François Ozon in the LONDON TIMES

In the London Times, Kevin Maher talks with François Ozon's, whose period drama Angel opens in the UK on August 29:

"He's one of France's hottest film-makers. He makes award-winning movies filled with knockout French femmes (including Catherine Deneuve and Ludivine Sagnier), bursting with transgressive sexual subtext and topped by occasional musical numbers. So what made the 40-year-old provocateur François Ozon shoot a traditional English period drama about a fictional Edwardian novelist?

"'Did you think it was traditional?'" he gasps in horror at the very thought that his new movie, Angel, about a deluded English writer played by Romola Garai (Atonement), might belong to the Merchant and Ivory stable. "'I tried not to make it traditional at all, but to make it about dreams and fantasies, and the effects of fame, and how artists reinvent themselves and their lives.'"

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Angel was inspired by the life of 19th-century British Gothic writer Marie Corelli (nee Mary Mackay). I first heard of Corelli while doing research for my Ramon Novarro bio. She wrote the novel Vendetta, which top silent-era director Rex Ingram filmed twice: in 1917, as Black Orchids, and in 1922, with Novarro as one of the leads, as Trifling Women.

The now-lost Trifling Women, in which the heroine-cum-villainess (silent-film vamp Barbara La Marr) destroys the lives of men (Novarro and Lewis Stone among them), may have inspired elements found in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. Those include the dead chimp (the orangutan in Trifling Women reportedly fell madly in love with La Marr), Norma Desmond's black-widowish look and persona (what Barbara La Marr's vamps would have looked like in 1950), and even the film's Gothic feel (not coincidentally, John F. Seitz shot both Trifling Women and Sunset Blvd.).