Desperate Remedies is about the business side of love. Stewart Main expanded on the idea, colleague film-maker Peter Wells wrote the script. On one level the film is about the battle a woman must fight to save her sister from a destructive relationship, on another level it is about power and underhand methods, deception and the power struggle mixed with sex that people fight to get what they want.Each of the six leading characters in the film has something to hide and the film is about the most important remedy that everyone seeks in life: how do you get what you want without destroying what you were looking for?The film is liberally lit, lavishly decorated and has a style reminiscent of the films with ‘fast-talking women from the forties’. Stewart Main: ‘The world we want to create in Desperate Remedies was deliberately one without historic points of reference, other than to other melodramas or costume dramas. While working with the actors we kept looking at films such as Wyler’s The Heiress, Visconti’s Senso, Sirk’s Imitation of Life and Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons. We sought the higher reality of the melodrama. You start off laughing and end up crying, deeply moved, you are almost ashamed to be carried away by something your logic resists. We see the film as an ornamented Kammerspiel, with dark shadows, with deception on one side and on the other an all-consuming romantic drama with grand passions. We tried to evoke a world we know from film and literature.’
