Ken Russell in 2001, for The Fall of the Louse of Usher
Stephen Applebaum: Would a film like The Devils be hard to make now?
Ken Russell: It would be impossible. No one would finance such a film, I would imagine.
Hasn’t the British Film Industry improved?
Well I’m not so mad on the British film industry. It seems to just produce one or two gems and then tons of mediocrity. I mean I saw, there was one the other day of people painting electric pylons.
Oh Among Giants?
Is that what it was called? I thought it was called Men Painting Pylons. And obviously it was so bad that they were desperate. Do you know what they did? They did long shots of them painting these pylons and over it they put a male voice chorus singing spiritual as though these guys from Newcastle would be singing “Nobody has known the trouble I’ve seen”. You know? All this crap. And it was watching paint dry. That was financed all very much by the British film industry. There was no excuse for it no matter what it was.
Maybe the establishment just wants new faces, new attitudes and films about social groups. You know, I’m not interested in that ever happening, I’m interested in wider subjects, wider horizons and not obvious things. New ways at looking at things. Just pointing out new excitements if you like, and so this film will be a new way at looking at Edgar Allan Poe.
What about British cinema?
I’m not interested in any of the British ones and I think that there are a lot of the American ones that are very… I don’t think enough credits given to American films these days, I think they’re very imaginative. I mean “The Thirteenth Floor” I thought was a wonderful film. I saw it on Sky. I loved it. I’ve seen it several times and it’s really quite a deep film. We all loved, at least I presume we loved the “Matrix” and we all want to see the “Matrix 2” and there is this film “Very Bad Things” which I love. And there have been a whole spate lately and they’ve come and gone very quickly but I can’t call one particular one to mind but I’ve got a sense that I’ve seen a number of very imaginative American movies that haven’t quite been exploited properly.
Continued at: https://www.netribution.co.uk/features/interviews/2001/ken_russell/1.html
Stephen Applebaum died in February 2024. He was one of the UK’s foremost film interviewers, with interviews spanning from Beyonce and Al Gore to Michael Moore and George Clooney; Bill Murray and Terry Gilliam, to Vidal Sassoon and Paul Rusesabagina. He’s survived by his wife and two daughters.