An interview of Ken by Stuart Jeffries in guardian.co.uk, 28 April 2011
Ken Russell is leaning on his stick outside the Pebble Beach restaurant in Barton-on-Sea, Hampshire, while his fourth wife parks the car. "Thanks for recognising me," he says as I shake his hand. It would be hard not to. Russell is wearing open-toed sandals, red trousers pulled up so far over his waist they're bearing down on his nipples and stripy shirt, while his big florid face is topped by a rage of grey hair.
But today Russell, now 84, has the air of a last-act Lear, or Tigger unbounced. Two weeks ago he suffered a stroke; this is only his second outing from the New Forest hospital where he's been recuperating. ...
...After Russell orders a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, I ask what he remembers about making The Devils 40 years ago. "Nothing," he replies. "I have short-term memory loss." "You don't have long-term memory loss," says Tribble sensibly. Surely, I suggest, you must remember that after the Evening Standard's Alexander Walker called The Devils "monstrously indecent", you hit him with a rolled-up copy of his newspaper? "I wish it had been an iron bar," he says.
...You directed another film the same year, I prompted him. The Boy Friend... Russell waves away the question and orders fish and chips.
Perhaps more Devils-related questions will get more in the way of response....
Why portray the king as a cross-dressing homosexual who shoots Protestants dressed as birds in his royal park for fun? "Because that's exactly as I saw him," says Russell.
...Russell mentions he was inspired by one particular line in Huxley's book. "The exorcism of sister Jeanne," wrote Huxley, "was equivalent to rape in a public lavatory." Hence the film's vision of Loudon as a pristine, white-stone city and the convent as clad in white tiles (Derek Jarman designed the sets). Russell recalls the film's final shot: "The girl goes up the hill of broken bricks." The girl (Grandier's recently widowed wife) walks over Loudun's ruins into a landscape in which the only objects are posts topped by carriage wheels, on which Protestant corpses turn in the wind. "Polanski is said to have been inspired by that shot for the last scene of The Pianist," Tribble says.
Russell then suggests The Devils is a religious film that takes inspiration from his own Catholic faith. "It's about the degradation of religious principles," he says. "And about a sinner who becomes a saint."
... Russell is exhausted and can only just be persuaded to pose for photos. We stand on the terrace, with its view of yachts on a silver sea and the Isle of Wight behind. This is Hampshire on Easter Saturday, but it looks like festival-time Cannes. Tribble drapes her husband in the Aleister Crowley robe. Russell leans on his cane, like a theosophical Fred Astaire.
We say our farewells. I tell Russell I hope he's well enough to attend the screening of The Devils. "I don't know what he's talking about," he says to Tribble. She goes off to get the car to drive him back to hospital. Did he really not understand or was he just being cantankerous? Let's hope the latter. Better Ken Russell the old devil than anything less.
The full interview is here
www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/apr/28/ken-russell-the-devils