Not liking to be interviewed probably starts with the reluctance to submit yourself to an alien, unpredictable critical gaze, but in Stephen Frears's case it has flowered into a bizarre art form. He'll answer questions in fits and starts, gnomically, in obscure one-liners or by means of silences punctuated by cigarette puffs or plaintive grunts. Always courteous and welcoming, he would just rather you didn't ask questions. "Have you got enough?" he asks at the end of a session, in the full knowledge that you haven't. So you arrange to meet him again and you keep going back to the films, in an effort to find out how much of a man so determinedly private has found its way into them.
In Tamara Drewe, Stephen Frears's rendering of Posy Simmonds's cult comic strip, the characters, not least the ravishing Tamara, appear positively radiant. Out of Simmonds's tightly conceived middle-class ironies, Frears has woven something slightly more alarming. From the moment Tamara's Mini Cooper noses into the village of Ewedown, the great English middle-class clichés are expertly nailed. Do the English perform the erotic acts gracefully? The evidence here suggests not, though they talk about bonking and fucking etc, the whole time. Do they ever really communicate? Not the awful guests at the grisly writers' retreat, whose embarrassed silences are broken only by panicky chatter. In England, there are those who still appear to believe that nature is welcoming and soothing. Most of the characters in the film are busy scribbling away at books that testify to the glories of the countryside. In the final scene of the film, a herd of insanely angry, berserk black-and-white cows definitively dispels the illusion of a civilised rural life.
No one would expect the director of such a film to inhabit the countryside and Stephen Frears can mostly be found strolling around the back streets of Notting Hill, a stone's throw from Portobello Road. It's a piece of London that has changed with the times, passing promiscuously from one definition of chic to another, but the same cannot be said of the rumpled, laconic Frears. A creature of habit, he has breakfast every Friday in the same cafe with friends and acquaintances. Pleasingly, when he stands outside the restaurant smoking one of the day's many cigarettes, you can see from across the road a shopfront sign perched perfectly above his head: My Beautiful Laundrette. (Frears's much-loved film, based on a script by Hanif Kureishi, was made in 1985.)
Frears has been married twice – to the editor of the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers, until the mid-1970s when he met the painter Anne Rothenstein. He married Rothenstein in 1992 and they have two children, Frankie and Lola. (One of Frears's two sons with Wilmers is a producer in New York; the other, Sam, who suffers from a rare nervous disease, is an actor, and shortly to become the subject of a BBC documentary; his daughter, Lola, has a bit part in Tamara Drewe.) In between making 22 films for the cinema, and many more for television, Frears has accumulated a tight circle of friends and collaborators. He teaches at the Beaconsfield National Film and Television School ("Oh, I just make remarks about what the students are doing") and dutifully attends the ritual beanos of the film year. This year, he told the Cannes festival that he wouldn't enter Tamara Drewe in competition "because it wouldn't win". Otherwise, it seems, he likes to hang out with those he likes, reading scripts when he isn't working.
Friends gleefully exchange "Frearsisms". After making The Queen (in which Blair was overwhelmingly favourably depicted), he remarked to a bemused German audience of students that he would happily witness the execution of Tony Blair, "but with my eyes closed". Lugubriously, he proffers the opinion that the Labour party may never get back into power again. "Social democracy is finished," he says. "The world in which there was any money has gone." Frears was recently invited in by the BBC Trust's chairman for advice on how to improve the corporation's creative output. (Tamara Drewe was part-funded by BBC Films as well as the UK Film Council, with private backing from WestEnd Films.)
"I said the high executive salaries were utterly grotesque," he says. "Also I told them the BBC must get back to fostering talent. Decentralise, I said. The BBC has become obsessed with management." Quizzed on what he thinks about the imminent closure of the Film Council as a result of cuts in arts spending, he shrugs. "I suppose we'll just have to make things more cheaply," he says. "I've always made things very cheaply."
"In some respects, Stephen is a very shy man," film-maker Hannah Rothschild says. "You do get to love the perverse, grumpy side of Stephen." For Tracy Seaward, his long-term producer, working with Frears can be like being on a mystery tour. "He talks in riddles," she says. "And I do feel that he's never certain of the outcome. He's not always secure and he says he doesn't know if things are going well. So you end up hoping and praying with him. They should get Antony Gormley to make a statue of him – The Angel Frears."
In film lore, and not just in France, where the term was made sacrosanct, auteurism still holds sway. You aren't taken seriously unless your oeuvre can be interpreted as a continuous, allegedly seamless creation. It is clear that auteurism doesn't remotely interest Frears. Fitful attempts to get him to explain why (unlike his contemporaries Ken Loach and Mike Leigh) he has never thought of himself as an auteur are greeted with tolerant exasperation. Unlike Loach and Leigh, he doesn't work with unknown or amateur actors and he relies very much on the scripts that are sent to him for inspiration. Those who've worked with him describe the on-set experience as taxing – because scenes are reshot so many times – but relatively normal.
Frears, it is clear, is interested in the way a film is conceived and brought to realisation. He regards the actual making of a film as something of an afterthought – something that happens after all the important decisions, about casting or cameramen, have already been made. He read Tamara Drewe on a plane, liked the script and was filming six months later. He sees directors as participants (like crew members, actors and producers, to whom he pays tribute) in a complex, time-consuming, risky process where anything can go wrong. For Frears, it would seem, you don't achieve success; instead, you avoid failure. He responds, animatedly for once, to the suggestion that Graham Greene, quizzed about his plots, would reply in the style of a solicitor or dry-rot inspector talking about a house. "That's what I always tell students who want to learn about film," he says. "You should know about economics, not tracking shots."
Hannah Rothschild points to the sheer unpredictability of Frears's output. Can one really speak of a coherent style or, indeed, vision, from the man who made, amid some disasters, successful films as various as The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons, The Deal, and now Tamara Drewe? "He is the ultimate journeyman director and I don't mean that at all negatively," Alan Yentob, presenter of the BBC art series Imagine, says. "You could call him the greatest hired gun."
More than many film people, Frears enjoys looking at the real world as it unfolds around him. "Stephen isn't terribly interested in himself – he's interested in other people," says Hanif Kureishi. "That's why he's such good company. He gets involved with things outside himself. He wanted to know about the Pakistani community in Britain. With Tamara Drewe, he has entered the bizarre world of the English middle classes. You have to remember that when Stephen was growing up, dramatists and film directors believed that their art should be used to illuminate social reality in Britain. He has kept faith in the idea that good film or theatre involves finding out things you don't know."
Scriptwriter Peter Morgan, author of The Queen and The Deal, is still amazed by the degree to which Frears is driven. "I'd say that it's best to be friends with him, because that way you don't want to kill him," he says. "He works his way through talent and he flatters you to get the best work, in the nicest way. But he also becomes dependent on you. As a scriptwriter, you enjoy a deeper relationship with a Frears film. That's fine when it's all going well, and you become part of his court, and you love him. But there are those terrible rows at 5am, when things aren't right. He can be very brutal to his closest friends. I feel he knows everything there is to know about male savagery."
Frears was born in wartime, middle-class Leicester. His father was an accountant who trained as a doctor and his mother was a social worker. Much later, he discovered that his mother was Jewish and had hidden this out of a desire to fit into middle-class Britain. But this is something he elects not to make much of. "I did read what Christopher Hitchens said about his own, similar experience and how, in spite of himself, it had seemed to matter, but I didn't really get what he was saying." Although he would most likely pooh-pooh the idea, he represents to near-perfection the pre-1968 British Oxbridge intelligentsia style of sceptical, literate intelligence. He went to Cambridge, where he read law, without being interested in the subject. For Frears and his generation, not being sure about so much of life appeared no bad thing. he was just younger than the Beyond the Fringe crowd, but he was influenced by their attitude, their lack of respect and he followed in their wake to media land.
After a spell at the Royal Court Theatre, then in its pioneering leftish prime, he worked with Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson. He made his first film, Gumshoe, starring Albert Finney, in 1971. The film was a critical success, but money remained hard to find. So Frears decamped to the BBC, where, throughout the 1970s, he directed television drama, mostly working for the much loved, lamented Play for Today, which showcased the best British directing and screenwriting talent for a mass television audience.
"I had a somewhat charmed life," he says. "I was brought up at the BBC. I did meet so many people cleverer than myself in those years. Often, I was slapped down and made to feel not good enough. And I also learned that you had to be able to fail. To be successful at anything, you need the right to fail, not just occasionally." In those days, he suggests, BBC talent was to be found at all levels, not just among directors. There was a degree of brutality that came from the fact that everyone believed totally in what they were doing, and how important drama was, not just for its ratings but because it truly reflected the national culture. "You could be given a script on Friday. You would be told, 'This has to start on Monday.' That was wonderful. It was truly invigorating"
The idea of professionalism, meaning that one must always deliver, no matter what the circumstances, recurs frequently in his conversation. He admires Alan Bennett, with whom he worked on many television films, for the latter's stubborn application and hard work as well as overwhelming talent.
Asked about the usefulness of Hollywood agents, Frears once retorted that he didn't need them because he had a good letterbox. His dependence on what he is sent means that he doesn't himself find subjects. "He'll just have read something," Hannah Rothschild says. "And quite often what he sees in it is not apparent to others. But he seems to know it's going to work."
"Scripts are really important for Stephen," Morgan says. "He doesn't claim to transform a script, but he wants you to be there throughout the shooting, which is quite unusual. He will know about the film, really, through the script."
Frears's biggest break came not from the BBC but the innovative 1980s phenomenon known as Channel 4. Frears received Hanif Kureishi's script of My Beautiful Laundrette, read it over a weekend and decided he liked it. "Hanif was bothered that the writing was too epigrammatic," he says. "I was telling him to make it dirtier and that bothered him a bit." The low-budget commercial success of My Beautiful Laundrette ensured that Frears henceforth got Hollywood work, but his more expensive films, such as Mary Reilly and Hero, were not always successful. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he went to Hollywood and back. It would seem significant, however, that his greatest Hollywood-financed success came from Britain. This was Dangerous Liaisons, scripted by Christopher Hampton (from the London stage hit he had written based on the Laclos novel) and starring Glenn Close, the not-terribly-well-known John Malkovich and Uma Thurman. The budget was a modest $10m. "We were lucky that it had to be so cheap," he remarks, repeating the Frears mantra that less can, if you are ingenious, be made to seem more. "A lot of time was spent in draughty French chateaux. The costume design, which won an Oscar, was done on no budget at all."
When I ask Frears about the pressures of Hollywood, I am directed online to a discussion about failure held at a German festival and featuring the critic David Thomson. With its poor sound and earnest German introduction, this turns out to be a mine of Frearsisms ("I've never had a 'vision' in my life", for example). Thomson, who lives in the US, would like to talk about the traditional Hollywood conflict between talent and the claims of big money, but Frears will have none of this. He explains that he has come to believe that the mistakes you make determine the outcome of a film. The trouble is that the Hollywood system makes no allowance for this simple fact, because most Hollywood films, except for the odd summer blockbuster, lose money anyhow.
So you can be trapped into making a film that is bound to lose money and thus doomed to failure. This was the case with his own biggest flop, Mary Reilly, which starred Malkovich as both Jekyll and Hyde, and Julia Roberts as the doctor's housemaid. Thomson admires Mary Reilly and he wants to say it was a success in spite of the appalling box office figures. Frears, who doesn't like the movie, disagrees. "It's mad to say that the film somehow belongs to a director and that it doesn't matter if it doesn't do well," Frears says. "Audiences aren't fools – their judgement really is important. And the true heroes of films are the investors. They take the risk, after all."
Smallish films have worked best for Frears. Until recently, they could be funded fairly easily, though he is bothered by what he sees as the collapse of the distribution system. He acknowledges that he has been lucky to work at a time when money, though never plentiful, was relatively easy to find. Now the economics of film-making are changing, making it hard to fund even the most inexpensive films. He is beginning to see himself as a surviving representative of an endangered species.
"As a director, my job is to protect," he says. "I protect scripts, actors, cameramen, designers." The Queen, he observes, was only made for cinemas because it couldn't be made for television. "It just cost too much to put up the cast in a Scottish hotel," he says. "These are the things that really determine how films are made or not."
The next time I meet him, Tamara Drewe has opened in France and is doing extremely well, with superlative reviews. he is in a good mood, relaxed and genial. "They love our dotties," he says about the French. "Give them Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers and they're in heaven. I'm so pleased that Gemma Arterton looks ravishing on posters all over France." Over white wine, Frears talks expansively about the films he loves. His tastes are profoundly cosmopolitan. A few years ago, he was chairman of the Cannes jury that gave a prize to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which chronicles, in grim and poignant detail, the efforts of two friends looking for an abortion in Ceausescu's Romania. It was in large part due to Frears's efforts that the film became known at all outside Romania. His favourite film this year was Jacques Audiard's two-and-a-half-hour French prison-gangland epic A Prophet.
It was Kenneth Tynan, writing in the Observer, who once said – controversially – that he would be unable to be friends with anyone who didn't like Look Back in Anger. I think he meant that not understanding the tormented, eloquent Jimmy Porter implied a degree of insensitivity to contemporary culture that marked one out as a no-hoper. What sounds like arrogance on Tynan's part is simply a way of saying that some things are really important – but you either get them or you don't. At his best, which is to say very often, and wonderfully, too, Stephen Frears has "got" many things on our behalf. His films show how Britain has been transformed, becoming more confusing but more interesting and likable too.
Alone, he has made absorbing drama from the anthill of British politics. In the variety of styles he has employed, he has demonstrated that there is no single way in which a director must approach his own work. Most importantly, Frears isn't a pessimist, a scold, an aesthete or an ideologue. His best films demonstrate, in a very English way, just how interesting and enjoyable it is to be alive. He'd say that is all one can be expected to do, but it represents a kind of genius.
Tamara Drewe is on general release from 10 September. Extra, the membership scheme for Guardian and Observer readers, is giving members the chance to see the film at an exclusive preview screening in London
