Rupert Wainwright

A religious experience

It's done big business in the US and opens here tomorrow. Rupert Wainwright tells Film Unlimited about Stigmata

It's not a horror movie, it's more of a love story. Its creator is an atheist who's made a movie about the Catholic church. Stigmata, the American blockbuster by British director Rupert Wainwright is a film that defies easy categorisation. Starring Patricia Arquette as a Pittsburgh hairdresser who finds herself afflicted by stigmata wounds, and Gabriel Bryne as the priest the Vatican (headed by a malignant Jonathan Pryce) sends to investigate, the film is tightly paced, entertaining and stylish - bearing more than a little resemblance to the MTV pop videos that Wainwright cut his teeth on.

  1. Stigmata
  2. Production year: 1999
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 18
  5. Runtime: 102 mins
  6. Directors: Rupert Wainwright
  7. Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Jonathan Pryce, Mark Adair-Rios, Patricia Arquette, Tom Hodges
  8. More on this film

Wainwright denies that his movie is jumping on the current anti-Vatican bandwagon. "A good movie has to be pro something," he argues, but "those guys have had such an easy time of it for the last 2,000 years it's about time someone took them on." However, he adds mischievously, "I had my son christened before the movie came out - in case no-one would do it afterwards."

The story of the missing fifth gospel (which New Testament experts put as the most accurate and contemporaneous of all accounts of Christ's life, but whose veracity the Catholic Church denies) forms the basis of the tale, but was actually added to the original script at the director's instigation. "I was obsessed by it" says Wainwright, who found himself involved in the writing to a large extent. Similarly the developing relationship between the two central characters, which now forms the crux of the story, was introduced at a later stage.

Wainwright's original ending was modified following test screenings. The one cinema audiences will see makes concessions to the studio's wish for a happy ending, and is not the director's choice. If you're curious, wait for the DVD release which will feature two versions of the ending, and is perhaps the first truly interactive DVD: viewers can choose at the beginning which version they'd rather watch.

The film itself owes much to Ken Russell's Altered States and Jacob's Ladder. Wainwright went to the trouble of hiring Jacob's Ladder cameraman Jeffrey Kimball because he wanted to convey a similar look. The influence of seminal British psycho-drama Don't Look Now is also evident - Stigmata uses the same palette of muted colours offset against a garish red.

Wainwright's past career has included a part in 1984's Another Country (he played Devenish), ballet dancing, and ad and pop video directing. He was discreet over what it was like to work with Michael Jackson on the promo for 1994's History' but did concede that he is "really obsessive a Howard Hughes character," and confirmed that Jackon's entourage then included the world's smallest dwarf. Employed as a security guard, no less.

As for his next projects, the California resident says he'd love to make a film in his native UK, but there are fewer opportunities here, and the whole process strikes him as too labyrinthine. Wainwright is currently involved in a Jim Carrey-produced female action thriller set in Shanghai, and is developing a movie about the National Rifle Association. Not surprisingly, this is proving hard to get off the ground in a nation where the right to bear arms remains a political hot potato. Still, having managed to make a film which lambasts the Vatican and seriously suggests that a non-believing modern woman receives all five Stigmata wounds, a movie on the NRA should be no problem.

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