Did the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton affair and the Starr report provide a context?
Certainly Royer-Collard bears some distant resemblance to Ken Starr. He comes to hound de Sade, to stop him from this torrid behaviour. What I love is that at the very end Royer-Collard is publishing the Marquis de Sade’s works for immortality just as Starr’s compilation of all that stuff is available in every bookstore, for children to read. It made ‘penis’ the most important word of the late 20th century. Geoffrey Rush gives an amazingly courageous performance. He spends the last 15 minutes naked. I loved Geoffrey’s physicality, his way of being so impish in his movements, so potty and seductive. After a while he was naked on set without any thought at all, just walking around. Doug said he wanted to revise the image of the Marquis de Sade to being the Hannibal Lecter of literature. You had a lot of fun with that idea. There’s an old James Whale film called The Old Dark House with Boris Karloff. It’s one of the funniest films I’ve seen but it’s done within the horror genre. Somebody
