Director Stephen Frears is basking in the afterglow of the awards buzz concerning his new film Philomena, which is up for three Golden Globes on Sunday, but might it be his swansong?
“I may have retired,” Frears announces when the Londoner enquired what his next projects encompass. “I’m knackered because I’m 72 and it [directing] is a young man’s game. I want a rest — it’s my body I’m concerned about.”
The Londoner wondered how working with Judi Dench on a gentle comic drama could cause such exhaustion. It turns out it wasn’t Dench but Frears’s forthcoming project that has led to him considering leaving the business. Frears, not often described as a man of a sunny disposition, has just completed work on an as-yet-untitled biopic of Lance Armstrong, which stars Ben Foster as the disgraced cycling legend and Dustin Hoffman in a supporting role. Filming is now over but Frears will have to compete with a flurry of rival films in production about Armstrong’s downfall. “Shooting it finished me off,” he says. “It was a big film and we didn’t have enough money. I’ve earned a rest. I’ll go and teach for a bit.”
Frears’s canon, which includes The Queen, is currently the subject of a retrospective at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, though it doesn’t include his controversial 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette. “They should be ashamed,” he quips.
