The people behind the new film “Quills” wanted to make a great date movie, which is easier said than done when your subject is the notorious French provocateur the Marquis de Sade. As Geoffrey Rush, who plays Sade in the film, puts it: “People who know a little of Sade expect the movie to be a salacious, offensive and maybe nauseating night out. They end up being surprised by the humor of it. Sure, the Marquis is a difficult, depraved and perverse dude, but he knows how to have fun, too.”
“Quills” is hardly a frivolous film. At the core of this frightening and funny movie are some pretty potent ideas: free speech and the power of words to inspire, provoke and sustain life. Yet director Philip Kaufman and writer Doug Wright (who adapted his own Obie Award-winning play) manage to carry the whole thing off with a light touch that’s never dogmatic. It’s a story about Sade that Sade himself might have told.
“We’re hoping that he’s down there turning on a spit and smiling at what we’ve done,” Wright says.
“Quills” uses a few biographical facts about Sade as a way to delve into the writer’s life and contemporary issues like censorship. We find Sade in an insane asylum where he is happily imprisoned, indulged by the administrative priest (Joaquin Phoenix) to write his pornographic books and, in the priest’s mind, purge the demons from his soul.
The Marquis is purging the demons all right — and being published in the process. A helpful, admiring laundress (Kate Winslet) smuggles Sade’s work to his waiting publisher. It sells like hotcakes (or French bread, in this case), but finds the attention of one powerful opponent: Napoleon. The emperor sends Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to the asylum to shut Sade down and, once and for all, “cure” him of his depravity.
Wright owes his fascination with Sade to a friend who gave him a Sade biography as a Christmas present several years ago. Wright was so astonished by the Sade’s life that he decided to investigate his fiction. What he found astonished him even more.
“When I cracked open that first volume, I was shocked and outraged and threatened and amused,” Wright says. “I found myself asking, `Does this belong in the canon? Does this belong on bookshelves?’ And I’m a real liberal on free speech issues, but here was an author who really gave me pause. I thought if my reaction to him was so complicated, he’d be a good subject for investigation.”
Wright’s 1995 play found favor with critics and audiences and Fox Searchlight Pictures, which commissioned a screenplay. Two years later, that script found its way to Kaufman, who had been unsuccessfully developing various projects of his own since his last movie, 1993’s “Rising Sun.”
Kaufman made for a logical enough choice. The director is no stranger to envelope-pushing, sexually provocative films, with a resume that includes “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Henry and June,” the movie that prompted the Motion Picture Association of America to create its scarlet-letter rating, NC-17.
The irony for Kaufman was that after several years of trying to make movies with more mainstream subjects — he developed an adaptation of John Grisham’s “Runaway Jury” and had plans for a film about the Marvel Comics character Sub-Mariner — that he would get the green light for a movie about the Marquis de Sade.
“I’d call it fortuitous,” Kaufman says. “Besides, I think the commercial prospects for this film are tremendous. There are vast segments of the American audiences that crave adult themes and are bored by films where everybody is going more and more to the center.”
If that sounds like a description of American politics, both Kaufman and Wright welcome the comparison. Wright used the symbiotic relationship between U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as inspiration for the connection between Sade and Caine’s self-righteous torturer in “Quills.” Kaufman read Wright’s screenplay during the recent presidential impeachment hearings and saw what he believed to be obvious parallels.
“Since Sade believed that man was fueled by self-interest and self-interest alone, I think he’d find a lot to write about with contemporary American politics,” Wright says.
“I think he’d say America needs a good spanking,” Kaufman adds. “The level of hypocrisy is incredible. The New York Times recently wrote about the $10 billion Internet pornography industry and how many major corporations are quietly cashing in on material that far surpasses anything that Sade or Playboy ever dreamed of. A lot of the people repressing the art that might be examining this thing in a serious way — which we hope our film is — are quietly raking in the billions from pornography.”
That said, “Quills” never forces its politics on its audience. It’s too busy having smart, mischievous fun with its gothic tale of treachery, lust and grand passion. That playfulness extended to the set where cast members would read from Sade’s fiction between takes just to see who could find the most fantastic passage.
Winslet held readings at her home where her whole family (her father and sisters are actors) would dramatize “Quills” scene by scene. And Caine, one of the acting world’s great storytellers, would lead conversations about sex.
“Michael can tell a few stories about sex in the 20th Century, that’s for certain,” Kaufman says.
Kaufman upped the ante by whispering lewd thoughts into his actors’ ears just before a take, prodding them to greater heights — or depths, as it were.
“I wish I’d kept a notebook of the things he said because they were quite extraordinary and gleeful,” Rush says. “He’d be grinning like a Cheshire cat, cajoling and provoking a sense of daring. It’s almost like, `I dare you to do this.’ And you’d do it. Phil is a man of great appetite and great relish, a wonderful ringmaster and alchemist and mentor and clown. He clearly loved the material.”
Just don’t think of “Quills” as a biopic, Wright says.
“Audiences see people with corsets and wigs and assume it’s a history lesson,” Wright says. “Well, this isn’t history. I wanted to pluck Sade from the musty pages of literary history and put him in a story that spoke to issues in our time. We gave ourselves enormous liberty in carving select facts about his life and embellishing them and building on them and twisting them in new ways. Because if you’re going to talk about someone as loaded and iconic as the Marquis, you’d better do it to some newer, startling purpose.”
Or, as Rush puts it: “Philip kept telling me that the Marquis was Mick Jagger. And that made sense because he wanted people to think of this as a companion piece to `The Exorcist’ or `Pulp Fiction.’ It’s a very contemporary movie.”
