by Annette Basile
“I never thought I would do a documentary,” says actor, producer, director and fashion designer Sadie Frost. “I’ve always worked on short films… or producing features. To do a documentary was, to me, such a grown-up thing to do.”
Frost is talking to FilmInk via Zoom about her initial hesitation to helm Quant, a lively doco about 1960s fashion designer and icon, Mary Quant. Frost plucked up the confidence to tackle Quant after reading the designer’s autobiography and undertaking a documentary course.
“I know about fashion, I know about film, I understood Mary from reading her autobiography, and I know what it’s like to be a woman in the public eye… I wanted to be very sensitive to Mary’s family and her son. I engaged with it, embraced it, and enjoyed every second.”
Mary Quant passed away in April of this year, aged 93. Before her death, she watched the documentary, enjoyed it, and gave Frost her blessing. But Frost and Quant were unable to meet. “I was going to meet her and then Covid happened,” Frost explains. “She was quite frail. I didn’t want to push it either because when somebody is in that part of their life, you don’t want them to feel uncomfortable – the last thing she needed was me coming down to visit.”
Quant’s son Orlando Plunket Greene, who was interviewed for the documentary, “loved” the film, says Frost. “I think you have to be careful when you work with a family – they could be obstructive in telling a story. But Orlando was only helpful, and he didn’t get involved creatively.”
There are several threads that weave together in the film, one of them being the love story between Quant and her late husband and business partner, the charismatic Alexander Plunket Greene. “That was very important to me,” says Frost of capturing the couple’s relationship. Frost wanted the audience to understand the way the pair worked together “and how much he was her muse… It was so beautiful. Youth is so beautiful, you have this blossoming love affair that isn’t perfect…”
The interviewees wouldn’t talk about his reported womanising ways, she says. “But they talked a bit about the drinking and his smoking 40, 50, 60 cigarettes a day. You live this high life, but it comes at a cost and a price – you see that with people in the 1960s. There was that ‘60s freedom and then the ‘90s was like complete hedonism, and then a lot of the people who were around in the ‘90s, you’re seeing now – they’re kind of paying the price for having a certain life, and I think the ‘60s had a similar thing.”
Frost knows all about the ‘60s… and the ‘90s. She was part of the hard partying Primrose Hill Set, along with famous faces like Ewan McGregor, Kate Moss (who’s interviewed in the film) and, of course, Frost’s ex, Jude Law.
As a child, Frost (born in 1965) had the Sixties counterculture right under her roof. “My dad [David Vaughan] was a psychedelic artist and worked with the Beatles, and did the Kinks cover of their album [Sunny Afternoon]. My parents lived in a squat in Primrose Hill, next to [photographer] David Bailey. I remember growing up with all these wild stories and it was definitely a wild family. So, I was kind of there – that was the initial tapestry to my life and made me the person I am today. My dad told me never to conform, and to be a bit anarchic… All of these things that happen in the first few years of your life define who you are.”
The Kinks connection continues into the present day with guitarist Dave Davies one of the doco’s talking heads. Frost loves The Kinks and they feature in the film’s soundtrack, which was hand-picked by Frost herself. “The music was very important to me. You’re obviously always limited with budgets, and the rights – and publishing is always so expensive. But I chose my wish list and then we had a composer, and we remastered a few things… and then we got some stuff from the library. So, it’s a real mix. Sometimes you’ve got to make your compromises and other times you get exactly what you want. But I had The Clash, Florence + the Machine, Spandau Ballet, The Kinks, The Who – so I approached all those people and luckily I got the tracks,” she says, beaming as she recalls her soundtrack coup.
Gathering the music was an exercise in art vs commerce – as was Quant and Plunket Greene’s experience as the couple built the Quant brand. Asked if the couple’s experience mirrored her own in terms of the discord between creativity and money, Frost replies that it “absolutely” did. “I think it’s something that – if you’ve never had a fashion business or made a film – you wouldn’t even know the kind of restrictions or things that you come up against. I think fashion is so hard, and film as well.
“Sometimes, the sacrifices that were made were – not so much time – but budget. We weren’t allowed to use the archive I wanted to really tell the story because it’d be millions of pounds. So, you’re like, ‘How can I tell this story if I can’t use this?’ Every time you show a photograph you’re paying for that image. So, sometimes you can’t make the film you completely want because of money. But in the end, you do the best you can.”
Frost – who’s just wrapped a documentary about another ‘60s fashion icon, Twiggy – talks about reading critical film reviews and being aware of what the filmmakers might have been confronted with. “You know the hell and the process that someone’s been through… We booked somebody – a really great person to be interviewed – and they cancelled three times on the day, even five minutes before. And that cost tens of thousands of pounds of the budget.
“Things like that happen all the time. It’s not a personal thing. You just have to have faith and trust and make sure that whatever happens you can get through it.”
Quant is in cinemas now
