In art, as in life, it’s always best to cut a bit of a dash. Clearly, this was in the mind of the painter Stuart Pearson Wright when he went to see a mate appearing at the Old Vic in Gaslight three years ago. A lanky six-footer, Wright had opted to wear plus fours for the evening. In the seat next to him was Keira Knightley. It so happened that Wright had written to Knightley several months before to ask if he might paint her. He got no response.
The plus fours apparently did it. After the play, they both went to the friend’s dressing room to congratulate her. As Knightley says: “I met Stuart backstage. He was wearing plus fours, and I thought it an extraordinary thing that someone had the balls...” They all went out for an aftershow dinner and then met again, weeks later, at a party, where they jammed together on toy instruments, as you do. “We formed a band,” Knightley continues. “I, the kazoo; he, the plastic trombone. It was after that that we first discussed doing a project together. I loved the idea of doing something that was purely creative, weird and wonderful, and not a commercial venture.
And so the face of Chanel ended up being in one of Wright’s artworks after all, although not quite as he had planned. She is the star attraction in his installation Maze — a debut for her, and, as it turned out, something of a first for him, too.
“Ideas were developed at his studio over cupcakes and tea, and under the skeleton of his dog,” Knightley explains. (When I visited Wright’s studio last week, the skeleton was nowhere in sight; his new dog, Enid, very much alive.) “And a film piece was decided on.” Shot in March last year in the ancient maze at Longleat in Wiltshire, Maze lasts 12 minutes. It is designed to be shown in a gallery on two screens facing one another. And it’s about as far from the red-carpet showbizzery of Pirates of the Caribbean as you can get. It’s fascinating to see Knightley involved in the pure business of acting, without either a cheesy Richard Curtis script or all the Hollywood farrago of a giant feature film getting in the way. She plays an Elizabethan maiden; Wright, her gallant courtier. Both are kitted out in full period costume: he in velvet doublet, cape and hose; she in a giant golden Elizabethan dress, complete with hooped skirts, ruff and loops of pearls, plus a colossal wig and white Pan Stik make-up. The two characters have been shot separately and appear on separate screens. The period sense is perfect. But, as with most artistic film projects, plot, character and theme must all be provided, to a large extent, by the audience.
It is highly likely Wright wasn’t seriously expecting Knightley to agree to be in his film. Yet it seemed to come along at the perfect moment for her. “She had just made The Duchess and was taking a year out, I think, to re-evaluate what she was doing,” he says. “She was very generous and agreed on the spot to do the film.”
Knightley, it seems, was sincerely relieved to escape the blockbuster antics that had made her famous in the Pirates films (Penelope Cruz has since become the female lead). She would follow Maze with a star turn in the West End, in a contemporary version of Molière’s The Misanthrope. Those who like to carp at her talents sniffed that she wasn’t exactly stretching herself by playing a spoilt young Hollywood star; but the truth is that Knightley showed she had real stage presence and was, gosh, a proper actress.
In terms of daring, Knightley has probably picked the right chap for her first foray into the contemporary art world. Wright, although certainly not without commercial savvy, is one of the most intriguing painters around. Trained at the Slade, he won the BP Portrait Award in 2001, at 26, with a picture of several middle-aged men surrounding a dead chicken. After this, he secured a raft of prestigious commissions, painting the Duke of Edinburgh, JK Rowling (now in the National Portrait Gallery) and a quartet of Indian cricketers for the MCC — all in his hyper-realistic style, where verisimilitude is traded off against subtle, surreal distortion. He operated (then) without a gallery, but clearly made enough, at least, to buy a studio in east London.
As he puts it, though, painting the rich and famous was a “default position”. He stopped doing portraits about two years ago and, since then, has been involved in producing a series of works with a personal narrative, set within a historical or art-historical frame. The show of his paintings running alongside Maze at the Riflemaker gallery, I Remember You, is a series featuring Wright as a cowboy that puts his usual off-kilter spin on stereotypical depictions of the American West. He has also done a bit of acting (at the Edinburgh Fringe), a bit of singing (he has made his own CD of country-music covers) and, now, a bit of directing. “Since I was about four,” he says, “I’ve had the perilous sense that I might never squeeze everything in.”
Wright had an unusual start in life: now 34, he has never known his father, and proudly admits he was brought up in an utterly peripatetic manner by his mother, Penelope, now a working painter herself. From an early age, he would imagine his life as a film. He would build tiny sets inspired by Star Wars, and work out screenplays. Yet, nice as it may have been to spend a happy childhood building intergalactic spaceships out of shoe boxes, it is quite another thing to be working with one of the film business’s most successful, famous and powerful leading ladies. “On the day of filming,” he says, “I had a wake-up call at 4.30am. I remember contemplating the fact that I was about to make a film with Keira Knightley and a crew of 15 experienced people. I wondered how long it would be before I was uncovered as a fraud.”
At that time the sum total of his experience in cinema was a single five-minute enterprise with a former girlfriend on a home-video camera in Epping Forest. “I was wearing medieval armour in it,” he says thoughtfully. “I think I have the right face for period costume.” Indeed, his long face works quite well across the centuries. As, of course, does Knightley’s. “I wanted to have an authentic period sense, you see, and I knew Keira would bring that sense to the film. And the moment she agreed to be in it, the pressure was on to make it happen.”
The plot, such as it is, involves Knightley, as the Lady Constance, getting lost in a maze, much to her distress and the equal concern of her swain (Wright). What starts out as an intriguing folie à deux ends up in near-hysteria as the light fades and the couple continually fail to reunite. The film was shot largely in one take on a single day at Longleat, with only about 12 lines of script. “It’s about two people trying to communicate with one another, but there is this hedge between them,” says Wright, who says he was inspired by an El Greco look for the piece.
Knightley has her own take on the cinematic references: “Films by Werner Herzog, as well as Possession, with Isabelle Adjani — particularly the scene where she miscarries the Devil’s child in a subway station.” It’s a fair old distance from Bend It Like Beckham, yet Knightley gives a measured delivery of the mounting hysteria that might overcome somebody who ends up abandoned in a maze. “My direction on the day often consisted of [Wright saying] ‘A little more Adjani.’ And although we never went quite as far as the abortion of green goo, there’s always the sequel,” she says.
Wright’s understanding as to why Britain’s most starry female star would agree to do such an off-piste project is as much a critique of the film world as an acknowledgment of his own abilities. “Well, it’s clear she loves acting and is a real craftsperson about the nature of acting. But I think she just wanted to do a project without all the PR, the marketing and all the surrounding stuff that goes with a feature film. She wanted to get away from everything and just enjoy acting for the process itself. And so she took a leap of faith.”
Perhaps it was the idea of working with a confirmedly unconventional artist that appealed to Knightley, who, after all, has spent the past 15 years more or less living in a series of trailers and dealing with Hollywood folk. Take her description of a recent meeting: “The last time I saw Stuart, he took me out to eat cabbage that had been rotted underground for some years.” Not something you would find on the menu at The Ivy. Might she be his muse? “Well, I don’t know what my fiancée, Polly, would have to say about that,” murmurs Wright, who is chatting to me beneath a giant picture of Polly, naked, in a field. “Maybe Keira might be, if not my muse, then certainly a muse, of sorts.”