Robert Pattinson may not have made a new fan of Susan Richards. The author and widow of late photographer Dennis Stock – played by Pattinson in forthcoming film, Life – says the actor’s performance lacked “the guts, energy and imagination needed to capture such a ferocious and remarkable man”.Richards has been outspoken in her criticism of the film’s depiction of Stock’s relationship with 24-year-old actor James Dean, who Stock (then just 26) photographed walking through a freezing Times Square in a now-iconic spread for Life magazine.
“Pattinson portrayed a man who was very insecure, very low on confidence. He wasn’t very bright, he wasn’t talkative. He seemed confused, inarticulate,” Richards says from her home in Maine. “I saw a lost soul, with none of the confidence, humour, charm or intelligence that drew me, and so many others, to Dennis. That wasn’t the man I knew.”
Set in 1955, in the lull between Dean’s groundbreaking performance in East of Eden and his role in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, Life explores how these now-classic pictures were created. The film shows the quasi-friendly dynamic that developed between photographer and performer – both of whom thought they were doing the other an undeserved favour.
Stock’s photographs of Dean in rainy New York, collar turned up, cigarette defying gravity, were coupled in the film with others of Dean on his family’s Indiana farm, playing a bongo by the livestock, or reading children’s stories with his nephew. These were the images that embalmed Dean as the doomed symbol of the counter-cultural age when he died six months later in a car crash.
But it is the depiction of Dean’s chronicler Stock that has caused concern. Richards’ comments may sting Life director Anton Corbijn, a deeply reverent admirer of Stock’s work who started his own career as a music photographer. “His photographs are like documents,” Corbijn says of Stock. “They’re brilliantly composed images of a person in a moment, but they’re beautiful examples of their era as well.”
The film, he says, involved researching Stock’s life, from the photographers and editors who worked with him, to his children and former wives. Yet, Corbijn says: “We took some liberties in the dramatisation of the film. We had to find an arc for their characters. A lot of people who knew Stock at the time are no longer with us. The further you go back, the more freedom you have in a way.”
Pattinson joined the project long before Dane DeHaan, who plays Dean, and the industry press assumed that he was to play the role of the actor. Although he had little prior interest in photography, it was Pattinson, Corbijn says, who was eager to play Stock. “Robert’s always being chased by photographers, and now he plays a photographer himself. There’s a kind of perverse pleasure for him there.”
Corbijn’s film is essentially a two-hander. DeHaan’s Dean is portrayed as the non-conforming young actor, appalled by the demands of stardom, hiding behind a veil of above-it-all insouciance.
Stock is the photographer with ambitions beyond the press pack, trying to convince his editor at Magnum, John G Morris – played by Joel Edgerton in a role originally intended for Philip Seymour Hoffman – of his worth, while scraping together enough money to keep his estranged wife off his case and his largely-ignored son interested in him.
“Now that he is gone, I realise that I vastly underestimated the talent of Dennis Stock,” Morris told the New York Times. “I think it was because he was such a pain in the neck to deal with in Magnum. I used to call him Dennis the Menace.”
Stock was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1928, to an English mother and a Swiss father who died when he was 16. Within a year, Stock had left school to fight in the second world war. “He left the army, and had the brashness to march into the office of Eugene Smith,” at the time, one of American’s celebrated photojournalists, “and ask for a job,” Richards says. “Dennis had never taken a picture in his life. It lasted two weeks before Smith fired him. He realised Dennis was a complete chancer who didn’t know anything about photography.”
Despite this, Stock managed to be invited into the world-famous Magnum photo agency in 1951 after becoming apprenticed to Life magazine photographer Gjon Mili. He would go on to photograph Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. He died in 2010 after a short battle with colon cancer.
In a scene in Indiana, Corbijn depicts Dean loudly telling a family member that Stock is a typical New Yorker: “Prickly, pushy and opinionated”. Yet this line doesn’t tally with the film, Richards says. Pattinson depicts Stock as shy and diffident, with nervous tics and hesitant mannerisms. It is, by Richards’ account, wildly divergent to the reality of Stock.
Richards says she could not imagine that Stock would have been as the film portrays him. She didn’t know Stock when he was 26 – they married in 2006, making her his fourth wife – but the real Dennis Stock, she says, “grew up on the streets of New York. This was not a shy man, but a ferocious man. He was a fighter who know how to survive in the bad parts of Manhattan. If he liked you, he would clamp himself to your life. If he didn’t like you, he could be a very ugly person. But he was a warm man, and that warmth wasn’t in the film at all.”
Asked why she thinks Pattinson played her husband in such a way, Richards says: “I think some actors, for fear of overacting, rely on understatement. You can do less harm that way. I don’t think Robert Pattinson had the guts to try and interpret someone as complex and powerful as Dennis. He just withdrew.”
But Corbijn’s view? “Robert is not interested in pay checks,” he says. “He is a guy who wants to prove himself as an actor, playing a photographer who wants to prove himself as a photographer.”
- Life is released in UK cinemas on Friday 25 September, in the US on 4 December and was released on 10 September in Australia.
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