. He is in talks with Disney to turn Dumbo into a musical "but that's a long way off". His planned film of Michael Chabon's novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, seems to be stalled, and the Bridget Jones musical is only at the workshop stage. Nevertheless, Daldry says there are "a few little things that may or may not happen" between now and the opening ceremony. He adds that the Olympic job is only "a stepping stone in my bid to be London Mayor by 2012". He's joking. I think.

Get him on the rights and wrongs of London hosting the Olympics and he is properly galvanised and engaged, though. He's not the world's biggest sports fan, but says that his liking for sailing and horseriding made him more amenable to the Olympics than, say, the World Cup.

He was behind London's 2012 bid from the start, and was "amazed" when it won. "And thrilled!" he adds quickly. "I just assumed, on the f***-up theory of history, that France would get it." He thinks the decision to divert funding away from established arts projects towards the still-mysterious "Cultural Olympiad" to accompany the Games was wrong, but says, somewhat stiffly, that he looks forward to finding out how his section of the Games and the Olympiad will interact.

When I ask him about the £40 million budget for the ceremonies, he is at great pains to point out that this, and all the costs of running the games, are covered by TV and ticket sales and sponsorship. The £9.5 billion spent by the government has gone on the buildings and infrastructure, and roughly two-thirds of this is destined to be of benefit to the East End after the games. "London will be unique in terms of legacy, in its vision of what the Games can bring to a city, and what they leave behind," says Daldry. "It's conceived as a regeneration project which is temporarily used for the Olympic Games."

Axing the games now in the face of the national debt would be "insane" as we'd be writing off that investment while forsaking potential — huge — income.

It's not just his enthusiasm and argumentative nature that make Daldry a good fit for this promotional, showbizzy aspect of the games. Even when he was running the tiny Gate theatre in Notting Hill back in the late 1980s, earning £100 a week, he had absolute confidence in his own destiny and an ability to think outside the box. He made serious money with his revival of JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls, then seemed to flit effortlessly between art-house theatre, film and musicals.

His private life is similarly unorthodox. Although ostensibly and openly gay, he married the American performance artist Lucy Sexton and had a daughter, Annabel Clare, with her in 2003. They commute between Hertfordshire and New York, share their "Viking longhouse" homes with all sorts of visitors, and are surprised that anyone should be bemused by this set-up.

When I ask Daldry how family life is going, he beams, and says he and Sexton are thinking of adopting, or fostering a second child.

Of course. Perfect for a man with a part-time job.

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