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They're superheroes with style, the coolest of crimefighters. They're the hippest heroes of the 1960's - and the year 2000.
They're "The Avengers," a blast from the past, back to battle evil-not to mention snow and hail.
This summer, more than three decades after the debut of the hit-and-myth British TV spy series, The Avengers will storm onto the big screen.
Back are secret agents John Steed (Ralph Fiennes), the unflappable, classically-dressed gentleman with bowler and umbrella, and his stylish sidekick and often leather-clad ally, Emma Peel (Uma Thurman).
When The Avengers first came on the scene, it was a time of cultural revolution; an era of mods, Beatles, Bond and pop art. Now, in the film version, it's as if that time never ended. The movie is set in the year 2000, yet the world in which Steed and Peel live is as hip and fashionable as the days when Twiggy ruled Carnaby Street.
And that's just the way veteran producer Jerry Weintraub fashioned it.
"I was in London in the 1960's, so I know what it was," Weintraub says. "The movie has the look of the '60s never ending. It's our vision of the '60s in the year 2000."
When we meet up with Steed and Peel in the future, they have been tapped by the Ministry, Britain's top-secret spy agency, to investigate a flurry of bizarre activity in Her Majesty's kingdom. Someone, it seems is out to control the weather, wrecking more havoc on the world than El Nino.
Steed and Peel, with martini-dry wit and steamy innuendo, prepare to stop the snow and temper the tempest, which means battling the cold and cruel Sir August De Wynter (Sean Connery).
"His villain was incredibly charming and seductive," Thurman says of Connery's role. "I don't really know he's a villain the entire time, which is perhaps more insidious than anything else."
"[De Wynter] destroys the world with style, and Steed and Peel save the world with style," Weintraub says.
And speaking of style, the distinctive style that set apart The Avengers TV series in the 1960's is recaptured in the Warner Bros. movie version today. From the witty repartee to the costumes to the look and tone of the film, the big-screen Avengers incorporates the TV version's penchant for minimalism, offbeat humor and sophistication.
Production designer Stuart Craig, a three-time Oscar winner for his art direction, describes the TV show as "surrealist," adding that his work on the film was inspired by Belgian painter Rene Magritte. (Coincidentally, one of Magritte's most famous works is a bowler hat-Steed's trademark).
"The series was made on a shoe-string and in a very witty way they managed to turn dereliction, empty spaces, no cars, no extras, into a virtue," Craig says. "They ended up with a very surreal world, a kind of selective reality."
"I think [Craig] has brilliantly captured the quirky eccentricities of the '60s and reinvented them alongside old, odd English things," raves Fiennes, the English actor known best for heavy dramatic roles in films like The English Patient and Schindler's List. "[There are] double-decker buses, red telephone boxes, but set in remote locations and often deserted environments."
That deserted, desolate, spartan quality is replicated in the $60 million-plus film in the form of a "clean" London. "There are very few characters, very few extras," says Weintraub. "At night, you might see one taxi cab, one bus, one policeman on a bicycle."
Connery suggests, jokingly, a whole other reason for the sparseness.
"All the streets were kind of empty, so they worked it out that it was part of the story," Connery says. "The real fact was that they couldn't afford the crowd, so there was nobody there."
The film shot in and around London for 75 days at locations that included traditional country homes and famous landmarks, such as Blenheim Palace and Stowe Castle.
Pinewood Studios served as the headquarters for the production. Several large-scale sets were built at the studio, including the bunker-like Ministry headquarters and the huge, futuristic structure of the Prospero project. De Wynter's weather-controlling station.
It was at Pinewood last June that a fire broke out during filming, causing more than $2 million in damage to one of the production stages. No one was seriously injured, and the stars of the film were not there when the fire started in the roof of the hangar-like building. But even a blaze couldn't slow this production down.
"This is an action movie, but the action is not the main character," Weintraub says.
"It's not Reservoir Dogs," adds Fiennes. "The action sequences are not heavy or sweaty. There's a sort of style even to the action sequences."
In addition to the Ministry and Prospero sets, Craig and set decorator Stephanie McMillan, director of photography Roger Pratt and visual effects supervisor Nick Davis re-created London's famous Trafalgar Square in the midst of an Arctic snowstorm created by De Wynter. The sequence - in which Steed chases a hot-air balloon through Trafalgar Square while fighting through 30-foot snowdrifts - required the filmmakers to build a scaled-down model of the square at Shepperton Studios. (Although "scaled down," it still took up more than 10,000 square feet.) Small sections of the square were then constructed to full scale on a separate stage. The filmmakers utilized visual effects to create shots of Steed wading through snowdrifts so they could be integrated into shots of the balloon floating past the statue of Lord Nelson in the center of the square.
"I can only imagine that the design will be a major star of the movie," suggests Thurman. "The design is extraordinary and massive, one of the most beautifully designed movies I've ever been on."
To create the impeccably British style of Steed and Peel, Oscar-winning costume designer Anthony Powell (Tess, Death on the Nile) relied on fashion from the 1960s, studying back issues of Vogue magazine. He used the '60s as a jumping point for Peel's wild wardrobe, including her leather bodysuit, a staple of the TV show. Steed's attire is classic, made expertly and excluisitely by tailors from the shops along Saville Row. His clothing includes pinstriped suits and signature bowler hats and umbrellas. And high style surrounds the pair right down to their choice in cars: Peel in an old jaguar XGE and Steed in an old Bentley.
But as modishly retro as her character was, Thurman still found parallels between Emma Peel and her previous summer-movie vixen, Poison Icy in Batman and Robin.
"They're both very strong characters and colorful in very different ways," says Thurman. "Emma Peel is far more subtle and delicate and not nearly the vaudevillian lunatic that Poison Ivy is. There are similarities between the films because they're both very design-heavy [with] specialty costumes. It was a good initiation to do a movie like this because it's been a while since I have had to suit up in various forms of rubber or leather."
Produced in England,starting in January 1961, The Avengers TV show was a tongue-in-cheek adventure series that starred Patrick Macnee as the debonair agent Steed. The actor, whose memoir The Avengers and Me was recently published by TV Books, has a cameo in this film, as well as a small stake in profits from the property.
"Patrick Macnee created something so quintessentially English. [It was] a wonderful mixture of eccentricity and likeable cliche, with his own particular brand of charm and joie de vivre," said Fiennes. "I can't help but be influenced by that because he was Steed through the whole decade of the '60s, but there came a point where I just knew I can't imitate Patrick's Steed. I had to absorb what he created and sort of make it my own. I've kept the bowler hat and the umbrella and the wonderful suits."
Weintraub, an Avengers fan from the start, obtained the rights to the series about a dozen years ago. Director Jeremiah Chechik (Benny and Joon) and screenwriter Don MacPherson (Absolute Beginners) are also longtime admirers.
"I've always been a huge Avengers fan. I was one of the people in London who would go to screenings of the TV series in movie theaters, " says MacPherson, who is British. "The first time I arrived in Hollywood as a screenwriter, people told me I'd be perfect to write [an Avengers script]. I have always wanted to be a part of an Avengers movie. As a fan, there's an ambition tomake the movie you've always wanted to see."
"I did it because when I was a kid I was mad about Diana Rigg," admitted Weintraub, whose film producing credits include Diner and The Specialist. "I fell in love with Diana Rigg. I had dreams about her."
So why then did it take 12 years to bring the project to the big screen?
"I make different movies every year, depending on what kind of clothes I want to wear that year, " Weintraub says with a chuckle. " It was suits and ties for The Avengers, and now I'm here in a quarry in jeans and T-shirts [for the upcoming sci-fi action epic Soldier]. But seriously, it's about when creatively I feel it's the right time for a movie, for a film audience. It's about when i get the right script and the right actors. i want to make things that are lasting and good and important. "
After a number of different storylines and scripts came and went, MacPherson created the version that made it to the big screen.
"It combines the beats of an action movie in a surreal manner," the screenwriter says."It's a spy/action movie, but with the logic of Alice in Wonderland. I wrote the script as if it were going to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock."
"It's a romantic comedy with [playwright] Noel Coward kind of dialogue. There are great lines," Weintraub adds. "Everything has sexual innuendo. It's very bright and very witty. All the bells and whistles are in it for the kids, but it doesn't lose adults along the way."
Thurman read one of the early drafts, but admits the project didn't feel quite right until Weintraub had MacPherson's version- and Fiennes. "When it came back around, it just seemed like it was coming back for a reason," Thurman says. "Ralph [Fiennes] was in it and I thought he was perfect for the part."
And according to MacPherson, Thurman plays her part to perfection, too. "Uma is sexy, witty, intelligent, mysterious, and unavailable - the perfect Mrs. Peel," he says.
The Avengers TV series progressed from black-and-white to color and featured a series of female leads, including Honor Blackman (who went on to play Pussy Galore in the screen adaptation of Ian Fleming's Goldfinger) as Catherine Gale, Rigg as Peel and Linda Thorson as Tara King. Gale, Peel and King were years ahead of their time - fully empowered troubleshooters who could hold their own with Steed.
"She's a positive, intelligent, witty, sort of superwoman with a tongue-in-cheek twist," Thurman says of Emma Peel.
Though Thurman and Fiennes profess admiration for the original series, fans will no doubt worry that their favorite characters will be mutilated.
Just recently The Saint, which was very loosely based on the British TV series of the same name, received only a lukewarm reception from fans and critics alike, partially because it jettisoned everything of merit from its source material.
According to Weintraub, however, the film version of The Avengers, despite the big-budget action scenes and sets, was designed to preserve as much of the original show's flavor as possible. Most the key players on the film are from the U.K., including Fiennes, Connery, comedians Fiona Shaw, Jim Broadbent and Eddie Izzard, and production designer Craig, costume designer Powell, screenwriter MacPherson and cinematographer Pratt. Their involvement helped keep the property from being Americanized into the typical Hollywood action-movie fare.
"It's really bold, it's really British, it's really sexy and really colorful," says MacPherson.
"It's an action movie in a non-malicious way, and it's a romantic comedy
in a very charming, elegant way, " says Thurman. "It's not really a love
story. It's a buddy movie. There's fight scenes and perhaps a kiss at
the end. I think most of all, it has a very delicate sensibility to it,
and an unusual sense of humor."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on April 24, 1998
EL STEPHO