A conversation with Lester James Peries

Biographical sketches bore me. Sure, sometimes they are the best way to disseminate the lives and careers of those who are being written on. But all too often, they are packed with so many inessential details recorded elsewhere that they become exercises in repetition and banality. Lester James Peries is no exception to this. With several books and essays written on the man, we still haven’t got to a cohesive, comprehensive text exploring not just his craft, but the names and the movies that shaped it. While my taste in the cinema is woefully inadequate to the task of delving into his career, I can try. So here goes.

Is there any overriding influence you can point out, right now?

Whenever people asked me “Which of the movies you've directed is your favourite?” I was inclined to say “My next film.” It’s roughly the same answer I give whenever I’m asked about my influences, because there are so many and to pinpoint one in particular would prejudice you and me against every other influence. I was shaped by everything I laid my eyes on, be they films, filmmakers, my brother, or my country. But if I were to dig deeper, I’d point at Italian neo-realism. Directors like Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti had a big say in my career. I was entranced and at times overwhelmed by their fidelity to realism.

To be sure, “realism” is a fluid term, always changing, never static. In this case, I use the term to denote the director’s ability to depict instead of representing, to stand apart and instil some flesh and blood into the characters being depicted. De Sica achieved that vision with his Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves, both of which I saw and was moved by when they were first released. In Bicycle Thieves there’s no attempt at glamour, at visual beauty or loveliness. What visual loveliness there is derives from the Italian metropolis and the poverty of the protagonists, the father and the son in search of their stolen bicycle. Most people think that neo-realism died during the Cold War, when moviemakers thought they had to be more politically slanted in their work. All stuff and nonsense. Neo-realism is still alive. It always will be.

Given this fidelity to realism, how did you find yourself when other directors and writers began covertly attacking you as a bourgeois filmmaker?

Names and labels are just that: names and labels. I was never really a politically committed director, but it depends on what you mean by “politically committed.” The definition used by these writers entailed anyone and everyone who sacrificed authenticity for an overtly political outlook. But I don’t think you need to film political manifestos to be committed. You can be aloof, you can try not to get involved in explicit political movements, and still talk about poverty, the oppression of the lower class, the conflict between the haves and the have-nots.

In Sri Lanka this wave of politically committed directors came about in the seventies. I remember a booklet that was distributed at the premiere of a film made by someone who was being championed as their mentor. The booklet was titled Appochchige Cinamawa, “Appochchi” being me. It echoed what was happening in France, where directors who didn’t fit into the model of filmmaking envisioned by the Nouvelle Vague and Cahiers du Cinema commentators were referred to as papa, with their work referred to as cinema de papa. It was an exact, word to word translation.

You mentioned Rossellini and de Sica. Any directors from across the Atlantic?

Satyajit Ray’s passion for the movies started with Hollywood. Before he began studying the director and the scriptwriter, he was infatuated with the big stars: Deanna Durbin, Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, and Humphrey Bogart. We all were, to be honest, because you couldn’t just escape the American cinema. It was everywhere. In every nook or corner. And it soon became part of our common experience. My stints as a journalist in London in the forties were a blessing for me in that respect, because I got to watch many American and British films. I remember reviewing some of them, even the continental ones like Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.

But if there was one movie that moved me into the cinema at that time, it was Citizen Kane. We were young when it first came out, so what was innovative, groundbreaking, and unprecedented about it caught us immediately. You could say it knocked our socks off, since we were so taken aback by this debut feature made by a 26 year old prodigy called Orson Welles. Most people would argue that it’s dated today, but I vehemently disagree. What was so dated to them is precisely what’s so timeless about it for me. Unlike Hitchcock’s thrillers and even a classic like Vertigo, which topped Kane in Sight and Sound’s list of the 10 greatest films of all time in 2012, it wasn’t seasonal. It transcended the time in which it was made.

There were other movies, other directors you couldn’t escape from. Like John Ford. He transformed the cowboy film into a folk art. He shaped the founding myths of America even though he wasn’t an American. The best part about it was that he never considered himself an artist: he would have glared at you if you were to describe him as one. When you see his Westerns now, which influenced all other Westerns made after his time, you don’t “discern” art. You discern a true professional at work, the sort who regarded his career only as a means of earning a living.

Any directors you didn’t take to?

I was never a fan of Cecil B. DeMille. Critics today acclaim the special effects and sense of grandeur in an epic like Samson and Delilah or The Ten Commandments, but for me they were add-ons. He was a showman, though his influence has pervaded every film industry. Every country has its share of DeMilles. They want to glamorise history, to instil some larger-than-life epicness into our myths, our legends. What they forget is that our people are the real bedrock of our cinema. They are far more virile and possess a greater range of experience than all the kings and queens in the world. Sadly however, they are neglected, and our directors choose to make another Ten Commandments, with their own Moseses and Samsons.

What can you say about the French New Wave?

It was not unlike Hitchcock’s films, largely seasonal, limited to the place and time in which it was fermented. Of the New Wave directors only one survived, and he’s the only one who’s still with us. I am talking about Jean-Luc Godard. Satyajit Ray once subtly compared his work to a collage. You can’t take to those films spontaneously. You have to gather the bits and pieces that make them up, carefully. That’s not to say they are intellectualised or cut off from the people, but they require a different conception of the medium to the one I operated on. Just as much as I diverged from the kind of epics that DeMille was making, I also diverged from what the New Wave followed.

But of course, their influence was very much pervasive here. I think it had to do with our defeatist attitude towards the world. In the seventies, when my work was lambasted as elitist, the typical young director took the East Europeans as his or her influence. The East Europeans were different to the Americans, because they were defeatist. The seventies was a brutal decade for our country. Naturally, that spilled over to our writers and our directors. Most people would use that as a criterion to argue that my films and my plots didn’t delve enough into the issues that ailed my characters, like poverty and landlessness. But like I said before, it all really comes down to what you mean by terms like realism and commitment.

Final question. 15 years ago in an interview, you compared the director to a conductor of an orchestra. Do you still stand by this observation?

I was never a big fan of the auteur theory, which stated that a film was what its director wanted it to be. Conflating the one with the other means missing out on the cast and crew that fleshes out the director’s vision. Speaking for myself, I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the best scriptwriters this country and my time could conjure, from Regi Siriwardena to Somaweera Senanayake.

Does that mean I wasn’t aware of my role in the filmmaking process? Of course not. One can be an individualist and a collaborationist. I think that’s quite valid for an art form, any art form, but it’s especially valid for the cinema, where by default you have to work with so many people. Accepting that you aren’t the only cast and crew member is a first step to a good film. A necessary first step.

Written for: Ceylon Today LITE, August 21 2017