Being wary of men who wear novelty braces is one of those rules of thumb I’ve always tried to adhere to. So when I’m introduced to Ben Lewin, the writer and director of the lauded new film The Sessions and spy his bright-yellow braces, designed to look like a tape measure, my heart sinks for a moment. Am I, as my instinct suggests, about to be overwhelmed by ‘zaniness’?
Thankfully, the answer proves to be no. Lewin, a short, slightly portly man who looks a touch older than his 66 years, is far quieter than his choice of braces suggests. He’s a happy man, too, smiling as he does throughout much of our time together, reminding me of a sitting Buddha.
Lewin, who walks with the aid of crutches after suffering from polio as a child, has every right to be content. The Sessions, released here next week, is finally helping him to make a name for himself in the film industry. He jokingly refers to himself as a ‘40-year overnight success’, adding, with the kind of cheery bluntness that proves to be his trademark, that when inspiration for The Sessions arrived in 2006 his long career as a director and screenwriter was ‘in the toilet’.
He had just written a sitcom called The Gimp, based on his experiences as a disabled man, when he found an article on the internet entitled ‘On Seeing a Sex Surrogate’ by the late American journalist and poet Mark O’Brien, who had also suffered from polio. The virus rendered O’Brien a quadriplegic, reliant on an iron lung to help him breathe. He was nevertheless determined to lose his virginity and the article detailed his visits to Cheryl Cohen Greene, the sex surrogate of the title.
Lewin says he immediately felt the story would form the perfect basis for a film script. I put it to him that the existence of sex surrogates, sex therapists who engage in sexual activity with their clients, will be news to many viewers of his film. He agrees and says it was a subject he had much to learn about too. The question uppermost in Lewin’s mind when he started writing was, what was the difference between a sex surrogate and a prostitute. He spoke directly with Cohen Greene to find out.
‘When I was sat there talking to Cheryl I was thinking about that question very much,’ he says. ‘A turning point in our conversation was when I asked her something and she said, “I don’t remember, can I just go and get my notes?” She came back with these very detailed clinical notes and I thought to myself, hookers don’t keep these kinds of notes on their clients.’
Lewin speaks with a gentle Australian burr, if you can imagine such a thing. He picked up the accent after moving Down Under as a child with the rest of his Jewish family when they were forced to flee Poland in 1949. Lewin initially trained to be a barrister but then came to England to study at the National Film School. A moderately successful career in television and film followed, but The Sessions is his biggest hit to date by some distance. It has already taken more than $5million at the US box office and, while Lewin jokes that it might not be too popular in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, I’d be surprised if British audiences didn’t take to it as well.
The film was a hit with critics and awards juries at numerous film festivals last year, predictions of Oscar success have been widespread. By the time you read this, the nominations for the 2013 awards will have been announced and we’ll know if the hype has been justified. Superficially at least, The Sessions is just the kind of thing Academy voters tend to go for, but whether or not it’s nominated, it deserves to be thought of as more than just worthy awards-season fodder, thanks to its higher than average joke count and refusal to be too earnest.
We briefly discuss the success of the Paralympics and Lewin says that, while he’d be delighted if his film were swept along in ‘any disability chic movement that might exist’, he also insists that he hasn’t made what he calls a ‘cripple of the week movie’. ‘The point is Mark wasn’t trying to do something extraordinary, he was trying to do something very ordinary actually, which is maybe an anti-heroic theme. Disabled heroes and heroines are part of a literary tradition, and regularly appear in folklore and cinema. I don’t think it is necessarily an oddball subject, but I’m not concerned about having the film described for what it is.’
It’s somewhat ironic that the very thing that has most interested people about The Sessions, the way it marries the potentially tricky subjects of sex and disability (the sex scenes are unflinching without being graphic), is exactly what prevented Lewin from finding anyone in Hollywood who was prepared to finance it in the first place. Every studio he approached rejected the script (‘It’s not a popcorn movie and so was of no interest to the studios who only want things that can be a franchise — Avengers 1 through 217’), so he and his wife, the producer Judi Levine, instead persuaded
family and friends to provide financial support.
A tiny budget of $1million was raised and, much to Lewin’s surprise, Hollywood stars John Hawkes and Helen Hunt agreed to take the lead roles, with the superb William H. Macy signing on to play O’Brien’s beer-swilling Catholic priest as well. When the finished film went down a storm at Sundance last year, Fox Searchlight snapped it up.
Lewin is understandably pleased that the industry has finally embraced the film. If the Oscar nominations have found room for him then it will make an already remarkable story even better. He won’t, he assures me, be too perturbed if he doesn’t make the cut, though. Lewin likens the scramble for Academy Awards to a horse race and the throw of a dice in quick succession, before reaching a philosophical conclusion.
‘There are plenty of terrific films that haven’t quite made it and plenty of crap that has been successful, so you always know that the scales of justice might not go your way,’ he says. Lewin will know by now whether those scales have tipped in his favour.
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