FrightFest is well known for showing some of the best documentaries around and this year in no exception, we chatted to Jon Spira who has delivered one of the very best, The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee.
NYX: How did you approach this documentary as Christopher Lee had such a colourful life?
JS: I guess my approach is always to find the emotional core. I think in any story or collection of stories I need to find the human thing that resonates with me and that I think an audience will get something from. In researching Christopher Lee, I was surprised and quite moved to find out how insecure he was and since he projected such a confident, erudite, powerful figure, I thought people would really feel some pathos with him and maybe connect with him in an unexpected, beautiful way. Beyond that, he had the MADDEST career and that’s just so much fun to explore.
NYX: There’s a wonderful, humorous tone running throughout the piece, was this always the plan?
JS: I’m a wonderful, humorous man - it’s unavoidable.
NYX: Was there anyone you couldn’t get hold of to interview?
JS: I mean, you can probably work out for yourself who we would have liked to get but didn’t. There is one very famous director who is still sending emails promising us an interview. We haven’t told him the film is finished. There’s still time to get it on the Blu-ray.
NYX: Do you have a favourite interview?
JS: Nah, you can’t pick favourites, every interview was so different in tone and rich in its own way. I was very touched by how candid they all were and the love and loss all of them still feel for him is just so powerfully evident.
NYX: Were there any sections you’d have liked to have covered in more detail?
JS: No. I had final cut so everything is how I decided it should be. I would have loved to put even more crazy archive in but some of that stuff is just a rights nightmare and impossible to clear. He made a LOT of REALLY unimaginably bad films. I really wanted to use a clip from Starship Invasions which is indescribably awful but we just couldn’t make it happen.
NYX: There are so many animated sequences here, did you have much of a budget to work with?
JS: We didn’t have a big budget but it was enough to do all the weird things we wanted to. I really wanted a very diverse slate of animators to reflect the very diverse experiences he had and films he made.
NYX: There’s some superb rarely seen footage of him, how many people were researching for you, or did you did it all yourself?
JS: One researcher, Someone at the BFI archive and me.
NYX: Have you got the puppet for yourself?
JS: No, he has his own special display case in the meeting room at Arch Model Studios where he is very much loved and taken care of by the brilliant Andy Gent and his team, who built him. The puppet is - firstly - huge and secondly an incredible work of art and technology. He’s not just a string puppet, his whole face is mechanised and can be operated by strings from above or with a second controller which can plug into the back of his head. He requires two operators and a standby team. I had him at my house for a fortnight while I was doing video publicity and I was beset with anxiety the whole time that something would happen to him. So he lives with Andy and The Arches but I do have visitation rights and Andy has promised to put together some kind of display version for my office eventually.
NYX: Is there one story about the great man which stands out for you?
JS: I think Peter Jackson’s story about Lee’s first day working on Lord of the Rings surprised me. It’s kind of the key to the whole inner workings of the doc and I was very grateful that he’d share such a personal recollection. But your readers will have to watch the film to find out what it was.
NYX: In which movie do you think Christopher gave his greatest performance?
JS: Sensible answer: The Wicker Man. It’s one of the greatest films ever made and he’s sublime in it. Honest answer: The Return of Captain Invincible. More than anything, Lee wanted to be a singer and in the near-300 films he made, this is the only musical. So not only does he play an unhinged megalomaniac evil genius who wants to take over the world but he gets to sing songs written by Richard O’Brien too. I love it. I’m the only person who has ever seen it.
NYX: Will you be nervous when the doc has its world premiere at FrightFest 2024?
JS: I don’t really get nervous about that sort of thing. I’m just really excited to finally share the film with people. What an amazing cinema for the premiere and for the crew to see their work for the first time and to be with our friends and families in fashionable Leicester Square. I don’t get nervous about people watching my films. They’ll either love it and have a wonderful time or hate it and that would suggest a failing on their part either emotionally or intellectually which has nothing to do with me or my art. They might feel somewhere in the middle and neither love it or hate it but those are the worst kind of people, the characterless walking flesh who haunt our world, unable to experience the passion of ecstasy or rage. The worthless shruggers who merely consume culture and then rate it with three stars on Amazon or Rotten Tomatoes because nothing has registered as more than a blip on their broken internal oscilloscope since they saw Star Wars when they were five years old. Some of them have their own blogs or video podcasts which sit, unwatched for all eternity by anyone except themselves (and me, if it comes up in a self-google) in which they witheringly condemn other people’s hard work with the opening line “I was excited to see this film, as a huge fan of *insert documentary subject here*, I was expecting it to be…” They remain utterly immune to the notion that anyone with a shred of intellect would judge something placed before them on what it IS and not what they had hoped it would be. And so they blather on into the howling abyss of nothingness as if their opinion has any value in a world in which Christopher Nolan is hailed as a cinematic genius. I might get a bit nervous. I don’t really like public speaking. And I’ve put a bit of weight on, so you know. But I’m back on the treadmill every day and I just got a really good haircut so that’s given me a little confidence boost. I don’t know. We’ll see on the day.
NYX: So, what are you working on at the moment?
JS: Something really exciting! Can’t reveal just yet, though.
NYX: Jon Spira, thank you very much.
JS: Thank YOU very much!
