The film is called The King, the lead character is called Elvis, but it's nothing to with a singer, director James Marsh tells Michael Dwyer.
An Englishman in New York, James Marsh grew up in Truro in Cornwall, about a mile from Land's End. Working as a director on the BBC TV arts programme, Arena, he found himself drawn to making documentaries about American popular culture.
"One time, about 11 years ago, I ended up staying on in New York, and that was it," Marsh said, when we met at the recent Dublin International Film Festival.
Marsh, who makes his cinema debut as a director with The King, is also credited on the Internet Movie Database as having been an assistant editor on Carrington and Crusoe.
"That actually isn't me," he says, laughing. "I have a background as an editor, but not on those projects. There is someone else with the same name."
The same website also credits him as the music editor on the Merchant Ivory production, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.
"That wasn't me either," he insists. "I don't think I'd be comfortable working in the heritage business with Merchant Ivory."
Let's talk, then, about what this James Marsh actually has done. Arena was in its heyday when he worked on the show in the 1990s, he recalls. "I was really fortunate in terms of timing. Those were the days when the lunatics had taken over the asylum. For about five or six years you could go to the editors of Arena with any ideas, no matter how bizarre or eccentric, and they would give you a hearing.
"The first film I made for Arena was in Latin and dealt with animals that were prosecuted for crimes in medieval Europe. It was a totally true phenomenon. If, for example, a wild boar savaged a child, the boar would be arrested and put in jail. There are records in France that itemise the execution of these animals. That gives you the flavour of the times at Arena."
His Arena productions included a Bafta-winning film on Velvet Underground member John Cale, a documentary on the last years of soul singer Marvin Gaye until he was murdered by his father, and an imaginative series exploring the background to popular songs, such as Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side and Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited.
"These were films about songs that had real people and events in them," he says. "Walk on the Wild Side is the perfect example of that. It's a documentary song about these drag queens in Andy Warhol's Factory in the 1970s."
Marsh's breakthrough into cinema came about by accident, when he made the Arena film, Wisconsin Death Trip, a visually inventive chronicle of human tragedies in a US farming community in the 1890s.
"That was basically a dramatised documentary, and a pretty baroque undertaking," he says. "It was made with a TV budget, but some people noticed it before it was broadcast. It got shopped on the festival circuit and ended up getting a cinema release in the UK and the US."
The critical success of that film enabled Marsh to make The King, which is not his first film with those two words in the title. In 1996 he made the award-winning documentary, The Burger and the King, inspired by his visit to Elvis Presley's Memphis home, Graceland.
"I saw all these Elvis cookbooks there for sale and I bought one," he says. "I began to see that you could tell his whole life through his choice of food. This cookbook seemed to be an insight into his mentality as well as his cultural background. So I made a whole film based around Elvis's favourite food through his life. It started off with fried squirrel and went through to the end, when he lived on a cocktail of barbiturates and enormous peanut butter sandwiches, all of which led to his early demise."
In a further resonance, the principal character in The King, played by Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, happens to be named Elvis. Marsh says that his co- writer on the film, Milo Addica, had seen and liked The Burger and the King, and that it was Addica's idea to name the character Elvis.
"I resisted that at first because it felt odd and begged too many questions," says Marsh.
Bernal's Elvis is a 21-year-old former US navy recruit who travels to Corpus Christi in Texas to confront the father he never met, an evangelist played by William Hurt.
"The film is from the point of view of a son who is trying to find out who his father actually is and what he is like," Marsh says. "That is a catalyst that creates all kinds of complications for all the other characters. If you've hidden something away, as this father did by abandoning and neglecting his son, you're asking for trouble - and that's what they get."
Whereas movies generally depict evangelists as flamboyant charlatan caricatures, Hurt's portrayal is refreshingly straight and subtle.
"The most public examples, such as Jimmy Swaggart, conform to that charlatan image," Marsh says. "But there are hundreds of thousands of ministers in the US and I believe that most of them try to live according to their beliefs, which is impossible.
"This discrepancy between trying and failing is dramatically much more interesting. It's the easiest thing in the world to mock and satirise somebody who falls short of his own beliefs. I wanted to make the character as righteous as he can be while at the same time showing him as flawed - and his flaw is pride."
As Elvis inveigles his way into his father's home and cunningly preys on the family, The King inevitably recalls Pier Paolo Pasolini's bold 1968 film, Theorem, although Marsh says he had not seen that movie before making his own.
"I have seen it since and I can see that its narrative scheme is quite similar," he says. "So, in a way, is Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle, which I saw when I was a young lad. I'm sure that made its mark, subconsciously, on me. Of course, there are only so many stories in the world, and the story of the outsider coming back in and trying to find connections is a well-established one. Our story for The King was prompted by two Bible stories: Cain and Abel, and the prodigal son."
Marsh cites the Gothic tradition in American literature and cinema as influences on his movie.
"I love Flannery O'Connor's stories, with their heightened naturalism, where very bad things can come out of nowhere, and those dreamlike, mythical films going back as far as Freaks and James Whale's films and then through Night of the Hunter, Badlands and Blue Velvet," he says. "All those movies have that voyeuristic quality that get to the heart of why you're watching movies. The King shares a sensibility with those films, but hopefully nothing is derivative about it."
Bernal plays Elvis as so ostensibly clean-cut that the film turns startling as he reveals his wholly amoral nature.
"That was the joy of casting an actor who's so physically seductive and charismatic," Marsh says. "He is a seducer. Women, in particular, will go with him on his dark and slippery journey and will cut him some slack, perhaps, when he doesn't deserve it.
"Gael was the only actor I wanted for that role. He stuck with the film through all kinds of production problems - you know, the usual boring stories about money falling out - and passionately wanted to make it."
Hurt, however, "has a reputation for being an exacting actor", Marsh says in an understatement. "He has his own way of thinking, shall we say? For me it was a baptism of fire. On the first day of the shoot he told me he had made 70-odd films and that I hadn't made any. Then he just wandered off. However, his performance is very precise and convincing, and he and I ended up collaborating very effectively. He's a brilliant actor and has so much experience that it makes you better as a director and makes you raise your game every day to a level that he will respect and respond to."
Marsh returns to cinema-verite for his next film, The Team.
"It's an observational documentary, which seems a very old-fashioned undertaking these days when the documentary is flourishing," he says. "I think they are so successful now because feature films are not telling the truth any more, and that applies to independent films as much as to Hollywood films. Documentaries are filling that vacuum very effectively.
"The Team is purely observational - no commentary, no montages, no MTV-style cutting. It follows these homeless people who get themselves together to train for the first Homeless World Cup. They play five-a-side games. In fact, there was a team from Dublin in the competition.
"I followed a New York team of homeless men, who travel to Austria for the games. They practice in a park. Dustbins are used for goalposts. They kick the ball around in their street clothes. They don't know the rules and they get angry with each other. It's been incredibly hard to make. I made The King in the middle of shooting it and I've been cutting it on and off for over a year. It's been mind- boggling to edit, trying to create a narrative out of so many hours of material. It's the hardest work I've ever done. I'm very proud of it."
The King is on release
