MIKE NEWELL/NIGHTMARES COME TRUE

One of Britain's most successful directors ever has had his worst fears fulfilled.

Like most great artists, director Newell has long worried that he was not as good as people thought, and dreaded being exposed. And finally his worries have been fulfilled.

Well, not exactly. But he does admit that the American outcry over his lastest offering – his 16th feature film – Love in the Time of Cholera (pictured, above), has been sobering.

Fortunately, this has been tempered by a hugely successful run in South America, where it is set and was filmed, and where you would have thought there would be outrage, if anywhere, given that the author of the original story Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is essential a national icon.

British cinema goers and lovers of Marquez and his novel will have their chance to decide when the film opens on these shores this month.

Meanwhile, a few notes on Newell the man might not go amiss, given that he was recently on stage at the University of Hertfordshire to answer a few pertinent questions about his career. He was on tap for a special screening of his film Donnie Brasco hosted by the innovative Film & Digital Media Exchange in the University's superb screening auditorium.

Newell is quintessentially a local boy. He was born in St Alban’s, just down the road from the Uni, and spent his formative years there, as the son of two theatrical parents, performing in the local choir and amateur dramatics.

When he shifted away, he did not go far – only to Cambridge – and his increasingly ardent love of theatre went with him. Indeed, his don, initially troubled by Newell’s response to the question ‘What do you want to do at Cambridge?’ – answer: To study and get a good degree – explained that he meant What did Newell intend to do besides that? and was visibly relieved to hear that he meant to get involved in stage productions. “Ah, well, we’ll see you again in a few years time, then.”

Newell did indeed lose himself in live performances of his favourite playwrights but when he moved from academia to London he was quickly snaffled up by Granada TV and his fate was sealed. Although he has worked consistently ever since on drama, including plays, he has worked only in television and, mainly, since 1979, in film.

He made the transition from TV to feature when his lavish small screen production of The Man In The Iron Mask enjoyed a theatrical release – and a successful one at that – in America.

Since then he has gone on to make an extraordinarily diverse range of more than a dozen feature films.

Newell’s reflection on this film during the Q&A at FDMX provided one of the most touching moments of the evening as he confessed that he felt a deeply personal attachment to Ellis. He said, “I based her character on my own mother, who I remembered as living through something of the same grim, bleak day to day routine at the time. It was a period when women had little choice and were severely punished if they dated to express any desire for something different.”

As if to alleviate such grim thoughts, Newell’s next few films had a much happier, almost mystical quality to them, leading to one of his favourite films, Into The West, starring Gabriel Bynre and a white horse.

Cue Stage Three of the Newell Grand Progress: The Year of Hugh Grant. Otherwise known as Four Weddings and a Funeral. Asked whether he knew from the beginning that this film would be such a colossal success, Newell admitted convincingly that.. as usual, he feared that he was about to be exposed.

I worried that it would fail miserably. I dreaded that people would be bored, thinking to themselves, So that’s two weddings down, still two more to go. Oh, dear, a funeral to look forward to as well. I feared that they would be walking out in droves. But when we did the first test screening and the audiences started laughing in the first few minutes and never stopped.

The success with Weddings propelled Newell to Hollywood, to make Donnie Brasco, (which was extremely well received 10 years down the road, at the FDMX screening); Pushing Tin, his underrated take on air traffic control chaos; Mona Lisa; and the monster known as Harry Potter.

With all this admirable work behind him, how could he still be worried about failure? Yet, the nerves continue and the hurt from the US rejection of Cholera was seemingly lessened by having been so long expected.

In any case, Newell is far from crushed. On the contrary, he is already off on his latest challenge, yet another divergence, making ready to begin filming Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, based on a video game featuring a prince who teams up with a rival princess to stop an angry ruler trying to destroy the world.

Filed December 17, 2007