FILMS
Introduction to My Beautiful Laundrette
I wrote the script of My Beautiful Laundrette in my uncle’s house in Karachi, Pakistan, in February 1984, during the night. As I wrote, cocks crowed and the call to prayer reverberated through crackly speakers from a nearby mosque. It was impossible to sleep. One morning as I sat on the verandah having breakfast, I had a phone call from Howard Davies, a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom I’d worked twice before. He wanted to direct Brecht’s Mother Courage, with Judi Dench in the lead role. He wanted me to adapt it.
That summer, back in England and at Howard’s place in Stratford-upon-Avon, I sat in the orchard with two pads of paper in front of me: on one I rewrote My Beautiful Laundrette and on the other I adapted Brecht from a literal translation into language that could be spoken by the RSC actors.
As Laundrette was the first film I’d written, and I was primarily a playwright, I wrote each scene of the film like a little scene for a play, with the action written like stage directions and with lots of dialogue. Then I’d cut most of the dialogue and add more stage directions, often set in cars, or with people running about, to keep the thing moving, since films required action.
I’d had a couple of lunches with Karin Bamborough of Channel 4. She wanted me to write something for Film on Four. I was extremely keen. For me Film on Four had taken over from the BBC’s Play for Today in presenting serious contemporary drama on TV to a wide audience. The work of TV writers like Alan Bennett (much of it directed by Stephen Frears), Dennis Potter, Harold Pinter, Alan Plater and David Mercer influenced me greatly when I was young and living at home in the suburbs. On my way up to London the morning after a Play for Today I’d sit in the train listening to people discussing the previous night’s drama and interrupt them with my own opinions.
The great advantage of TV drama was the people who watched it; difficult, challenging things could be said about contemporary life. The theatre, despite the efforts of touring companies and so on, has failed to get its ideas beyond a small enthusiastic audience.
When I finished a draft of My Beautiful Laundrette, and Mother Courage had gone into rehearsal, Karin Bamborough, David Rose and I discussed directors for the film.
A couple of days later I went to see a friend, David Gothard, who was then running Riverside Studios. I often went for a walk by the river in the early evening, and then I’d sit in David’s office. He always had the new books and the latest magazines; and whoever was appearing at Riverside would be around. Riverside stood for tolerance, scepticism and intelligence. The feeling there was that works of art, plays, books and so on, were important. This is a rare thing in England. For many writers, actors, dancers and artists, Riverside was what a university should be: a place to learn and talk and work and meet your contemporaries. There was no other place like it in London and David Gothard was the great encourager, getting work on and introducing people to one another.
He suggested I ask Stephen Frears to direct the film. I thought this an excellent idea, except that I admired Frears too much to have the nerve to ring him. David Gothard did this and I cycled to Stephen’s house in Notting Hill, where he lived in a street known as ‘directors’ row’ because of the number of film directors living there.
He said he wanted to shoot my film in February. As it was November already I pointed out that February might be a little soon. Would there be time to prepare, to rewrite? But he had a theory: when you have a problem, he said, bring things forward; do them sooner rather than later. And anyway, February was a good month for him; he made his best films then; England looked especially unpleasant; and people worked faster in the cold.
The producers, Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe, Stephen had worked with before, on promos for rock bands. So the film was set up and I started to rewrite. Stephen and I had long talks, each of us pacing up and down the same piece of carpet, in different directions.
The film started off as an epic. It was to be like The Godfather, opening in the past with the arrival of an immigrant family in England and showing their progress to the present. There were to be many scenes set in the 1950s; people would eat bread and dripping and get off boats a lot; there would be scenes of Johnny and Omar as children and large-scale set pieces of racist marches with scenes of mass violence.
We soon decided it was impossible to make a film of such scale. That film is still to be made. Instead I set the film in the present, though references to the past remain.
It was shot in six weeks in February and March 1985 on a low budget and 16mm film. For this I was glad. There were no commercial pressures on us, no one had a lot of money invested in the film who would tell us what to do. And I was tired of seeing lavish films set in exotic locations; it seemed to me that anyone could make such films, providing they had an old book, a hot country, new technology and were capable of aiming the camera at an attractive landscape in the hot country in front of which stood a star in a perfectly clean costume delivering lines from the old book.
We decided the film was to have gangster and thriller elements, since the gangster film is the form that corresponds most closely to the city, with its gangs and violence. And the film was to be an amusement, despite its references to racism, unemployment and Thatcherism. Irony is the modern mode, a way of commenting on bleakness and cruelty without falling into dourness and didacticism. And ever since the first time I heard people in a theatre laugh during a play of mine, I’ve wanted it to happen again and again.
We found actors — Saeed Jaffrey, for whom I’d written the part; and Roshan Seth I’d seen in David Hare’s play Map of the World, commanding that huge stage at the National with complete authority. I skidded through the snow to see Shirley Anne Field and on arriving at her flat was so delighted by her charm and enthusiasm, and so ashamed of the smallness of her part, that there and then I added the material about the magic potions, the moving furniture and the walking trousers. It must have seemed that the rest of the film was quite peripheral and she would be playing the lead in a kind of ‘Exorcist’ movie with a gay Pakistani, a drug-dealer and a fluff-drying spin-drier in the background.
Soon we stood under railway bridges in Vauxhall at two in the morning in March; we knocked the back wall out of someone’s flat and erected a platform outside to serve as the balcony of Papa’s flat, which had so many railway lines dipping and criss-crossing beside and above it that inside it you shook like peas in maracas; in an old shop we built a laundrette of such authenticity that people came in off the street with their washing; and I stood on the set making up dialogue before the actors did it themselves, and added one or two new scenes.
When shooting was finished and we had about two-and-a-quarter hours of material strung together, we decided to have a showing for a group of ‘wise ones’. They would be film directors, novelists and film writers who’d give us their opinions and thereby aid in editing the film. So I sat at the back of the small viewing cinema as they watched the film. We then cut forty-five minutes out.
The film played at the Edinburgh Film Festival and then went into the cinema.
Some time with Stephen: A Diary
2 JUNE 1986
I shove the first draft of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid through Stephen Frears’s letterbox and run, not wanting him to see me. A few hours later he rings and says: ‘This isn’t an innocent act!’ and refuses to read it. He says he’s going to Seattle with Daniel Day Lewis for the weekend to attend a film festival and he’ll read it on the plane.
I have many doubts about the script and in lots of ways it’s rough, but I can’t get any further with it at the moment. In fact, I can’t even bear to look at it.
9 JUNE 1986
Scared of ringing Frears and asking his opinion on the script, I ring Dan and ask about the Seattle trip. I also ask — and I am shaky here — if he managed to glance at the script himself, if he perhaps had a few moments in which to pass his eyes over it. He says firmly that he did read it. I ask if Frears liked it. He says Frears did like it. Finally I ring Frears and after much small talk about cricket he says: ‘I know why you’ve rung and it’s very good!’ It begins then.
10 JUNE 1986
I see the great Indian actor Shashi Kapoor on TV, on the balcony of the Indian dressing-room at the Test match. I’d like him to play the lead in the film, the politician. I’ve had him in mind since Frears met him in India and said how interesting he was. We try to track him down, but by the time we get to him he’s left the country.
12 JUNE 1986
Frears rings me to talk about his availability. He’s not going to be around for a while, being preoccupied with Prick Up Your Ears and then a film he’s shooting in India. I wonder if this is a subtle way of his saying he doesn’t want to direct the film.
Meanwhile I send the script to Karin Bamborough at Channel 4. She and David Rose commissioned and paid for all of My Beautiful Laundrette. Then I ring Tim Bevan and tell him what’s going on.
Bevan is a tall, hard-working man in his mid-twenties, in love with making films and doing deals. He and his partner Sarah Radclyffe are relative newcomers in films, but between them they’ve been involved in several recent British films: My Beautiful Laundrette, Caravaggio, Personal Services, Elphida, Wish You Were Here and A World Apart, with many more in the pipeline. Bevan has learned and developed very quickly. He’s had to, moving rapidly from making pop promos to major features. His strength as a producer is his knowledge of all aspects of film-making and his ability to protect writers and directors from financial and technical problems. He’s not a frustrated writer or director either. While he makes suggestions all along about the script, the direction, the actors, he ensures that everyone is working freely in their own area; his views are valuable and informed, but he never attempts to impose them.
He’s keen to read the script and thinks that after the success of the Laundrette in the US it shouldn’t be a problem raising some of the money there. But Frears won’t give Bevan a script to read because Bevan’s going to LA and Frears doesn’t want him to try and raise money for it. Frears is still working out how best to get the film made. He doesn’t want to be pushed into doing it any particular way.
It’s a relief to me that other people are involved. Getting a film going is like pushing a huge rock up the side of a mountain and until now, writing the script, I’ve been doing this alone. Now other people can take the weight.
13 JUNE 1986
I’ve known Stephen Frears since October 1984 when I sent him the first draft of My Beautiful Laundrette. It was made in February and March 1985 and released later that year. After its success in Britain and the US it is slowly opening around the world and Frears, Bevan, the actors and I are still promoting it in various places.
Frears is in his mid-forties and has made four feature films: Gumshoe, The Hit, My Beautiful Laundrette and Prick Up Your Ears. He’s also produced and directed many films for television, where he served his apprenticeship and worked with many of the best British dramatic writers: Alan Bennett, David Hare, Stephen Poliakoff, Peter Prince, Christopher Hampton. Frears was part of the Monty Python generation at Cambridge, where he studied Law; many of his contemporaries went into film, TV, theatre and journalism. Later he worked at the Royal Court Theatre as an assistant to Lindsay Anderson.
Whatever Frears wears, he always looks as if he’s slept in his clothes and his hair just stands straight up on the top and shoots out at the sides as if he’s been electrocuted. His idea of dressing up is to put on a clean pair of plimsolls. The sartorial message is: I can’t think about all that stuff, it means nothing to me, I’m a bohemian not a fashion slave. When we were shooting the Laundrette Daniel Day Lewis would go up to Stephen as if Stephen were a tramp, and press 20p in his hand, saying: ‘Please accept this on behalf of the Salvation Army and buy yourself a cup of tea!’
I was drawn to him from the start because of his irreverence and seriousness, his directness and kindness. While he hates words like ‘artist’ and ‘integrity’, since they smack of self-regard, he is immensely skilled and talented; and though he talks a lot about how much money certain directors make, he never makes a film entirely for the money. He has great interest and respect for the young, for their music and films and political interests. As his own generation settles down into comfort and respectability, he is becoming more adventurous and disrespectful of British society, seeing it as part of his work to be sceptical, questioning, doubting and polemical.
Frears’s nonconformity and singularity, his penchant for disruption and anarchy, suit and inform the area of film we inhabit, an area which has been especially exciting recently, that of low-budget films made quickly and sometimes quite roughly; films made, to a certain extent, outside the system of studios and big film companies, films that the people involved in can control themselves.
The freshness of these films has been due partly to the subject matter, the exploration of areas of British life not touched on before. Just as one of the excitements of British culture in the 1960s was the discovery of the lower middle class and working class as a subject, one plus of the repressive 1980s has been cultural interest in marginalised and excluded groups.
So I ring Frears and give him an earful about why I think he should direct Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. I lay off the flattery for fear of making him extra suspicious, and get technical. I emphasis.0000.………….e that it’ll be a continuation of the work we’ve started with Laundrette — the mixture of realism and surrealism, seriousness and comedy, art and gratuitous sex.
Frears listens to all this patiently. Then he suddenly says we should make the film for television, on 16mm. I quickly say that I’m not convinced by that. He argues that the equipment is much lighter; you can make films faster. So he suggests we give it to the BBC. If they like it, he says they’ll pay for it and our problems will be over. I counter by saying they’ve become too reactionary, terrified of ripe language and screwing, cowed by censors. If you want to show an arse on the BBC, they behave as if their entire licence fee were at stake.
All the same, he says finally, he sees it as a TV thing, done in the spirit of Laundrette.
I watch scenes on TV of South African police beating up protesters and wonder what the minds of the cops must be like. That’s partly what I want to get at with Sammy and Rosie — it’s my puzzling about the mind of a torturer, the character of a man capable of extreme violence and cruelty while he continues to live a life with others. Does he speak of love in the evenings?
Receive a letter from an aunt who lives in the north of England. After seeing Laundrette she frequently rings my father to abuse him. ‘Your son is a complete bastard!’ she screeches down the phone, as if it’s my father’s fault I write such things. ‘Can’t you control the little bastard!’ she yells. ‘Humiliating us in public! Suppose people find out I’m related to him!’
In her letter she says: ‘I tried to phone you, but I believe you were in the USA boring the pants off the Americans with your pornography … Worst of all, the film was offensive to your father’s distinguished family. Uncle was portrayed in a very bad light, drunk in bed with his brand of vodka, and uncut toenails … this was totally uncalled for and mischievous. It only brings to light your complete lack of loyalty, integrity and compassion … We didn’t know you were a “poofter”. We do hope you’re aware of AIDS and its dangers, if not, then a medical leaflet can be sent to you. Why oh why do you have to promote the widely held view of the British that all evil stems from Pakistani immigrants? Thank goodness for top quality films like Gandhi.’
I think of something Thackeray wrote in Vanity Fair: ‘If a man has committed wrong in life, I don’t know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations.’
I decide to name the Asian lesbian in Sammy and Rosie after her.
Earlier this year I ran into Philip Roth at a party and told him about the hostility I’d received from this aunt and other Pakistanis complaining about their portrayal in Laundrette and other things I’d written. Roth said the same thing happened to him after Portnoy’s Complaint. Indeed he writes about this in The Ghost Writer.
In that novel, Nathan, a young Jewish novelist ‘looking for admiration and praise’, writes a story about an old family feud. He shows it to his father. The father is shattered by the public betrayal. ‘You didn’t leave anything out,’ he moans. Except the achievements, the hard work, the decency. He adds sadly: ‘I wonder if you fully understand just how little love there is in this world for Jewish people.’
When Nathan protests that they are in Newark, not Germany, the father seeks a second opinion, that of Judge Leopold Wapter. Wapter immediately applies the literary acid test which he believes every Jewish book must endure: will the story warm the heart of Joseph Goebbels? The result is … positive. So why, why, screams Wapter, in a story with a Jewish background, must there be adultery, incessant fighting within a family over money and warped human behaviour in general?
What Wapter’s Complaint demands is ‘positive images’. It requires useful lies and cheering fictions: the writer as public relations officer, as hired liar.
Like Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie is quite a personal story, autobiographical, not in its facts, but emotionally. The woman involved (I’ll call her Sarah) asked to read the script. I said no, because the character will change as the film goes through several drafts; the actress playing the part will also change it, as will Frears when he starts to work on it. It’s also difficult to write accurately about real people in fiction — however much you might want to — because the demands of the idea are usually such that you have to transform the original person to fit the constraints of the story. All the same, I’m nervous about what Sarah will think of it. I know that in certain passages I’ve been spiteful.
On the phone Frears talks about Art Malik for the part of Sammy. He’s an attractive actor, but we both wonder if he’s fly enough for the role.
20 JUNE 1986
Meeting at Channel 4 with Karin Bamborough and David Rose to discuss the film. Together they’ve been the architects of a remarkable number of low-budget independent films which are mostly (or partly) funded by TV money for theatrical release. This series of films has ensured a revival in British film-making (they’re almost the only people making films in Britain today) and has given encouragement to women and black film-makers, first-time directors and writers, working on material that wouldn’t be acceptable to the mainstream commercial world.
Their success has partly been due to their initiative in approaching writers from other forms — novelists, playwrights, short-story writers and journalists — to write films. They know that usually the best screenplays are not written by people who call themselves screenwriters, but by good writers, writers who excel in other forms. After all, the ‘rules’ of screenwriting can be learned in an hour. But the substance of a decent screenplay, character, story, mood, pace, can only come from a cultivated imagination. Although it’s virtually impossible to make a good film without a good screenplay, screenwriting itself is such a bastardised, ignoble profession (director Joseph Mankiewicz said ‘the screenwriter is the highest-paid secretary in the world’) that writers who wish to survive have to avoid it, turning only to the movies as a well-paid sideline, regrettably not regarding it as a serious medium.
Karin tells me that the characters in the first draft aren’t strong enough yet. I’ll have to do two or three more drafts. David Rose says he regrets it all being set in London since he feels too many C4 films have been set there. Can’t I set it in Birmingham, he says.
21 JUNE 1986
The contract arrives from C4 offering a commission for Sammy and Rosie. They’re offering a pathetic amount of money.
6 JULY 1986
My agent rings me in New York to say the idea now is to form a three-way company to make the film: Frears, Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe, and I. This way we’ll be able to control everything about the film.
9 JULY 1986
I speak to Frears who is about to start filming Prick Up Your Ears. He says he wants to prepare Sammy and Rosie after he’s finished his Indian film. This means we’ll shoot it in the autumn of 1987. It’s a long time to wait: I feel let down, life goes slack once more. But it’ll force me to write something else in the meantime.
9 AUGUST 1986
Lunch at ‘192’ in Notting Hill with Bevan and Radclyffe, and Frears. Shashi arrives with his secretary after everyone else. He has on a loose brown costume, with a dark red and chocolate scarf flung over his shoulder. He is so regal and dignified, stylish and exotic, that a shiver goes through the restaurant.
I mention that though this is the first time we’ve met, I saw him on the balcony at the Lord’s Test. He says he wore the same clothes then and had trouble getting into the pavilion, so conventional and uptight are the MCC. So he told them he’d just had lunch with Mrs Thatcher and if his national dress was good enough for the Prime Minister surely it would be acceptable to the MCC.
In the charm department he has real class and yet he is genuinely modest. I feel a little embarrassed at asking him to be in this film, small and fairly sordid as it is. But Shashi says he thinks the script is better than that for Laundrette. He adds that he’s available at our convenience.
It’s a sunny day and when Shashi leaves we stroll back to Frear’s house, pleased with Shashi’s enthusiasm. We talk a bit about the other parts: Claire Bloom as Alice, with Miranda Richardson or Judy Davis as Rosie perhaps.
Frears talks about the part of Anna, the American photographer, saying she isn’t sympathetic enough: I’ve parodied her. He’s right about this and I lack grip on the character. The process of writing is so much one of seeking ideas in one’s unconscious, whatever they are, and then later justifying them, filling them out and finding what the hell they mean, if anything. The entire script will have to be subject to this scrutiny.
14 AUGUST 1986
At last I give the script to Sarah to read. Sarah and I met at university and lived together for six years. Since she moved out, we’ve continued to see a lot of each other.
When Sarah reads it she is angry and upset at the same time. I’ve said things that she feels are true, but which I’ve never said to her. The worry is, she adds, that people will think she is Rosie and she’ll be petrified like that for ever, with her freedom possessed by the camera. She’ll no longer be in reasonable control of the way people think of her. Won’t they have this crude cinema idea?
All this makes me feel guilty and sneaky; it makes me think that writers are like spies, poking into failures and weaknesses for good stories. Necessarily, because that’s how they see the world, writers constantly investigate the lives of the people they are involved with. They keep private records of these private relationships. And on the surface they appear to be participating normally in life. But a few years later, it’s all written down, embellished, transformed, distorted, but still a recognisable bit of someone’s lived life.
Bevan has sent the script to Art Malik and Miranda Richardson, who I ran into the other day at the Royal Court. I told her about the film and she seemed interested, but it seems she’ll be doing the Spielberg film Empire of the Sun at the same time.
1 SEPTEMBER 1986
To Paris with Frears, Bevan and Daniel Day Lewis. Everywhere you go here British films are showing: Clockwise, Mona Lisa, Room with a View, Laundrette. There seem to be more cinemas per square kilometre here than anywhere else I’ve been. I do interviews all day through an interpreter who is the daughter-in-law of Raymond Queneau.
Dan is something of a star now, and as an actor has moved on to another plane. He’s here rehearsing for the movie of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Dan dresses in black and doesn’t shave. He carries a black bag hooped across his body and looks like an artist, a painter, as he strides across bridges and down boulevards.
We meet to chat in the bar of the George V Hotel where Frears is being interviewed. The journalist says admiringly to Frears: ‘I’ve met a lot of men like you, only they’re all Italian.’
Frears has thought a great deal about how to do Sammy and Rosie and has now decided that the best thing is to make it on 35mm for theatrical release, keeping the budget as low as possible. Bevan thinks we can raise most of the money for the film in America. Frears thinks this is a good idea since it’ll save Channel 4 money: they’ll be able to give the money to film-makers who can’tget money elsewhere.
18 DECEMBER 1986
Suddenly we’re going into production at the beginning of January, shooting early in March, as Frears’s Indian project has been delayed. So the script has to start looking ready. Try to get the story going earlier, Frears says. And the riots: we’re too familiar with them from television. Something more has to be going on than people throwing bottles at policemen. I interpret this to mean that what happens between the characters during these scenes is of primary interest.
I meet Frances Barber in the production office. She’s a very experienced theatre actor and I’ve known her work for years, as she’s risen up through the fringe to join the RSC. She’s done some film work (she was in Prick Up Your Ears), but not yet played a major role. The feeling is that she’s ready, that she’s at the stage Daniel was at just before Laundrette. She talks well about the script and can see the problems of playing against characters with the charm I’ve tried to give Rafi, and the bright childishness of Sammy. Rosie mustn’t seem moralistic or self-righteous.
Later Frears rings me, delighted to be in the middle of an interview with a young Pakistani actor, Ayub Khan Din, who is upstairs having a pee and is being considered for the part of Sammy. Art Malik, who we discussed first but were sceptical of, has anyway complained about the scenes in bed with Anna and about the scene where Sammy wanks, snorts coke and sucks on a milkshake at the same time. In the end he says the script isn’t good enough. I think he prefers easier and more glamorous kinds of roles.
Ayub had a small part in Laundrette which was later cut from the film. I remember him coming to the cast screening, eager to see himself in his first film, and Frears having to take him to one side to explain that, well, unfortunately, he’d had to cut his big scene. Since then Ayub has grown and developed, though he’s only twenty-five and the part was written for someone older.
Now the film is going ahead and other people are starting to get involved, I can feel my responsibility for it diminishing. This is a relief to me. I’ve done most of the hard work I have to do. Now I can enjoy the process of the film being shot and released. Any rewriting I do from now on will be nothing compared with the isolated and unhelped strain of working out the idea in the first place.
I remember sitting in a hotel room in Washington, overlooking the Dupont Circle, drinking beer after beer and trying to jump over the high wall which was the halfway point of the script. I got stuck for months with the film after the ‘fuck’ night — the climax, the section at the centre where the three couples copulate simultaneously. (Originally I wanted to call the film The Fuck.) What would be the consequences of these three acts? What would they mean to all the characters and how would these acts change them? It wasn’t until I decided to extend the waste ground material and the consequent eviction, until I introduced this new element, that I was able to continue. The problem was whether this material would be convincing. It wasn’t based on anything I’d known, though for a long time I’ve been interested in anarchist ideas — a respectable English political tradition, from Winstanley, through William Godwin and onwards. If anything, it was based on some of the young people who’d attended theatre workshops I’d given. They had terrific energy, intelligence and inventiveness. But because of poverty, homelessness, unemployment and bad schooling, they were living in the interstices of the society: staying in squats, dealing drugs, and generally scavenging around. It seemed to me that this society had little to offer them, no idea how to use them or what to do with their potential.
Because of this block I frequently thought of abandoning the film. I wrote the same scene twenty-five or thirty times in the hope of a breakthrough. I’d set up this complicated story; I’d invented the characters and let things happen between them, but then it all stopped. This is where real life or direct autobiography fails you: the story has to be completed on its own terms.
Sarah Radclyffe has some reservations about the script. She doubts whether Sammy and Rosie would be ignorant of Rafi’s involvement in the torture of his political enemies, especially if they’d been to visit him in his own country. Karin Bamborough said something similar and suggested I change it so the film opened with them all meeting for the first time. That would be a considerable rewrite. Also, there’s no reason why they should have found out about the details of Rafi’s crimes since he would have worked through hired hit-men and through people who wouldn’t necessarily have been immediately identified with him. It would have taken years for this information to be discovered and collated.
This morning in our office it was like the Royal Court in exile. Frears, myself, and Debbie McWilliams (the casting director) all worked at the Court. Tunde Ikoli, a young writer and director who worked as Lindsay Anderson’s assistant at the Court, was in the office. We see a number of interesting and experienced black actors. Things have certainly changed in that respect from four or five years ago. Many of these actors who have either worked at the National Theatre’s Studio with Peter Gill (ex-Royal Court) or at the Court serve to remind us of the importance of the theatre, not only in itself, but as a seedbed for film and TV.
We talk about the audience there is for our kind of films. Aged between eighteen and forty, mostly middle class and well-educated, film-and theatre-literate, liberal progressive or leftish, this massive and sophisticated audience doesn’t want to be patronised by teen films: they’ll support a poor and rough cinema rich in ideas and imagination.
21 DECEMBER 1986
Michael Barker from Orion Classics rings to say Orion are going to push for an Oscar nomination for me. He doesn’t think I’ll win — Woody Allen will win for Hannah and Her Sisters — but he thinks he can swing the nomination.
23 DECEMBER 1986
Hugo, the film’s designer, rings to say they’ve found an excellent location for the caravan site. This is in Notting Hill. The flat concrete curve of the motorway hangs above a dusty stretch of waste ground which itself is skirted by a mainline railway line and a tube track. I know the area he means and it’s excellent.
They’re also looking for a house in the area to serve as Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat. There’s been talk of building it in a studio which would be easier, but Frears feels at the moment it should be done on location.
Bevan is trying to find an area where we can stage the riots. There are obviously problems with the police over this, and I’ll have to prepare a doctored script to show them. When he goes to see them he refers to the riots as ‘scuffles’!
I run into Claire Bloom in the street nearby and yesterday I met her husband, Philip Roth, in a health-food shop in Notting Hill. He asks how the film is going and tells me he prefers to keep away from films, not having liked any of the films made from his books. It reminds me of the second time I met Philip and Claire. Frears and I were outside the American Embassy walking through the crowd protesting against the bombing of Libya. Mostly the occasion was like a Methodist church fête. Then, there at the barrier nearest to the Embassy were Philip and Claire, very angry.
24 DECEMBER 1986
Frears and I talk about Sammy and Rosie in its style and rhythm, being far more leisurely than Laundrette. The relationships are more developed; it needs more room to breathe. It’s less of a shocker; more of a grown-up film.
29 DECEMBER 1986
Frears slightly miffed by the realisation of how much Thatcher would approve of us: we’re a thrifty, enterprising, money-making small business. I say: But part of our purpose is to make popular films which are critical of British society. He says: Thatcher wouldn’t care about that, she’d just praise our initiative for doing something decent despite the odds; the real difficulty of making films in Britain today made more difficult by this government.
4 JANUARY 1987
Long meeting with Frears last night at his house. The first time, really, we’ve sat down and discussed the script. His ideas are exactly the stimulation I’ve been waiting for to enable me to find a resolution to the film. After the ‘fuck’ night the film fragments, the intercutting is too quick, the scenes are too short. This is because I haven’t worked out exactly what is going on, what I want to say. What Frears and I do, as we talk, as he puts his children to bed, is invent new elements to bind the story together: Rani and Vivia putting pressure on Rafi; Rani and Vivia putting pressure on Rosie with regard to Rafi living in her flat; some of the other women pursuing Rafi through the city, perhaps harrying him to his death; all the characters (and not just some of them, as it is now) meeting at the eviction scene and their relationships being resolved there.
Now I have to sit down and look at the whole thing again. It’s not as if I can rewrite bits and pieces. It’ll be an entirely new draft. I suppose if you want to be a decent writer you have to have the ability to rip up what you’ve done and go back and start again, tear up your best lines and ideas and replace them with better lines and ideas, however hard this is and however long it takes.
5 JANUARY 1987
I get up at six in the morning unable to sleep so paranoid am I about this thing ever getting rewritten. In this frozen deserted city I start to fiddle with the script, contra what I said yesterday. When I realise the futility of this fiddling I put a fresh sheet in the typewriter and start at page 1. I do no planning, give it no thought and just go at it, walking out on the tightrope. The idea is not to inhibit myself, not be over-critical or self-conscious or self-censoring, otherwise I’ll get blocked and the act of writing will be like trying to drive a car with the brakes on.
Today is the first day of pre-production and everyone officially starts work: the director, the casting director, the production manager, designer and so on. The young lighting cameraman, Oliver Stapleton, is going to shoot this film, as he did Laundrette. That film was his first feature, though since then he’s done Absolute Beginners and Prick Up Your Ears. So it’s all terrifically exciting. What a shame that it feels as if the script is disintegrating in my hands. The new ideas touch every other element in the film, altering them, giving them different significance. Little of what I’ve written seems secure now, except the characters; certainly not the story. As the whole thing goes into the mixer my fear is that it’ll all fall apart.
7 JANUARY 1987
I write a scene this morning between Rani, Vivia and Rosie at the end of the party, which is crucial to the film. Rani and Vivia accuse Rosie of lacking political integrity. It’s a dramatic scene and will wind the film up just when it needs it. I’m surprised that it’s taken me so long to see how useful this kind of pressure on Rosie could be. It’s partly because it’s only since that conversation with Frears that I’ve seen the point of Rani and Vivia in the film. They were in the first draft — I dropped them in because unconsciously I knew they’d be of use. It’s taken me till the fourth draft to find out for what exactly.
8 JANUARY 1987
I spend most of the day trying to write a final scene for the film, which at the moment is Rafi staggering around on the waste ground during the eviction, and Sammy standing on the motorway shouting down at Rosie without being heard. This isn’t satisfactory. So I try going back to a previous ending, which has Rosie and Margy and Eva, her women friends, deciding to move into the flat with Rosie while Sammy goes off on his own to a house he’s bought. But I don’t believe in this ending.
Usually when I have a block I put the film or story in a drawer for thirty days, like putting a pie in the oven, and when I take it out it’s cooked. But there isn’t time for that now.
So I put the last few pages in the typewriter and rewrite them, trying to quieten my mind and allow fresh ideas to pop in as they will. So it occurs to me, or rather it writes itself, that Rafi should hang himself. As the words go down I know I’m on to something dramatic and powerful. I’m also doing something which will be depressing. I’ve no idea how this suicide will affect the rest of the film and no idea what it means or says. I can work that out later. It’s a relief to have had a new idea, and a creative pleasure to solve a problem not by refining what one has already done, but to slam down a bizarre and striking fresh image!
10 JANUARY 1987
Bevan, Rebecca (the location manager), Jane (production manager) and I go to North Kensington to look at locations for the scenes at the beginning of the film with Rosie visiting the old man and finding him dead in the bath, waiting for the ambulance, and watching the boys’ bonfire in the centre of the estate. To the thirtieth floor of a tower block (which won design awards in the 1960s), with several young kids in the lift. The lift is an odd shape: very deep, with a low roof. Jane says this is so they can get bodies in coffins down from the thirtieth floor. We walk around other blocks in the area. They are filthy, derelict places, falling down, graffiti-sprayed, wind-blown, grim and humming with the smell of shit, implacable in the hatred of humanity they embody. The surrounding shops are barricaded with bars and wire mesh. I was brought up in London. It’s my city. I’m no Britisher, but a Londoner. And it’s filthier and more run-down now than it’s ever been.
I get home and speak to Frears on the phone. The double imperative: that the rewritten script be handed in on Monday and yet, as he says, be more intricate. ‘Deeper’ is the word he uses. Christ. Have told no one yet about the new ending.
I have the sense today of the film starting to move away from me, of this little thing which I wrote in my bedroom in Fulham now becoming public property. On the crew list there are now already fifty names, at least a quarter of them from Laundrette.
12 JANUARY 1987
Frears comes over. I sit opposite him as he turns over the pages of the script. We talk about each page. Because the film is about the relations between men and women in contemporary Britain and has political content, we’re beginning to realise how important it is that it says what we want it to say. That means working out what it is we believe!
As Frears gets nearer the end I get more nervous. I’ve typed up the scene where Rafi hangs himself and it’s quite different from the innocuous and rather dissipated finales so far.
After reading it Frears says nothing for a while. He jumps up and walks round and round the flat. It’s started to snow outside; it’s very cold. Is he just trying to keep warm?
We talk until one-thirty about this end and worry whether it’s too brutal both on the audience and as an act of aggression by Rafi against the rest of the characters he’s become involved with. We talk about the possibility of Rafi dying of a heart attack! But this is too contingent. It’s the power of the deliberate act that we like.
We discuss Chekhov’s Seagull. I say Rafi’s suicide could be like Trepliov’s at the end of that play: understated, with the action offstage, one person discovering it and then returning to the room to tell everyone else. In this room there’d be: Rani, Vivia, Alice, Anna, Eva, Bridget, Rosie.
We decide to leave it for the moment. More importantly, we’re going to New York soon to cast Anna the photographer. I’m still not clear what she’s doing in the film. I’ve deliberately avoided rewriting her bits.
13 JANUARY 1987
Seven in the morning and freezing cold. Streets covered in snow. Behind me I can hear the tubes rattling along at the back of the house. Outside the careful traffic and people starting to go to work. I’m not in the mood for rewriting this thing. Still a few scenes to be revised, but I’m sick of it. It says on the piece of paper in front of me: fifth draft, but in reality it must be the eighth or ninth. If each draft is about 100 pages, that’s 900 pages of writing!
When I first moved into this part of west London, in 1978, I felt vulnerable. It was like living on the street. People walked by on their way to work just yards from my head. In time I relaxed and would lie in bed and hear and feel London around me, stretching out for miles.
These west London streets by the railway line have gone wrong. In 1978 most of the five-storey houses with their crumbling pillars, peeling façades and busted windows were derelict, inhabited by itinerants, immigrants, drug-heads and people not ashamed of being seen drunk on the street. On the balcony opposite a man regularly practised the bagpipes at midnight. Now the street is crammed with people who work for a living. Young men wear striped shirts and striped ties; the women wear blue jumpers with white shirts, turned-up collars and noses, and pearls. They drive Renault 5s and late at night as you walk along the street, you can see them in their clean shameless basements having dinner parties and playing Trivial Pursuits on white tablecloths. Now the centre of the city is inhabited by the young rich and serviced by everyone else: now there is the re-establishment of firm class divisions; now the 1960s and the ideals of that time seem like an impossible dream or naiveté.
Though I was at school and not politically active in 1968, I was obsessively aware of the excitement and originality of those years. I had the records, the books, the clothes; I saw the 1960s on TV and was formed by what I missed out on. I wasn’t involved enough to become disillusioned. The attitudes that formed me are, briefly: that openness and choice in sexual behaviour is liberating and that numerous accretions of sexual guilt and inhibition are psychologically damaging; that the young are innately original and vigorous, though this special quality is to do with not being burdened with responsibility and the determinations of self-interest; that there should be a fluid, non-hierarchical society with free movement across classes and that these classes will eventually be dissolved; that ambition and competitiveness are stifling narrowers of personality; and that all authority should be viewed with suspicion and constantly questioned.
The past ten years of repression have been a continuous surprise to me. Somehow I haven’t been able to take them seriously, since I imagine the desire for more freedom, more pleasure, more self-expression to be fundamental to life. So I continue to think, in that now old way, in terms of the ‘straight’ world and the rest, the more innocent and lively ones standing against the corrupt and stuffy. I still think of businessmen as semi-criminals; I’m suspicious of anyone in a suit; I like drugs, especially hash, and I can’t understand why people bother to get married. Ha!
14 JANUARY 1987
Frears rings and says the scene where Alice tells Rafi to go, at the end of the film after he’s been chased out of Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat by Vivia and Rani, is boring, boring, boring. There has to be a dramatic action rather than extended verbals as it is now. I say: well what fucking dramatic action? He says: no idea — you do the paperwork, I just do the pictures!
16 JANUARY 1987
Frances Barber seems enthusiastic about the rewrites but says she’d been disturbed by the new end. It reverses the film, she thinks, in that Rafi now seems to accept his guilt for torturing people. Frances says this seems inconsistent with his having argued so strongly for political expediency in the restaurant scene. I say I don’t want him committing suicide out of guilt. It’s that he’s come to the end. No one wants him. There’s nowhere for him to go, neither at home nor in Britain.
Frears has a session with Frances and Ayub, which he videotapes. Ayub is very nervous, not surprisingly. We’ve cast Frances and probably Ayub will be offered the part tomorrow.
17 JANUARY 1987
We look at the tape of Frances and Ayub together. They look good together. Ayub waits downstairs in his agent’s office, refusing to go home until we make our decision. He comes into the room looking dazed with tension. We offer him the job. He thanks us all and shakes hands with us.
Frears has decided that the film should be much more about young people than I’d imagined. Because of Ayub being five years younger than Frances we could as easily cast the people around them down in age as up. Frears says casting it young will make it more cheerful. I’m all for cheerfulness, though worried that Rosie will seem oddly older than everyone else.
18 JANUARY 1987
Frears talks about the problems of shooting the riots, especially after a friend said: Oh no, not a lot of black people rioting. So we talk about avoiding the TV news-footage approach: screaming mobs, bleeding policemen. What you don’t get in news footage is detail. In The Battle of Algiers, for example, the director humanises the violence. You see the faces of those to whom violence is being done. In the torture scene, you don’t see the act, but only the faces of those around it, streaming tears.
In Sammy and Rosie you do see the circumstances from which the riot comes — the shooting of a black woman by the police. And we see, in the circumstances, how justifiable the riot is. The difficulty arises from the fact that black people are so rarely represented on TV; if when they are shown, they’re only throwing rocks at the police, you’re in danger of reinforcing considerable prejudice. I suppose this depends partly on how you see the riot, or revolt. I know I supported it, but as Orwell says about Auden, it’s easy to say that if you’re elsewhere when the violence takes place.
After Frears said the Alice — Rafi parting scene at the end of the film isn’t dramatic enough I shake my brains and come up with a Miss Havisham scene set in the cellar of the house. I have Alice furiously throwing open a suitcase in which she’s packed the clothes she’d intended to take on her planned elopement with Rafi in the mid-1950s. I also have her showing Rafi the diaries she kept then, in which she poured out her heart to him — the physical and visual representation of what was formerly just dialogue.
To the opera on Friday with a vegetarian friend. A woman in a long sable coat sits next to us. My friend says: I wish I carried a can of spray paint in my bag and could shoot it over her coat. Thought it might be an idea to stick in the film. But where?
20 JANUARY 1987
Debbie McWilliams saw a pop group, the Fine Young Cannibals, on TV and asks the singer, Roland Gift, to come into the office. He shows up looking splendid, proud and vulnerable, with his manager. I ask the women in the office to get a look at him through the office window and let us know if they want to rip his clothes off with their teeth. As most of them seem to want this, Roland inches closer to the part of Danny.
On the way home from the movies the other night, at Piccadilly tube station a group of young Jewish kids gathers at the top of the escalator. Suddenly, around them, are a bunch of Arsenal football supporters who stand and chant ‘Yiddo, yiddo!’ at these kids. The kids look embarrassed rather than frightened, but they do move closer together, standing in a little huddle. It’s a difficult moment. What do you do when it comes to it? Walk on, watch, or pile in? What are you made of? What would you give up? I can see a lot of other dithering people in the vicinity have this dilemma. But no one does anything. The chanting goes on. Then the youths disappear down the escalator, their voices echoing around the building. It’s the first time I’ve seen this kind of anti-Semitism in London. Decide to put it in the film somewhere. The structure is secure enough now for anything odd or interesting that happens to have a place. All the bits and pieces will just have to get along with each other, like people at a party.
23 JANUARY 1987
Problems with Meera Syal, the actress we want to play Rani. Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of the Royal Court, rings to say Meera has already committed herself to Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money. She also wants to play Rani in our film. At the moment the schedule can’t be arranged so she can do both. We don’t want to press her to choose, for fear she’ll choose the Court. It’s painful to her, especially as Asian actors get offered so little work.
Anyway, we’ll deal with it later. In the meantime we’re going to my favourite city, New York!
25 JANUARY 1987
New York. This city is snowbound and every time you look round, someone has skidded on to their back in the street. New York is cold in a way London never is: here your face freezes, here the fluid in your eyes seems to ice over.
The entrance of our hotel, on Central Park West, has a silver-lined overhang in which bright lights are embedded. This ensures that the hotel shines like a battery of torches in a blackout for hundreds of yards around; indeed, if you’re driving through the park you can see it glowing through the trees. In this overhang there are heaters which warm the street and melt insubordinate snowflakes which may drift on to the hotel’s red carpet or float on to the hat of the doorman. Everywhere you go in this city there are notices urging you to save energy while outside this hotel they are heating the street!
Frears is a prisoner in his hotel room, doing publicity for Prick Up Your Ears. Food and drink is brought up to him. Between interviews he looks out of the window at Central Park. His talk schedule is exhausting. There was a time when I thought that talking about yourself to someone who said little, listened intently and made notes or recorded what you said was the ideal relationship. But after the first three hours your tongue is dry, your mouth will not work, your jaws ache, as after six hours of fellatio. The only respite is to question the journalists and hope they’ll revive you by telling you about themselves.
A journalist asks me how I came upon the central idea of Sammy and Rosie. I start to think about it, but it is complicated; an idea usually has many sources.
One source was the great Japanese film Tokyo Story in which an old couple who live in the country go to visit their children in the city and are treated shabbily by them. I started off thinking of Sammy and Rosie as a contemporary remake of this desperately moving and truthful film. Sometimes I wish my own script had the simplicity, luminosity and straightforward humanity of Ozu’s masterpiece, that I hadn’t added so many characters, themes and gewgaws.
Another source was a play I once wrote and abandoned about an Asian politician living in London in the 1960s and having an affair with a young woman. I retained the politician and dropped everything else.
There was also a story I was told about a member of my family who loved an Englishwoman, left her after promising to return to England to marry her, and never came back, though the word is she loves him still and continues to wait.
When Frears has finished his interviews for the day he says a journalist told him, when they were discussing British films, that he didn’t think anything dramatic ever happened in Britain now. This journalist’s view of Britain sounds like Orson Welles in The Third Man talking about Switzerland, only capable of producing the cuckoo clock!
The journalist’s remark hits a nerve. It relates to the British sense of inferiority about its film industry: not only the feeling that the British can’t really make good films, but that contemporary British subjects and themes are really too small, too insignificant as subjects. So British films are often aimed at American audiences and attempt to deal with ‘universal’ or ‘epic’ themes as in Gandhi, The Mission, The Killing Fields, Cry Freedom.
The journalist’s view isn’t entirely surprising since a lot of English ‘art’ also dwells, gloats on and relives nostalgic scenarios of wealth and superiority. It’s easy therefore for Americans to see Britain as just an old country, as a kind of museum, as a factory for producing versions of lost greatness. After all, many British films do reflect this: Chariots of Fire, A Room with a View, the Raj epics, and the serials Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown. Even the recent past, the Beatles, punks, the numerous Royal Weddings, are converted into quaintness, into tourist mugs and postcards, into saleable myths. If imperialism is the highest form of capitalism, then tourism is its ghostly afterlife in this form of commercial nostalgia which is sold as ‘art’ or ‘culture’.
But some British dignity remains, unlike in New York where a friend of mine rings a fashionable restaurant on a Saturday night and they tell him they don’t have a table. My friend, who in the American manner is very persistent, says he is bringing a screenwriter with him — me. The person in the restaurant asks: We may be able to squeeze your party in, sir, but please tell me: what are the screenwriter’s credits?!
26 JANUARY 1987
We troop off to the famous theatrical restaurant Sardi’s for an award dinner. Like executioners, photographers in black balaclavas crowd the entrance. Going in, I realise we’ve arrived too early. We sit down and they bring us our food while others are still arriving. The salmon tastes like wallpaper. Around the walls there are hideous caricatures of film stars and famous writers. Thankfully the ceremony is not televised or competitive: you know if you’ve won; they don’t torment you with any opening of envelopes. Sissy Spacek and Lynn Redgrave, obviously experienced at the awards game, time it just right, so that when they arrive the whole room is in place and is forced to turn and look at them. Photographers shove through the crowd and climb across tables to get to them.
I see Norman Mailer come in. He is stocky like a boxer and healthy of face, though he looks frail when he walks. It will be a thrilling moment for me to have the great man rest his eyes on me when I receive my award for the Laundrette screenplay. When the playwright Beth Henley announces my name I eagerly look out for Mailer from the podium. I start into my speech but almost stop talking when I see Mailer’s place is now vacant and across the restaurant he is rapidly mounting the stairs to watch the final of the Super Bowl on TV.
27 JANUARY 1987
Spend two mornings in the hotel room interviewing actresses for the part of Anna. About twenty come in and we have longish conversations with all of them: they’re frank and lively and seem healthier and more confident than their British counterparts, somehow less beaten down by things. They are less educated too. The American film world isn’t adjacent to the theatre or literary world as it can be in London. It’s closer to rock ’n’ roll, if anything.
An actress called Wendy Gazelle seems untypical of the group we see. She is less forthright, more sensitive and attractive in a less orthodox way. When Wendy reads, in that room overlooking the park through which people are skiing, it is heartbreaking. I’m so pleased she can invest the somewhat duff dialogue with feeling and meaning that I urge the others to choose her.
In the evening to the Café Luxembourg with Leon from Cinecom, the company that, along with Channel 4, is financing our film. Frears and I refer to Leon as ‘the man that owns us’, which he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s thirty-four, friendly and intelligent, with long hair in a pigtail. Bevan, Frears and I are apprehensive about the pressure his company might put on us to massage or roll our film in a certain direction. We’ll just have to wait and see.
28 JANUARY 1987
To a smart party on the Upper West Side, given by a New York agent for the German director Doris Dorrie. It’s a large apartment in front of which is a courtyard and behind it a view of the river. Marcie, the publicist for Laundrette in New York says: I wouldn’t object to being the accountant of the people in this room! She points out: Isabella Rossellini, Alan Pakula, Matthew Modine, Michael Douglas and various others. Michael Douglas, polite and friendly, praises the British Royal Family to Frears and me for a considerable time, obviously thinking this’ll please us. On the way back we pass a laundromat called My Beautiful Laundrette done up in neon: it offers Reverse Cycle Washing, Fluff Drying and Expert Folding. Two days later I go back and this laundrette has closed for good.
We wonder why the film has done well in the US. It’s partly, I think, because of its theme of success at any price; and partly because the puritan and prurient theme of two outcast boys (outcast from society and having escaped the world of women) clinging together in passionate blood-brotherhood is a dream of American literature and film from Huckleberry Finn to the work of Walt Whitman and on to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
29 JANUARY 1987
I ride the subway across New York to have lunch with Leon at the Russian Tea Room. In the subway car a couple with a kid kiss shamelessly. A legless black man in a wheelchair propels himself through the car, carrying a paper cup. Everyone gives him something. The streets here are full of beggars now; every block someone asks you for money. Before going out I ensure I have a selection of loose change to give away, just as I would in Pakistan.
The young people in NY that you see on the street or subway are far less eccentric, original and fashionable than kids are in Britain. The kids in London, despite unemployment and poverty, have taste; they’re adventurous and self-conscious. They’re walking exhibitions: billboards of style, wearing jumble-sale and designer clothes together. In Britain fashion starts on the street. Here the kids are sartorial corpses. They all wear sports clothes. There are even women wearing business suits and running shoes.
The Russian Tea Room is a fashionable restaurant for movie people. It’s plusher than Sardi’s, apparently more ‘cultured’, and patronized by people who have money. It has semi-circular booths in red and gold: booths for two in the entrance, convenient for both seeing and being seen, and larger ones inside. It has a festive atmosphere. There are shining samovars, red and gold pompons on the lamp-shades and the staff wear red tunics. It’s like a kind of Santa’s grotto with waitresses. Powerful New York agents do business here, reserving several booths for their clients and associates and moving from booth to booth like door-to-door salesmen, dealing and negotiating.
Leon has this time brought with him some serious reinforcements to deal with the script ‘difficulties’, a beautiful and smart woman called Shelby who works with him.
Oh, how we eat! Oh, how I like life now! I have dark brown pancakes on which the waitress spreads sour cream. She forks a heap of orange caviar on to this and pours liquid butter over the lot. This is then folded. This is then placed in the mouth.
Shelby leans forward. As each caviar egg explodes on my tongue like a little sugar bomb, Shelby tells me she has just read all five drafts of the script. I am flattered. But more, she has compared and contrasted them all. More wine? She talks knowledgeably about them. She seems to know them better than I do. Scene 81 in draft 2, she says, is sharper than scene 79 in draft 4. Perhaps I could go back to that? Well. I look at her. She is telling me all this in a kindly tone. In the end, she implies, it is up to me, but … She expresses her reservations, which are quite substantial, at argued length.
I nod to everything, not wanting to induce indigestion. I am also experimenting with the Zen method of bending with the wind, so that when the cleansing storm stops, the tree of my spirit will gaily snap back to its usual upright position. But will this helpful puffing ever stop?
We talk about the end of the film and the hanging of Rafi. They suggest Rafi be murdered by the Ghost. I manage to say (though I object on principle to discussing such things at all) that this would be predictable. Leon says: How can a Ghost murdering a politician in an anarchist commune be predictable?
By now I am sucking and licking on light ice-cream with whipped cream and grenadine. Shelby is into her stride. Perhaps my lack of response means I am thinking about what she is saying? The script hasn’t necessarily improved at all, it’s become cruder, more obvious. Why have you developed the black women, Vivia and Rani? Well … I almost begin to fight back when she starts to fumble in her bag. She brings out a letter. There, read this please, she says. It’s from someone who cares.
The letter, from a reader in the company, is addressed to me. Its tone implores me to see sense. ‘The version I read in October was just about perfect and the fifth draft has been tinkered with entirely too much … The fifth draft seems a little preachy and one-dimensional. It’s lost so much for the sake of clarity and it’s not nearly as successful as a film … I hope you’ll consider going back to the terrific screenplay you wrote in October.’
I leave the restaurant burping on caviar and heavy with ice-cream. All afternoon I wander the city. Two dozen wasps are free within my cranium. Perhaps all those people are right. I don’t know. Can’t tell. God knows. My judgement has gone, swept away by the wind of all this advice. Eventually I settle down in an Irish bar — a grimy piece of Dublin — and have a few beers. I toast myself. The toast: long may you remain waterproof and never respect anyone who gives you money!
30 JANUARY 1987
Motivated entirely by greed I stay in the hotel room all day writing a 1,000-word piece about Frears for an American film magazine. They promise me $1,000. On finishing it, sending it round and listening to their reservations, I realise how rarely any kind of writing is simple and how few easy bucks there are to be made. Whatever you write you always have to go back and rethink and rewrite. And you have to be prepared to do that. You never get away with anything.
5 FEBRUARY 1987
London. Good to talk to Frears again. We both say that some of the people around us have made us gloomy by expressing doubts, by emphasising the difficulty of what we want to do. We want to work confidently, with certainty, and with pleasure. Frears is an extraordinarily cheerful man who takes great pleasure in his work and in the company of others. There’s no poisonous negativity in him. It’s as if he knows how close dejection and discouragement always are, that they are the converse of everything you do, and how comforting it is to let them put their arms around you.
He says this is the hardest film he’s made. He said the same about Laundrette, and I remember feeling glad that we were doing something risky and dangerous.
10 FEBRUARY 1987
Meeting at Channel 4 with David Rose and Karin Bamborough. Karin says I’ll have to give Sammy more substance as he’s such a jerk and constantly making glib, flip remarks. Stephen and Tim Bevan sit chuckling at me, knowing there’s some autobiography in the character. We tell Karin that Ayub is such a delightfully complicated person and so intent on playing the Oedipal relationship that he’ll give the character depth. I also explain that the end will be rewritten. At the moment Rafi just hangs himself. It seems an ignoble act whereas Frears and I want it to be a justified thing, chosen, dignified, something of a Roman act.
Shashi sends his measurements in and hasn’t lost any weight. We feel he’s too big for the part and should look fitter and trimmer. The plan has been for Shashi to arrive a few weeks before shooting and then Bevan will shunt him off to a health farm. But so far, no sign of Shashi. Some of us are wondering whether he’ll turn up at all.
As we’ve been concentrating on casting the other parts it now seems that Claire Bloom may not be available. A real nuisance. Fortunately the problems with Meera have been worked out and she’s going to be in the film.
12 FEBRUARY 1987
I go into the production offices off Ladbroke Grove to talk about casting. There is a row of offices with glass partitions. About twenty yards away I can see Bevan waving his arms. He dashes up the corridor to tell me there’s been a call from the States to say I’ve been nominated for an Oscar. I call my agent and she says: Goody, that’ll put a couple of noughts on your fee.
I think of a letter Scott Fitzgerald wrote from Hollywood in 1935 where he was working on the script of Gone with the Wind: ‘It’s nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try about three years. The point is once you’ve got in — Screen Credit 1st, a Hit 2nd, and the Academy Award 3rd — you can count on it for ever … and know there’s one place you’ll be fed without being asked to even wash the dishes.’
Later in the day Frears and I drive to west London to check out an actress for the part of Alice. Frears says what a strange cast it is: a mixture of inexperienced young people, a rock singer, a famous and glamorous movie star who’s never worked in Britain, and a theatre actress without a great deal of film experience.
The irascible actress we’ve come to see, in her genteel west London sitting room, starts off by flapping the letter we’ve written her and saying how flattered she is to be offered the part of Anna. Surely though, at her age, early fifties, she shouldn’t be expected to have two Ws tattooed on her buttocks.
I look at Frears. As he sits there in her high-backed leather chair with his ripped green-striped plimsolls resting on her cream carpet, I can’t help thinking of him as a punk at heart. He is a little distracted, though perfectly polite. I know what he doesn’t like to do is explain things. Art Malik has complained to me that Frears wouldn’t explain Sammy’s role in the movie to him. Frears said he didn’t know that much about Sammy’s role in the movie: it’s all so much in Hanif ’s head, he says; let’s hope we can pull it out some time near the day. Malik was horrified by Frears’s flipness. But Frears wants people to work intuitively and spontaneously. He wants them to work things out for themselves and not be lazy; what they’ve worked out they’ll bring to the film. He also expects other people to be as intelligent as he is.
Frears pulls himself together and hastily explains that the actress is being considered for the part of Alice, not Anna. She then looks at me as if I’m a very small boy and asks, severely, what the film is about. I explain that it concerns a number of relationships unfolding against a background of uprising and social deterioration. ‘That’s easy to say,’ she says. ‘Very easy. Now can you tell me what it’s about?’ I tell her I’m not one of those people who think plays or films ought to be ‘about’ anything. ‘What are you trying to say then?’ she asks, putting her head in her hands and making a frightening gurgling noise. At first I think she’s choking; I consider hammering her on the back. But surely she’s crying? When she looks up I can see she’s laughing hysterically. ‘Oh, poor England’s changed,’ she says. ‘And I don’t know where it’s gone. A black boy attacked me in the street the other day. Before, you’d never even lock the door to your house.’
Frears is knocking back a fat slug of whisky and looking in the other direction. The actress starts up on a rambling monologue about her career. She keeps you alert because you have no idea what she’s going to say next. In some ways she is rather like Alice, delicate, decent and unable to understand why her world has changed.
16 FEBRUARY 1987
Roland Gift who is playing Danny comes over. He admits being nervous of Frears’s method of working, of not rehearsing. I tell him of the dangers of over-preparation which kill spontaneity and creativity; also that he’s in the film partly because of what he’ll bring of himself to the part, not because of his technical abilities as an actor. The idea is to avoid performances. British actors, because of their training, tend to be theatrical on film.
Roland talks about being brought up in Birmingham and being in a class at school in which there were only five white kids. And then moving to Hull and being the only black kid in the class. The racism was constant and casual. One day he was walking along and heard someone calling out, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ When he turned round he saw it was a woman calling her dog.
Later he worked as a nude model for architects. Architects? In a life-drawing class, he says, so the barbarians of the future would get a sense of beauty.
We talk about the character of Danny being underwritten. Roland might fill it out by having a strong sense of what the character is. He thinks there’s much of himself he can bring to the part.
Bevan has managed to get permission from the police to block off some streets in North Kensington to stage the riot scenes, or the ‘scuffles’ as he describes them. They don’t even ask to see a script.
17 FEBRUARY 1987
To see Claire Bloom, Stephen and I. Chat for a while to Philip Roth. Roth fizzes and whirls with mischief and vibrant interest in the world. He is a wicked teller of tales! I tell him that on taking his advice and writing some fiction, a story I’ve written for the London Review of Books may not be accepted in the US because of the sex and four-letter words in it. He says he’s had similar trouble: imagine the nuisance, he tells me, of having to find a suitable synonym for the perfectly adequate ‘dogshit’ just so your story can be published in the prissy New Yorker. He also tells us with great glee that he’d written a story called ‘The Tormented Cunt’, but had to change the title.
Claire looks younger than her fifty-six years and I did want Alice older than that, partly so that the scene I lifted from A Sentimental Education — the woman lets down her hair and it has gone white — is effective. Claire hunts through the script for a line she doesn’t understand. It is: ‘The proletarian and theocratic ideas you theoretically admire grind civilisation into dust.’ It seems to me that no clearer line has ever been written. Frears explains the line and adds that the line ‘that country has been sodomised by religion’ in Laundrette mystified him long after the film had been finished. Claire looks sceptical and says she doesn’t think she can say something she doesn’t understand.
On the way home Frears says Shashi has rung to ask if he can leave early on the first day of shooting to go to a cocktail party. Frears says if this is how stars behave, it might all be difficult to deal with.
23 FEBRUARY 1987
I run into Roland. He says: Why does Danny have to have a girlfriend and a kid? I say because it makes the character seem more complex. I can see Roland wants Danny to be more romantic. I tell him the character’s unreal enough and idealised as it is.
Talk to Karin Bamborough about the end of the movie. The idea of it ending with the hanging is still not necessarily the best. It’ll send people away in a gloomy mood. Karin thinks there should be some image of reconciliation. I say, well, if one occurs to me I’ll put it in. I’m not sure Sammy and Rosie should be reconciled at the end of the film, not sure they’d want that.
Stephen and I talk about the music we’ll use in the film. Some kind of street music, plus some American soul, perhaps Otis Redding or Sam Cooke, music from the 1960s which seems to me to have really lasted, something that everyone recognises.
24 FEBRUARY 1987
Roland, Ayub and Wendy Gazelle (who has just flown in from New York) are in the production office today and on the walls are photographs of Meera and Suzette Llewellyn, who are playing Rani and Vivia respectively. Ayub and Wendy together look like Romeo and Juliet! Their all being so young will mean there’s little bitterness in the film, so a story that involves the shooting of a black woman by the police, an exiled torturer and the eviction of dozens of people from their homes, while ending with a hanging, won’t be as grim as this description sounds.
The actors are pretty nervous and complain to me that Frears and I haven’t spent much time talking about the backgrounds to their characters. I urge them to work it out for themselves, maybe writing out a few pages of background detail. Despite their worries, when I sit down with them and they discuss various scenes with each other, they seem to know what they’re about. The important thing is that they like each other and can relax. I know they’ve started to hang out together.
Stephen and I talk about the end of the film once more. It’s still not worked out properly. Maybe there should be another scene, after the hanging, maybe with Sammy and Rosie in each other’s arms, a scene that was cut from earlier in the script. I’m not against the idea; but maybe there’s something more interesting I could write.
25 FEBRUARY 1987
To Milan for the opening of Laundrette in Italy. I do an interview through an interpreter and go to the bar with the publicist, the distributor and the journalist. They talk politics. The journalist, a fashionably dressed woman in her thirties, turns to me and says: Isn’t it funny, all the Italians round the table are communists? It’s a disconcerting remark, since I haven’t heard anyone describe themselves as a communist for at least ten years, since I was a student. Indeed, I reflect, it’s only with embarrassment and in low voices that the people I know in London will admit to being socialists. Generally we don’t admit to believing in anything at all, though we sometimes disapprove of the worst abuses. It’s as if in London it’s considered vulgar or exhibitionist to hold too strongly to anything, hence the London contempt for Mrs Thatcher along with the failure to do anything about her. In some ways this British insouciance is a manifestation of British scepticism and dislike of extremes; in another way it’s just feebleness.
To a massive Gothic church in Milan. The stained-glass windows tell, in sequence, like bright cartoons, biblical stories. And with strong sunlight behind each of them, they resemble the frames of a film.
26 FEBRUARY 1987
To Florence by train. The fast and comfortable Italian trains and the businessmen around me in their sharp clothes. The care they take: everything matches; not a garment is worn or shapeless. What surprises me is the affluence and attractiveness of northern Italy and that despite Thatcher’s talk about the boom in British industry, compared with this place it’s in desperate straits.
In Florence I do more interviews. This publicising of films is an odd business. I have no Italian money and little grasp of what is going on. Norboto, the publicist, takes me from city to city. When I am thirsty he buys me a Coke; when I am hungry he fetches me a sandwich. He takes me to the hotel and in the morning he wakes me up. It reminds me of being a kid and being out with my father. You veer in these publicity tours between feeling you are important, a minor celebrity, someone to be listened to, and the predominant feeling that you’re a kind of large parcel, a property at the disposal of a nervous distributor with which things can be done, films sold and money made. You hope in return that you’ll get a decent view of the Grand Canal from the window of your Venice hotel.
27 FEBRUARY 1987
To Venice for the Carnival. I stand in the railway station and read the board: there are trains to Vienna, Trieste, Munich, Paris, Rome. That these places are merely a train ride away gives one a sense of being a part of Europe that isn’t available in Britain. When I’m in the US and people talk of making a trip to Europe it still takes me a beat to realise they’re also referring to Britain. I think of the legendary sign at Dover: Fog over Channel, Continent cut off.
Then out into the crumbling, drowning city of tourists which is packed with people in medieval costumes and gold masks. They dance all night in St Mark’s Square and fall to the ground where they sleep beneath people’s feet until morning. Looking at the bridges I wonder how they don’t collapse under the weight of people. I walk with the distributor through this wild celebration to a cinema where Laundrette is opening. The cinema is virtually empty. A man is asleep and snoring loudly, the sound filling the place. To my horror the film is dubbed: strange Italian voices are coming from the mouths of Saeed Jaffrey and Roshan Seth. The Italian hairdresser on Sammy and Rosie said he grew up hearing Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando all with the same voice, dubbed by the same Italian actor.
I watch the audience watching the film. At the points where the audience usually laugh there is complete silence. The film is no longer a comedy.
I get up to speak. The snoring man opens his eyes briefly, looks at me and goes back to sleep. The audience puts questions to me through the interpreter. But though she has a good accent, what the interpreter says to me makes no sense. So I describe how the film came to be made and talk a little about the gay theme. She blushes when I say this. Then she stumbles and backs away from me and the microphone. I glare at her. She recovers and talks to the audience for a long time. But I know she isn’t repeating what I said. So I turn to her and say the aim of the film is to induce worldwide sexual excitement. Now she won’t go to the microphone at all. She is backing away, wide-eyed. The audience whistles and shouts and claps. I get out as soon as I can.
3 MARCH 1987
First day of shooting. I go to pick up Shashi who turned up late last night. ‘I nearly didn’t come at all,’ he says. ‘I’ve got big tax problems. Rajiv Gandhi himself had to sort them out.’ Shashi has three Indian writers staying with him in his flat. They’re working on a script Shashi will direct at the end of the year. He tells me that Indian film-writers often write ten films a year and earn £250,000. Some writers only work out the story and are no good at dialogue, while others just come in for the verbals.
Shashi looks splendid, if a little plump. He’s less familiar with the script than I’d hoped — and in the car he asks me to remind him of the story — but he’s serious and keen. Soon everyone is in love with him.
We shoot the scene of Rosie finding the old man dead in the bath. I turn up and find Frances in a long green coat with a furry black collar. On her head she has a black pillbox hat. Instead of a social worker she looks like an extra from Doctor Zhivago. I take it as a direct blow to the heart, as if it’s a complete misunderstanding of everything I’ve been trying to do. Frances is very nervous and apprehensive, as it’s the first day, and she clings to the coat as if it’s a part of Rosie’s soul. But Frears is enjoying himself. He can get along with actors. Where I’d have them by the throat with my foot in the back of their neck, he sits down and talks gently with them. Frances changes the coat. But it’s not the last we’ll see of that coat.
When Shashi comes on set — we’re shooting the scene outside and inside the off-licence — the local Asians come out of their shops in amazement. One immediately gives him three boxes of crisps. Another gives him perfume and aftershave. For them Shashi is a massive star, like Robert Redford, and he has been around for considerably longer, making over 200 films since he first started, aged eight. When they believe it is him, the kids dress up in their best clothes — the Asian girls in smart salwar kamiz and jewellery — to be photographed with him. Others ring their relatives who come in cars across London and wait patiently in the freezing cold for a break in filming so they can stand next to their idol.
Seeing the off-licence with wire-mesh across the counter, the dogs, the siege-like atmosphere — it is based on places I know in Brixton, where buying a bottle of wine can be like entering a battle zone — Shashi is taken aback, as Rafi would be. Shashi asks:
‘Are there really places like this in London?’
Shashi decides to wear a moustache for the part. It makes him look older and less handsome, less of a matinée idol; but also formidable, imposing and sort of British in the right military, authoritarian sort of way.
4 MARCH 1987
Sarah comes to the set where we’re shooting a scene between Sammy and Rosie set in a looted Asian grocer’s shop. Frances is still tense and unsure and she complains to Frears about Sarah being there watching her as she is trying to create the character of Rosie. Sarah leaves. She is amused by the clothes Frances is wearing, as if a social worker would wear a mini-skirt and three-inch-high heels to work. Before that, of course, the hours in make-up, the hairdresser constantly standing by to adjust any hair that might fall out of place. All seemingly absurd when the attempt is to do something that is, in some ways, realistic. But then the cinema has never stopped being a palace of dreams. Even in the serious cinema there is some emphasis on the ideal. Imagine casting a film with only ugly or even just ordinary-looking actors. The cinema cannot replace the novel or autobiography as the precise and serious medium of the age while it is still too intent on charming its audience!
5 MARCH 1987
Much falsity in what I wrote in anger yesterday, partly to do with my failure to let go of the script and let Frears make the film he has to make. I think that despite the clothes and the paraphernalia of glamour, the voice of the film collaborators can transcend the trivial messages of escape that the cinema must transmit if it is to reach a large audience.
Also, and today I have to repeat this to myself, the film-writer always has to give way to the director, who is the controlling intelligence of the film, the invisible tyrant behind everything. The only way for a writer to influence a film is through his relationship with the director. If this is good then the film will be a successful collaboration; if not, the writer has had it. And most writers are lucky if directors even allow them on the set.
Presumably, it is because of this contingency that serious writers don’t venture into the cinema. You don’t find many American writers — in a country with a film industry — thinking of film as a serious possibility.
Also contra what I said yesterday: I do think the constraints of playing to a wide audience can be useful. You have to ensure that your work is accessible. You can’t indulge yourself; you have to be self-critical; you have to say: is this available? So, to take a literary analogy, you have popular Thackeray and Dickens, say, as opposed to some recent American writing, loaded with experiment, innovation and pretty sentences which is published by minor magazines for an audience of acolytes, friends and university libraries.
I wake up, pull the curtains and it is snowing! The snow is settling too. This morning we’re shooting the aftermath of the riots, when Rafi decides to go out for a walk. He meets Danny and they go to visit Alice.
When I get to the set the snow doesn’t seem to matter. Burnt-out cars are scattered about; there are mobs throwing rubber bricks and police with batons charging them. Padded stuntmen dive over cars and policemen kick them. Among it all, in the awful cold, wanders Shashi, bearing a bunch of flowers. The kids in the mob are locals, not extras. These kids refuse to sit in the caravan with the actors in police uniform in case their friends think they’re fraternizing with the police.
The charges and fighting look terrifying and we haven’t shot the main riot yet. That’s tonight. Frears says: If we can get through that we’ll be OK, we’ll survive!
6 MARCH 1987
Night shoot. A row of derelict houses and shops with asbestos over their windows with gas-fired jets in little window boxes in front of them to give the impression of the neighbourhood in flames. In front of this are exploding cars, fire-engines, ambulances and a divided mob of 200 extras plus police with riot shields. There are four cameras. It’s massive, for a British film, and brilliantly organised. I think of the script: it just says something like: in the background the riot continues!
The rioting itself is frightening, thrilling and cathartic. It’s not difficult to see how compelling and exciting taking part in a riot can be and how far out of yourself such compulsion can take you. On some takes the kids playing rioters continue to attack the extras in uniform after we’ve cut. Some of the extras playing police threaten to go home if this doesn’t stop!
Late at night from the mob emerges a strange sight. Nearby is a hostel for the blind and about fifteen bewildered blind people with dogs emerge from the mob and walk across the riot area as cars explode around them and Molotov cocktails are flung into shops. At the far end of the set they release their dogs into a park.
I see rushes of yesterday’s material. It looks pretty effective. I can see how thrilling it must be to film large-scale set-pieces. It’s far easier and often more effective than the hard stuff: subtle acting and the delineation of complicated relationships.
Each day Frears asks me to give him a detailed report of the rushes: what was that scene like? he asks. And the other one? He refuses to watch rushes. The discovery that he can avoid this has liberated him from the inevitable discouragement of staring daily at his own work and its limitations.
10 MARCH 1987
More rushes and some of the riot material cut together. At last it comes alive! I talk to Oliver (the lighting cameraman) about the way he’s shot it. He’s eschewed the pinks and blues of Laundrette, going for a more monochrome look, though at times the screen positively glows! Originally I was sceptical of this, liking the heightened and cheap quality of Laundrette. But Oliver felt that the more real Sammy and Rosie looks the better as the oddness of the story and strangeness of the juxtapositions are sufficient unreality. He has given the film a European quality, sensuous and warm. I haven’t seen a film like it made in Britain.
It’s a hard film to make and much to do in six weeks. Everyone looks exhausted already, not surprisingly. They start work at eight in the morning and usually knock off around eleven at night. With night shoots we’ve been starting at six in the evening and finishing at seven in the morning, though people aren’t getting to bed till nine.
The worries about Ayub: he’s stiff at the moment and the humour of the part is beyond him. He’s better in close-up, being handsome. In mid-shot he wilts and looks as if he doesn’t quite know what to do with his body. His pleasantness of character comes through, playing against the unpleasantness of Sammy. But it’s going to be difficult for him in the first big part he’s played. Wendy looks effective in the rushes, powerful and vulnerable. American actors are trained for the screen. Where you sometimes feel Ayub is delivering his performance to the back of the stalls, Wendy understands the intimacy of the cinema.
On the way to today’s shoot, in an East End loft, a battleship passes along the river. The taxi I’m in stops. ‘Why have you stopped?’ I ask. ‘I can’t go on,’ the driver says, gazing at the ship. ‘My eyes have misted over. Doesn’t it do you in?’ I refrain from telling him the battleship is French. When I turn up I find they’ve managed to work the battleship into the scene. Let’s hope people think it’s a symbol.
In the script most of the scenes between Anna and Sammy take place in Anna’s bed. But Frears opens them up, using the whole space, even creating a new scene by moving into the loft’s tiny bathroom which has a spectacular view over London. Because of these scenes I write new dialogue for Anna about an exhibition she’s having, called ‘Images of a Decaying Europe’.
13 MARCH 1987
Today Frears rails at the actors for lacking flair, for thinking too much about their costumes, for being too passive and not helping him enough. He’s been cheerful all through it, but now the strain is starting to tell. It’s partly because the scene we’re shooting — outside Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat, with Rosie returning with Danny on a motorbike, the Ghost walking past, Vivia watching Rafi from the window and Rosie’s two friends also watching Rafi — is very complicated. The cold — working fifteen hours a day in snow flurries — is getting people down. Frears also blames me for this scene going badly: ‘You should never set a scene as complicated as this outside,’ he says. ‘Haven’t you learned that yet? I can’t control it out here!’ In fact, this is the only scene in the film we will have to reshoot.
16 MARCH 1987
To Frears’s last night to discuss the waste ground eviction scene at the end of the film. It has to be choreographed precisely and it hasn’t been yet. What I’ve written isn’t clear. So we work out, almost shot by shot, the final relationships between the characters. The problem with the end of the film, with the eviction as opposed to the already shot riot scene, is the danger of it being sentimental. Ambiguities and ironies have to be excavated just as Rafi and Sammy and Anna bumbling around during the riots made all the difference to a scene which could easily be one-dimensional.
Have the idea that in order to reflect on what has gone on in the film it might be a good notion to have, during the closing credits, some of Anna’s photographs shown to us.
17 MARCH 1987
Shooting the waste ground material on the large piece of unused ground under the motorway. Bit of a shock to turn up at the location and find Frances Barber in a black and white corset. I look at her wondering if she has forgotten to put the rest of her clothes on. Her breasts, well, they are jammed into an odd shape: it looks as though she has two Cornish pasties attached to her chest. I tell Stephen she looks like a gangster’s moll from a western. He takes it as a compliment. ‘That’s exactly what I intended,’ he says. ‘John Ford would be proud of me.’
Between takes, the corset debate continues between us, as in a snowstorm Shashi sits in a filthy flea-ridden armchair in front of a smoking fire, surrounded by young people in grey costumes banging tins. Frears argues that the corset is an inspired idea; it liberates Rosie from do-goodery; she looks bizarre, anarchistic and interesting, not earnest or condescending. What he then describes as the ‘simplistic politics of the film’ he says are transcended by imaginativeness. At the end of the argument he calls me a prude and for the rest of the afternoon he refers to me as Mrs Grundy.
The corset depresses me because after everyone’s work on the film it is still easy to hit a wrong note. I feel uneasy in complaining because I think Frears’s judgement is less conservative than my own; I could be wrong. Maybe, too, I’m being sentimental about the woman the character is based on, a more dignified and sensitive person than the one signified by the corset.
19 MARCH 1987
We shoot the eviction and exodus from the waste ground. With the trailers and caravans whirling in the mud and dust, the bulldozers crashing through shops, lifting cars and tossing them about, the straggly kids waving flags and playing music as the police and heavies invade and evict them, it is like a western! Frears runs among it all, yelling instructions through a megaphone.
It is tough on Shashi. India’s premier actor, a god to millions, is impersonating a torturer having a nightmare while bouncing on a bed in the back of a caravan which is being wildly driven around a stony waste ground in a snowstorm. Books scatter over his head. When he emerges, shaken and stirred, dizzy and fed up, he threatens to go back to Bombay. The next morning, when we tell him as a joke that we have to reshoot his scene in the back of the caravan, he goes white.
It is obvious that he has a difficult part. The character of Rafi is complex and contradictory and he has to play against many different kinds of character. Shashi is not used to making films in English and the part is physically demanding. But with his modesty, generosity and unEnglish liking for women, he is the most adored person on the film.
So a glorious day — mostly to do with the pleasure of working with other people, especially the ‘straggly kids’ who jam all day and some of the night by the fire. Most of them are alternative comedians and buskers from the London Underground. Few of them have a regular place to live, and when Debbie wants to inform them of a day’s shooting, she has to send her assistants round the tube stations of central London to find them.
Coming out of my hutch for this film has made me realise how hard it is sometimes to bear the isolation that all writers have to put up with.
20 MARCH 1987
To Kew where we’re shooting the suburban material — in Alice’s house and the street she lives in. We film the scene where Alice comes to the door and sees Rafi for the first time for thirty years. We do several takes and find it works best when Claire and Shashi do least, when they contain their reaction and we have to strain to imagine their feelings.
Here, where it is quiet and sedate, leafy and affluent, we have more complaints from residents than at any other location, though there are no charging bulldozers and we burn nothing down, though severely tempted.
Being brought up in the suburbs myself, this location reminds me of slow childhood Sundays on which you weren’t allowed to yell in the street and your friends were kept in for the holy day. Sundays in the suburbs were a funeral and it’s still beyond me why the celebration of God’s love for the world has to be such a miserable business.
I know now that England is primarily a suburban country and English values are suburban values. The best of that is kindness and mild-temperedness, politeness and privacy, and some rather resentful tolerance. The suburbs are also a mix of people. In my small street lived a civil servant, an interior decorator, secretaries, a local journalist, an architect, a van driver, a milkman, and so on, all living together in comfortable houses with gardens, in relative harmony.
At worst there is narrowness of outlook and fear of the different. There is cruelty by privacy and indifference. There is great lower-middle-class snobbery, contempt for the working class and envy of the middle class. And there is a refusal to admit to humanity beyond the family, beyond the household walls and garden fence. Each family as an autonomous, self-sufficient unit faces a hostile world of other self-contained families. This neurotic and materialistic privacy, the keystone of British suburban life, ensures that the ‘collective’ or even the ‘public’ will mean little to these people. It’s interesting that the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, has repudiated the now discredited notion of the collective in favour of left-wing individualism. He has said: ‘They have got to be told that socialism is the answer for them because socialism looks after the individual.’
My love and fascination for inner London endures. Here there is fluidity and possibilities are unlimited. Here it is possible to avoid your enemies; here everything is available. In the suburbs everything changes slowly. Heraclitus said: ‘You can’t step in the same river twice.’ In the inner-city you can barely step in the same street twice, so rapid is human and environmental change.
I sit in the first sunshine of the year in this English garden in Kew reading the papers. There is much written today about the verdict in the Blakelock case, where a policeman was hacked to death during an uprising on the Broadwater Farm Estate in north London. A man was sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing. The uprising followed the death of a much respected middle-aged black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, who died of a heart attack during a police raid on her home on the estate. The Police Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Newman, claimed that ‘anarchists and Trotskyists’ planned the uprising in advance, though there is no evidence for this. There is confusion and inconsistency in the police account of the incident, to say the least. The police also broke numerous rules and acted illegally in their treatment of two young ‘suspects’. A fifteen-year-old boy was held three days without access to his parents or a solicitor. A sixteen-year-old, with a mental age of seven, was interrogated without his mother or solicitor.
It’s all depressing, as was the incident around which I based the opening of the film: the shooting of a black woman, Cherry Groce, who was permanently paralysed after being shot during a police raid in which her son was being sought.
But what are we doing using this material in the film? Today, when confronted once more by the racism, violence, alienation and waste of the Broadwater Farm Estate uprising, our little film has to be justified over again. After all, real life has become part of a film, reduced perhaps, maybe trivialised. We will make money from it; careers will be furthered; film festivals attended. But aren’t we stealing other people’s lives, their hard experience, for our own purposes? The relation we bear to those people’s lives is tangential, to say the least. Perhaps because of that we seriously misunderstand their lives.
I can’t work out today if the question about the relation between the real people, the real events, and the portrayal is an aesthetic or moral one. In other words, if the acting is good, if the film is well made, if it seems authentic, does that make it all right, is the stealing justified? Will the issue be settled if experience is successfully distilled into art?
Or is the quality of the work irrelevant to the social issue, which is that of middle-class people (albeit dissenting middle-class people) who own and control and have access to the media and to money, using minority and working-class material to entertain other middle-class people? Frequently during the making of the film I feel that this is the case, that what we’re doing is a kind of social voyeurism.
At the same time I can justify our work by saying it is the duty of contemporary films to show contemporary life. This portrayal of our world as it is is valuable in itself, and part of the climate of opposition and dissent.
In one part of me I do believe there is some anger in the film; and it does deal with things not often touched on in British films. In another part of me, when I look at the film world, run by the usual white middle-class public-school types, with a few parvenu thugs thrown in, I can see that the film is just a commercial product.
Frears and I talk this over. He says the film is optimistic about the young people portrayed in it: their vivacity, lack of conformity and rebelliousness are celebrated in it.
In the evening to rushes — uncut takes of the waste ground material. It looks good and people are pleased with their work. Leon from Cinecom is there, as is his boss. Leon sleeps through the rushes and his boss says: For rushes they’re not bad, but it’s not family entertainment.
After, we drive through London and go to a pub. It’s a shock that London and other people’s lives are continuing while we’re making a film. Film-making is an absorbing and complete world; the relationships are so intense and generous, the collaboration so total, that the rest of the world is blanked out.
24 MARCH 1987
In the studio at Twickenham at last and off the street. Here we’re shooting all the material in Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat. It is easier to watch the performances in this calmer and more controlled place, even if the atmosphere is slightly flat.
It seems to me that Shashi is going to turn out to be very good, portraying a complex and dangerous character, a murderer and a man eager to be loved, a populist and an élitist. Frears is carefully and patiently teasing out the power and subtlety in Shashi by getting him to act simply and underplay everything. You can see the performance developing take by take. After eight or nine takes Shashi is settled, a little tired and bored, more casual and relaxed. Now he is able to throw the scene away. And this is when he is at his best, though he himself prefers the first few takes when he considers himself to be really ‘acting’. Sometimes he can’t see why Frears wants to do so many retakes.
Ayub improving too. He is inexperienced as an actor (it is of course difficult for Asian actors to gain experience), but Oliver is doing a wonderful job in making him look like a matinée idol. The balance of the script has gone against Sammy. It is Rafi and Rosie that I’ve developed as there is more scope for conflict with them. Sammy doesn’t believe in a great deal, so it’s hard to have him disagree much with anyone. His confusion isn’t particularly interesting. Rosie is a more complex character and harder to write, especially as she isn’t a character I’ve written before.
25 MARCH 1987
I turn up on the set and find that Frears has Rosie going out to meet her lover not only in that ridiculous coat, but wearing only her underwear. He seems to think that someone would go to see their lover, via a riot, wearing only a thermal vest and a pair of tights. I certainly wouldn’t. I hope I’ll be able to watch the film in the future without suffering at this moment.
Thank God I’m leaving London in a couple of days for the Oscar ceremonies. I’ve been on the set every day, though I’m not sure it’s been as essential as it was on Laundrette. There hasn’t been much rewriting this time.
28 MARCH 1987
Los Angeles. I wind down the window of the cab as we hit the freeway and accelerate. Air rushes in, gloriously warm to me after an English winter of freezing balls. I pull three layers of clothes over my head. LA is blazingly green and bright: how easy it is to forget (one’s senses accustomed to dullness) that this industry town is also subtropical; its serious and conservative business takes place among palm trees, exotic birds and preternaturally singing flowers. Everything is as resplendent as if I’d taken LSD. Walking into the hotel, the Château Marmont, a small, friendly European place on a hill, the grass appears to have been sprayed with gloss and the air pumped full of perfume. It is eucalyptus.
The phone calls begin as soon as I open the windows of my room: from agents, press people, producers, recommending the numerous totally beautiful human beings I should impress in the next few days. I say to my agent: But most of these people do not interest me. She says: Dear, all that is important is that you interest them — whatever you do, don’t discourage them. As long as they’re saying your name as they eat all round this city you’ve got nothing to worry about.
As we talk I eat some fruit. Swollen nature in my hands: strawberries long as courgettes, thick as cucumbers. Here the most natural things look unnatural, which is fitting in a mythical city in a hotel in which Bogart proposed to Bacall, where John Belushi died, where Dorothy Parker had an apartment and Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer would come to tea and no one wanted to be the first to leave, and in which, when I get into bed to read — Robert Stone’s Children of Light — I find myself staring into a novel about a burned-out screenwriter living at the Château Marmont drinking and drugging himself while a screenplay he wrote is being shot in another country.
29 MARCH 1987
At breakfast the waiters are discussing films they’ve seen recently. Then they start to worry about the Oscars. They can’t believe that Betty Blue is the French entry in the Best Foreign Picture Category. What about Vagabonde? At another table a young man is hungrily explaining the plot of a film he’s written to an older man. ‘This film could change lives,’ he says, not eating. The other man eats croissants as big as boomerangs. ‘It’s about an alien disguised as a policeman. But it’s a good alien, right? It’s about the renewal of the human spirit.’
Later, with some friends, I drive through this baking city to Venice Beach. I’m being shown the city. How attractive it is too, and not vulgar. I notice how few black people there are. What little poverty. I’d have thought this city was bereft of unhappiness if I hadn’t stayed downtown on my last visit here. That time the manager of the hotel said, when I checked in: Whatever you do, sir, don’t go out after dark.
Venice Beach — so called because of the rotting bits of Venetian architecture still left over from a time when a minor Venice was being contemplated here. It is in its wild spirit something like the Venice, Italy, I saw a few weeks ago, though less stylish and more eccentric, which you’d expect in a country without an aristocratic culture. Herds of people cruise the boardwalk. A man is juggling a chainsaw and a ball, hurling the humming saw into the air and catching it. A dog in sunglasses watches. A man with pierced nipples, with rings hanging from them, also watches. All along the beach there are masseurs, rolfers, shiatsu experts, astrologers, yoga masters and tattoo freaks. Further along, at Muscle Beach, in an enclosed area, men and women work out, twitching, shaking, vibrating, tensing and generally exhibiting their bodies to the crowds.
Back at the hotel the phone rings constantly. People tell me: The greatest day of your life is approaching. I try to think of the one day in my life in which I had more happiness than any other.
Later, to a cocktail party given by Orion, the distributors of Laundrette in the US. It is as interesting as a convention of carpet salesmen. I sit next to a woman whose husband is an executive in the company. In her early twenties, she tells me how she hates it all, how you just have to keep smiling if you want your husband to be promoted and how desperate she is to go home and get some drugs up her nose. Everyone leaves early. Drive the LA streets at eleven and they’re deserted. It’s like Canterbury. Everyone goes to bed early because they work so hard.
30 MARCH 1987
After lunch in Santa Monica near the beach, to the Bel-Air hotel with its lush gardens, its white Moorish architecture and its private suites and cottages in the grounds with their own patios. Here, you go somewhere, get out of your car and someone parks it. When you leave the restaurant, bar or hotel, the car is waiting outside. If you’ve got the dough, there’s always someone around to save you doing something yourself. I’m beginning to see how addictive such a luxurious place as this could become. Once you’d really got the taste for it, how could you be detoxicated? To which clinic could you go to dry out from the juices of wealth and pleasure that had saturated you in this city?
It’s interesting how few notable American film directors actually live in Los Angeles: Coppola, Pakula, Pollack, Scorsese, Demme, all live in other cities. The directors and writers who do live here are British, often successful in British television, now flailing around in the vacuum of Los Angeles, rich but rootless and confused, attempting the impossible task of finding decent work, exiled from a country that doesn’t have a film industry.
31 MARCH 1987
The day of the Oscars. People leave work after lunch in order to get home and watch it on TV at five o’clock. All over the city Oscar parties are beginning in lounges and beside pools. For weeks since the nominations, there has been speculation about possible winners. Turn on the TV and grave pundits are weighing the merits of Bob Hoskins and Paul Newman; open a paper and predictions are being made. Here the Oscars are unavoidable, as competitive and popular as a Cup Final, as dignified and socially important as a Royal Wedding.
A last swim on my back in the hotel pool, watching the sky through the trees before the extensive pleasures of the bathroom where I sip champagne and receive phone calls and gifts. Slipping on my elastic bow-tie I suspect this will be the best time of the day. Outside in the lane the limo is already waiting. By now I have definitely had enough of people saying: It’s enough to be nominated, it’s an honour in itself. By now that isn’t enough: by now I want to win; by now, I know I will win!
When your four-seater black stretch limo pulls up outside the venue all you see on either side of you are other limos, a shimmering sea of shining black metal. When you slide out, you see the high grandstands lining the long walk to the entrance. In these packed grandstands screaming people wave placards with the names of their favourite films written on them. ‘Platoon, Platoon, Platoon!’ someone is yelling. Another person bellows: ‘Room with a View, Room with a View!’ One man holds a placard which says: ‘Read the Bible.’
Inside there are scores of young people, the women in long dresses, the men in tuxedos, who have small signs around their neck saying: ‘The 59th Academy Awards’. They are the seat-fillers. Their role is essential, so that when the cameras sweep across the auditorium there isn’t an empty seat in the place, whereas in fact the sensible people are in the bar watching it all, like everyone else, on TV, only going in to sit down for their bit. In the bar with friends we look out for stars and discuss them: doesn’t Elizabeth Taylor look tiny and doesn’t her head look big — perhaps she’s had all the fat in her body sucked out by the modish vacuum method; doesn’t Bette Davis look shrivelled and fragile; doesn’t Sigourney Weaver look terrific and what was wrong with Jane Fonda and doesn’t Dustin Hoffman always look the same?
When it comes to your section and Shirley MacLaine starts to read out the names of the nominees, you silently run over your speech, remove a speck of dried semen from your collar and squeeze the arms of your seat, ready to propel yourself into the sight of a billion people. You wonder where in the sitting room you’ll put your Oscar, or maybe you should hide it somewhere in case it’s stolen? What does it weigh anyway? You’ll soon find out.
When they make a mistake and don’t read out your name you vow never to attend any such ridiculous ceremony of self-congratulation, exhibitionism and vulgarity again.
1 APRIL 1987
The next day by the pool drinking iced tea, several young producers come by. My impression is that they come to have a look at you, to check you out, to see if there’s anything in you for them. One drives me around the city in his Jag. He asks me if I want to fly to San Francisco for lunch. I ask if there isn’t anywhere a little nearer we can go. He swears eternal love and a contract.
An idea for a story: of someone who inadvertently writes a successful film and lives off its reputation for years, so afraid of ending the shower of financial seductions and blandishments that he never writes anything again.
2 APRIL 1987
I return to find Frears in heaven on the set, sitting with his plimsolls up and gossiping, waiting for a shot to be set up. To ruin his day I tell him about the directors I’ve met in Hollywood and how much they earn and the kind of luxury in which they live. Frears goes into agonies of frustration and jealousy, especially when I mention money. He keeps saying: ‘What am I doing here, fuck all this art, just give me the money!’ This makes Shashi laugh and laugh. But there is another element of neurosis in all this American craziness which is more serious, especially for a film-maker. Since the 1950s the United States is the place where the action is, where things happen, and because the US has the central role in the world which England had in the nineteenth century, America is always present for players in the culture game. Like a mountain that you have to climb or turn away from in disgust, it is an existential challenge involving complicated choices and threats and fear. Do you make an attempt on this height or do you withdraw into your corner? How much of yourself are you prepared to put into this enterprise? Unfortunately for British film-makers, America has been something of a Bermuda Triangle into which many careers have crashed without trace.
They are shooting the party scenes and some kissing between Rani and Vivia; also between Rani and another woman, Margy. I remember Meera (who plays Rani) as a student coming to see me in 1981 at Riverside Studios where we were rehearsing a play for the Royal Court. She asked me if I thought she would ever become an actress. She desperately wanted to go into the theatre, and she wanted to write too. There was some resistance from her parents who, like the parents of many Asian girls, were mostly concerned with her having an arranged marriage. But her enthusiasm and ambition were so obvious, I just told her to stick at it. I wonder what her parents would say if they could see her having a grape removed from between her teeth by the tongue of another actress!
Perhaps these kisses, like the ones between Johnny and Omar in Laundrette –
Each kiss a heart-quake, — for a kiss’s strength
I think it must be reckon’d by its length.
— are subversive in some way. It’s as if they poke social convention and say: There are these other ways to live; there are people who are different, but aren’t guilt-ridden. When I went to see She’s Gotta Have It recently, and it was mostly a young black audience, when the two women kissed the audience screamed with disapproval and repulsion.
We also shoot the scene where Rafi arrives at Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat and finds Rosie’s friends putting a condom on a carrot. Later in the scene Rani and Vivia stand in the centre of the room and kiss, rather ostentatiously. Shashi is agitated by all this and yells for his agent, a taxi, and a first-class flight to Bombay.
God knows what this film will look like when it’s all stuck together. I suppose it’s a film of juxtapositions and contrasts, of different scenes banging hard together. One danger is that the film lacks narrative force and focus; it may be too diffuse.
3 APRIL 1987
Frears and I rejig the scene where Rafi comes home from the party and finds Vivia and Rani in bed. Originally they chase him around the room with lumps of wood and attempt to beat him to a pulp. He barricades himself in the study and climbs out of the window and down the drainpipe. When it comes to shooting it, it doesn’t seem as believable or funny as when I wrote it.
So at lunchtime we rework it. Rafi comes in, finds Vivia and Rani in bed, and is outraged. Abusing them in Punjabi, a row breaks out. So Shashi and Meera work out a couple of pages of abuse to scream at each other. Meera will also throw things at him. It’s terrifying when we come to shoot it, with Meera hammering a piece of wood with nails in it into the door behind which Shashi is cowering! As the scene is all Punjabi abuse we talk about putting sub-titles on it.
7 APRIL 1987
We shoot Sammy and Rosie crying and rocking together on the floor at the end of the film, with the women slowly leaving the flat behind them. I get to the studio at eight in the morning and leave at nine in the evening. This seems to me to be an ideal solution to living: erect this saving girder of necessity around you: you don’t have to think or decide how to live!
Frears saw a good deal of the film on Saturday, as it’s being edited as we shoot it. He says: Christ, it’s a weepie, a complete heartbreaker! We’ll have to put hundreds of violins on the soundtrack!
8 APRIL 1987
I look at a good chunk of the film on the tiny screen of an editing machine at Twickenham Studios. It makes me laugh, partly, I think, with relief that it isn’t completely terrible. It’s less rough than Laundrette, more glamorous, more conventional, with Hollywood colours. I look at the scene where Rafi catches Rani and Vivia in bed; they attack him and he climbs out of the window and down the drainpipe. We were thinking of cutting him climbing out of the window, it seemed unconvincing. Yet looking at it in context, I think it’ll work.
Frears comes into the cutting room while I’m watching and talks to Mick, the editor. It’s very impressive the way Frears can hold every shot of the film in his head at once, even though he’s barely seen any of it. He can remember every take of every shot. So when he’s talking to Mick about scenes he shot weeks ago, he’ll say: Wasn’t take 5 better than take 3? Or: Didn’t the actress have her hand over her face on take 11 on the mid-shot and not on take 2?
We talk about the kind of harmless threat of disorder that films like Laundrette or Prick Up Your Ears represent, which partly explains their success. The pattern is one of there being a fairly rigid social order which is set up in detail in the film. Set against this order there is an individual or two, preferably in love, who violate this conventional structure. Their rebellion, their form of transgressional sex, is liberating, exciting. Audiences identify with it. Films as diverse as, say, Billy Liar, Room with a View, Midnight Cowboy, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, have this pattern, following an alienated individual or couple, unable to find a place for themselves in the society as it is. Usually there’s some kind of individual reconciliation at the end of the film; or the individual is destroyed. But there is rarely any sense that the society could or should be changed. The pattern is, of course, a seductive one because we can see ourselves in the alienated, but authentic, individual standing up against stuffiness, ignorance and hatred of love. In all this we are not helped to think in any wider sense of the way societies repress legitimate ideals, groups of people, and possible forms of life.
In some films of the middle and late 1960s, when the rigid social order was eschewed entirely as no longer relevant, and only ‘liberated’ individuals were portrayed, the films have little power or interest, lacking the kind of conflict and tension that the classic pattern necessarily produces.
9 APRIL 1987
Filming in the cellar of a pub in Kew. Cramped and dusty; the lights keep going out. Claire, whose performance until now has been, rightly, contained, starts to reveal her power in this cellar scene with Shashi. Furiously jerking things out of the suitcase she packed thirty years ago, and shoving the whole lot on the floor, she reveals such a combination of wild anger, vulnerability and pain, that when the camera cut, there was complete silence. Even Shashi looked shaken. It was especially difficult for her as the Ghost was in the scene as well, standing at her elbow.
10 APRIL 1987
We spend the day in a South Kensington restaurant filming the confrontation scene between Rosie, Rafi and Sammy when they go out to dinner. This is the pivotal scene of the movie. It starts off simply. The three of them are at the table; the violinists play a little Mozart in the background, the drag queen sits behind them. But the violinists have extraordinary faces: English features, pale shoulders (ready to be painted by Ingres), Pre-Raphaelite hair, and after twelve solid hours of fiddling, very worn fingers.
As the day progresses Shashi and Frances become more heated in their argument. The playing of the violinists becomes more frenzied. The drag queen does a very exasperated flounce. Shashi eats a finger made from sausage meat and spits out the nail, putting it politely on the side of the plate.
I can see Frears’s imagination racing as he uses these few elements to their fullest and most absurd effect. He becomes increasingly inventive, his control and experience allowing him to play. I am a little afraid the scene will be drowned in effects, but I did write the scene in a similar spirit — putting the people in the restaurant and experimenting until something came of it.
Of course, the conditions of Frears’s creativity are different from mine. Alone in a room I can take my time and rewrite as often as I like. I can leave the scene and rewrite it in two weeks’ time. For Frears in that small restaurant crowded with seventy people there is no way of going back on the scene. It has to be done there and then and it has to work. It takes a lot of nerve to play with a scene under those conditions, especially as the medium is so ridiculously expensive.
I notice how comfortable Frances is in her part now. She has discovered who she is playing; and that is something you find out only in the course of filming. But unlike the theatre, there’s never another opportunity to integrate later discoveries into earlier scenes.
If the conditions in which film directors usually work make it difficult for them to be original, a film actor’s life is certainly no bed of roses. You are picked up at seven or earlier in the morning; you may shoot your first scene at ten or eleven, if you’re lucky. Or you may be hanging around until three or four before you begin work. Wendy came in early for several days, thinking they were going to shoot her ‘fuck night’ scene with Ayub that day, then nothing was done, though she didn’t know that until early evening. But if your scene is going to be shot, however bored and cold and confused by the entire thing you are, you have to drag your concentration to the sticking place, you have to pull out your performance immediately. You may have to play a very emotional scene and you have to play it now! But whatever you’re doing, it’s very expensive, so the faster you do it the more you will be appreciated. As there’s little time for exploration and experiment you will probably have to give a performance much like one you’ve given before because at least you can be sure it will work.
When that acting job’s finished there might possibly be another one. Should you turn it down and hope something better will turn up? Perhaps it won’t; but perhaps it will. If it does, the director may be duff or the script no good or the part too small. Whatever happens, most of the work actors get doesn’t stretch them and 80 per cent of the directors they work with will have little talent. Of the good 20 per cent, 5 per cent will be tyrants who think of actors as puppets.
Despite these difficulties, all the British actors I know have one thing in common: they are well-trained, skilled and dedicated people who want to do good work and give of their best within a profession that only rarely gives them the opportunity to reach their potential. No wonder so many actors become neurotic or dull through lack of interest in anything but their careers.
11 APRIL 1987
In a tiny studio off the Harrow Road we film the interior scenes set in Danny’s caravan. Outside the caravan, a row of gas jets reproduce the waste ground fires. The props man and the assistant art director wearily dance behind the gas jets to reproduce the celebration of the ‘fuck’ night as Frances and Roland roll around naked. Frears sinks down in a chair next to me. ‘I’ve become completely paranoid,’ he says. ‘I’ve had it. Is this any good or not?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘What’s it about anyway?’ he says. ‘Fuck knows,’ I reply. He needs support and for no one to speak in too loud a voice. Anything above a whisper is interpreted as hatred. ‘We should have had more time,’ he says, after a while. ‘About two more weeks would have done it. But it would have cost £300,000 and we didn’t have it.’
I leave early and go to a book publishing party. On the way I see the police have stopped a black man and woman and are questioning them. It’s odd going to the party: the world going on as normal. Later, I see someone I recognise coming towards me, black hair sticking up, face white, a week’s growth on his face. I try and work out who it is. At last I know: Stephen Frears.
Later, I run into a friend who drags me away from the restaurant and tells me to sit in her car. She says there’s something I have to see that I’ve never seen before. Well, she drives me to an Arts Centre in west London. I take one look at the scene and try to leave. It looks as if she’s brought me to an Asian wedding. Women and kids of all ages are sitting on rows of chairs around the walls, not talking. The men, mostly Sikhs, stand together at the bar, talking. The women have gone to a lot of trouble tonight, really dressing up for this one in much jewellery, in salwar kamiz threaded with silver and gold. By ten o’clock the hall is packed with Asian families, with babies and children and old men and women. I’ve no idea what to expect. The stage is full of rock ’n’ roll gear.
The band comes on: eight men in red and white costumes. They look like assistants in a fast-food joint. One of them announces the singers: ‘Welcome the greatest Bhangra singers in the world!’ Two men bounce on stage in spangled T-shirts and tight white pants.
The music starts. The music is extraordinary. After years of colonialism and immigration and Asian life in Britain; after years of black American and reggae music in Britain comes this weird fusion. A cocktail of blues and r ’n’ b shaken with Indian film songs in Hindi, cut with heavy guitar solos and electric violin runs and African drumming, a result of all the music in the world being available in an affluent Asian area, Southall, near Heathrow Airport — it is Bhangra music! Detroit and Delhi, in London!
For a few seconds no one moves. The dance floor is a forbidden zone with everyone perched like tense runners around it. Then no one can hold themselves back. Men fly on to the floor. They dance together, thrusting their arms into the air and jerking their hips and thighs, tight-buttocked. Sometimes the men climb on each other’s shoulders or wrap their legs around others’ waists to be swept in dizzy circles inches from the floor. Women and girls dance with each other; women dance with tiny babies. An old Indian colonel with a fine moustache and military importance weaves amongst it all, taking photographs.
And they all know each other, these people. They were at school together and now they live in the same streets and do business with each other and marry amongst themselves. This gig, such a celebration, is unlike any other I’ve been to for years: it’s not to do with boys and girls trying to pick each other up; it’s not aggressive. Makes you aware of the violence and hostility you expect of public occasions in Britain.
12 APRIL 1987
Now we’ve almost finished filming, in the morning I sit down and try to write something new.
I’ve enjoyed being out of the house every day and the intense involvement of film-making. The cliché of film-making which talks of the set as being a family is inaccurate, though the set is hierarchical and strictly stratified in the family way. But unlike with a family the relationships are finite, everyone knows what they’re doing and there’s strong sense of purpose. The particular pleasure of a film set is in being with a group of people who work well and happily together.
Now, back at the desk, I immediately feel that writing is something of a dingy business. Why this unhealthy attempt to catch life, to trap it, rearrange it, pass it on, when it should be lived and forgotten? Why this re-creation in isolation of something that had blood and real life in it? The writer’s pretence and self-flattery that what is written is even realer than the real when it’s nothing of the kind.
16 APRIL 1987
To Frears’s house. He’s being photographed with his kids to coincide with the opening of Prick Up Your Ears. David Byrne comes by in a green and black tartan jacket, jeans, with a little pigtail. He has a luminous round face, and bright clear skin. It’s the first time I’ve met him, though his band, the Talking Heads, are heroes of mine. We walk round the corner to the Gate Diner where the waiter inadvertently sits us under a poster for Stop Making Sense. Various people in the street recognise him and a woman comes over to our table and gives him a note with her phone number on it, thanking him for his contribution to music and films.
Byrne is shy and clever and unpretentious. The disconcerting thing about him is that he listens to what you say and thinks it over before replying seriously. The only other person I’ve met who has done this is Peter Brook. A most unusual experience.
Byrne was given the script of Sammy and Rosie in New York by the great fixer David Gothard, and wants to do some music for it. Byrne has picked up some African music in Paris, composed by street musicians, which Frears thinks is superb. Byrne talks about using similar rhythms in the music he might do for Sammy and Rosie. We’ll show Byrne a cut of the movie as soon as possible and he can put music over the parts that interest him. The problem is time, as Byrne is composing the music for the new Bertolucci film, The Last Emperor, as well as writing the songs for the new Talking Heads record.
In the street waiting for a cab with Byrne I see the cops have stopped another car with black people in it. The black people are being very patient. What the hell is going on in this city?
18 APRIL 1987
Big day. First rough assembly of the film. I meet the editor, Mick Audsley, who is pulling the film on a trolley in its numerous silver cans through the streets. It’s 110 minutes long, he says. As it’s a rough-cut the film is a little like a home movie, with the sound coming and going; and of course there’s no music.
We watch it in a small viewing theatre off Tottenham Court Road. The first forty minutes are encouraging and absorbing and we laugh a lot. Shashi is excellent: both menacing and comic, though his performance seems to lack subtlety. I am elated all the same. Then it begins to fall apart. My mind wanders. I can’t follow the story. Entire scenes, which seemed good in themselves at the time of shooting, pass without registering. They bear no relation to each other. It is the centre of the film I’m referring to: the party, the ‘fuck’ night, the morning after, the breakfasts. Towards the end the film picks up again and is rather moving.
Each of us, cameraman, editor, director, me, can see the faults of the thing from our own point of view. I can see the character of Danny fading out; can see that the character of Anna is not sufficiently rounded; that the riots are not developed in any significant way.
But there are pluses: Shashi of course. And Frances, who portrays a strong, complex person very clearly. Roland too, especially as I’d worried that he might have been a little wooden.
What I don’t get is any sense of the freshness of the thing, of how surprising and interesting it may be to others.
After, I stagger from the viewing theatre, pleased on the one hand that it’s up on the screen at last. On the other, I feel disappointed that after all the work, the effort, the thought, it’s all over so quickly and just a movie.
Frears is pleased. These things are usually hell, he says, but this wasn’t, entirely. Some of it, he says, is the best work he’s done; it’s a subtle and demanding film. Part of the problem with it, he thinks, is that maybe it’s too funny at the beginning and not serious enough. He suggests it could be slowed down a bit. I say I don’t want to lose any of the humour especially as the end of the film is so miserable. It’s a question, over the next few weeks, of reconciling the two things.
30 APRIL 1987
Mick Audsley has been furiously cutting the film for the last two weeks. When we all walk into the preview theatre — including Karin Bamborough and David Rose from Channel 4 — to see how the film’s progressed, Mick’s as nervous as a playwright on a first night. I reassure him. But it’s his film now; this is his draft; it’s his work we’re judging. ‘I’ve taken some stuff out,’ he says nervously. ‘And moved other things around.’
There are about twelve people in the room. Frears’s film Prick Up Your Ears is successful in the States and Bevan’s Personal Services is number three in the British film charts, so they’re both pretty cheerful.
For the first forty minutes I can’t understand what’s happened to the film. It’s more shaped now, but less bizarre somehow, less unpredictable. I suppress my own laughter in order to register every gurgle and snort of pleasure around me. But there is nothing: complete silence.
The film begins to improve around the ‘fuck’ night and takes off when the Ghetto-lites dance and mime to Otis Redding’s ‘My Girl’ and we cut between the avid fuckers. It’s unashamedly erotic, a turn-on, running right up against the mean monogamous spirit of our age. There must be more jiggling tongues in this film than in any other ever made.
I cringe throughout at the ridiculousness of the dialogue, which seems nothing like the way people actually talk. A lot of this will go, I expect, or we can play some very loud David Byrne music over it, though I am attached to some of the ideas contained in the more strident speeches.
At the end I feel drained and disappointed. I look around for a chair in the corner into which I can quietly disappear. I feel like putting a jacket over my head.
Then you have to ask people what they think. David Rose is a little enigmatic. He says the film is like a dream, so heightened and unreal it is. It bears no relation to the real world. I say: We want to create a self-sustaining, internally coherent world. He says, yes, you’ve done that, but you can’t be surprised when what you’ve done seems like an intrusion to those it is about.
Frears says it’s a different film from the one we watched two weeks ago. Now we have to fuse the seriousness of this version with the frivolity of the first version.
A journalist who came to see me the other day asked why I always write about such low types, about people without values or morality, as it seems all the characters are, except for Alice. It’s a shock when he says this. I write about the world around me, the people I know, and myself. Perhaps I’ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd. Reminds me of a story about Proust, who when correcting the proofs of Remembrance of Things Past, was suddenly disgusted by the horrible people he’d brought to life, corrupt and unpleasant and lustful all of them and not a figure of integrity anywhere in it.
4 MAY 1987
A very confused time for us in trying to work out what kind of film we want to release. We talk frequently about the shape of it, of pressing it experimentally all over to locate the bones beneath the rolling fat. But you have to press in far to touch hardness. There’s barely any story to the thing. If there is a story, it belongs to Shashi. Frears is talking of ‘taking things out’; he says, ‘Less means better,’ and adds ominously, ‘There’s far too much in it.’ It’s painful, this necessary process of cutting. I think, for consolation, of Jessica Mitford’s: ‘In writing you must always kill your dearest darlings!’
7 MAY 1987
Frears on good form in the cutting room. He hasn’t been so cheerful for days. He’s cutting swathes out of the movie. It’s funnier and more delicate, he says. He adds: Your talent will seem considerably greater after I’ve done with it!
He’s put his finger on something which will inevitably bother film-writers. If the movie is successful you can never be sure to what extent this is due to you, or whether the acting, editing and direction have concealed weaknesses and otherwise lifted an ordinary script which, if it were to be shown in its entirety or as written, wouldn’t work at all.
11 MAY 1987
Frears rings and says it’s vital I come in later today and see the film. You’ll have to brace yourself, he adds, ringing off.
The first shock is in the first minute: the shooting. Mick has obviously worried a great deal about this. He has removed the moment when the black woman gets shot, when you see her covered in blood and falling to the ground. Even Frears is surprised that this has come out, but he’s pleased with it. What such a powerful and upsetting moment does, they both argue, is overwhelm the opening. Frears also says that its removal improves the subtlety of the storytelling — we find out later what has happened. I do like the shooting, not for aesthetic reasons, but for didactic ones: it says, this is what happens to some black people in Britain — they get shot up by the police.
Halfway through this cut I can see it’s going to work. The shape is better, it’s quicker, less portentous. Danny’s long speech has gone, as have various other bits of dialogue. A scene between Anna and Sammy has gone, which means that Anna’s part in the film is diminished. Alice’s speech on going down the stairs, before the cellar scene, has gone, which I missed. I’ll try and get them to put it back.
I argue to Frears that in some ways the film has been depoliticised, or that private emotions now have primacy over public acts or moral positions. In one sense, with a film this is inevitable: it is the characters and their lives one is interested in. Frears argues that, on the contrary, the film is more political. Ideas are being banged together harder now: the audience is being provoked. But I can see that my remark has bothered him.
I can’t deny it’s a better film: less grim, less confused and lumpy, funnier and maybe tearjerking at the end. Frears has put the music from Jules et Jim over the scene where Sammy tells us what he likes about London, which brings that section to life, thank God, especially as three or four people have moaned about it being redundant. Next week Frears will shoot a couple more sections for that particular homage to Woody Allen and maybe reprise the music at the end.
After the viewing we talk about there being another scene at the very end of the film, a scene between Sammy and Rosie under a tree, maybe at Hammersmith, by the river. Of course, there’s the danger of sentimentalizing this, of saying that despite everything — the shooting, the revolts, the politics of Rafi — this odd couple end up being happy together, the implication being that this is all that matters. This is, of course, the pattern of classical narration: an original set-up is disrupted but is restored at the end. Thus the audience doesn’t leave the cinema thinking that life is completely hopeless. I say to Frears that at least at the end of Jules et Jim Jeanne Moreau drives herself and her lover off a bridge. He says, sensibly: Well, let’s shoot the scene and if it doesn’t work we can dump it.
17 MAY 1987
Frears and I talk about the odd way in which Sammy and Rosie has developed. The oddness is in not being able to say in advance what kind of film it is since the process seems to have been to shoot a lot of material and then decide later, after chucking bits of it away, what the film will be like. It’s like a structured improvisation. Frears says: Shouldn’t we be more in control at the beginning? Surely, if we had more idea of what we’re doing we could spend more time on the bits we’re going to use? But, with some exceptions, it’s difficult to tell what’s going to be in the final film, partly because I’m no good at plots, at working out precisely what the story is.
21 MAY 1987
Frears and I were both moaning to each other about the Tory Election broadcast that went out yesterday. Its hideous nationalism and neo-fascism, its talk of ‘imported foreign ideologies like socialism’ and its base appeals to xenophobia. Seeing the film once again Frears has taken the socialist Holst’s theme from ‘Jupiter’ in The Planets, later used for the patriotic hymn ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ (which was, incidentally, played at the Royal Wedding) from the Tory broadcast, and played it over the eviction scene, giving it a ritualistic quality.
Later there is intense discussion of the film between David and Karin, Mick, Bevan, Frears and I. I find these discussions quite painful. But Frears invites them. He listens carefully to everything people have to say and then he goes back to the film. So secure is he in what he is doing that he isn’t threatened by criticism; he can absorb it and use it to improve his work.
An election has been called. I do some leafleting for the Labour Party. I cover estates which I walk past every day, but haven’t been inside since the last election. In the meantime, the buildings have been ‘refurbished’. From the outside the blocks and low-rise houses look modern: rainproof, wind resistant, nature-blocking. I wonder if they have really changed since the last time around. My trips to New York and Los Angeles now seem utterly unimportant when there are parts of my own city, my own streets, for Chris-sakes, five minutes’ walk from me, that are unknown to me!
I walk off the main road and across the grass to the entrance of the first block. The door is open; the glass in the door is smashed. A woman in filthy clothes, in rags I suppose, stands in the entrance waving her arms around. She is in another place: stoned. I go on through and into the silver steel cage of the lift. Inside I hold my nose. At the top of the block the windows are smashed and the wind blows sharply across the landing. Broken bottles, cans and general detritus are whisked about.
Someone has a sign on their door: ‘Don’t burgle me I have nothin’.’ Many of the doors have been smashed in and are held together with old bits of wood. The stench of piss and shit fills the place.
An old distressed woman in a nightdress comes out of her flat and complains that a party has been going on downstairs for two days. One man comes to the door with a barely controlled Alsatian. Come and take back this fucking leaflet, he screams at me; come and get it, mate!
There are at least two dogs on each floor, and you can hear their barking echo through the building.
It is difficult to explain to the people who live here why they should vote Labour; it is difficult to explain to them why they should vote for anyone at all.
23 MAY 1987
Last day of shooting. Bits and pieces. Colin McCabe at the ICA, Sammy and Rosie by the river (for the last shot of the film) and Aloo Baloo at the Finborough pub in Earls Court for the ‘Sammy and Rosie in London’ part of the film. It is a strange day because these are all things Sarah and I have done together; they are places we go. So you live them and then go back a few weeks later with some mates, a camera, and some actors, and put it all in a film. Sarah has yet to see the film and that’s good, I think, as it is improving all the time. But she rang me last night, angry at being excluded, thinking this was deliberate, or just more evidence of my general indifference. Whatever it is, she has started to call the film ‘Hanif Gets Paid, Sarah Gets Exploited’.
5 JUNE 1987
Frears and Stanley Myers are working away on the music. Charlie Gillett, the great rock DJ and music expert, is suggesting various bands and styles of music to go over different parts of the film. David Byrne, from whom we’ve heard not a word for ages, has finally said he’s too busy to do anything.
Sarah finally comes to see the film. She sits in front of Frances Barber. After, she tells me she likes it. She confidently says she can see it as an entire object, just a good film, something quite apart from herself.
10 JUNE 1987
My agent Sheila goes to see the uncompleted Sammy and Rosie and rings this morning. Some of it’s wonderful, she says. But it’s heartless and anti-women. Why anti-women? I ask. Because all the women in the film are shown as manipulative. And Rosie doesn’t care for Sammy at all. When he sleeps with someone else it doesn’t appear to bother her. I thought, she says, that this was because you were going to show Rosie as a lesbian. I ask her why she should think this. Because most of her friends are lesbian. Plus, she adds, you make Sammy into such a weak, physically unattractive and horrible character it’s difficult to see how she could take much interest in him. Is he what you and Stephen think women like?
Sheila doesn’t like the end of the film, with Sammy and Rosie sitting crying on the floor. It makes them seem callous, especially with all the women trailing out of the flat and not doing or saying anything. In addition she dislikes the ‘Sammy and Rosie in London’ sequence, one of my favourites in the film, which she compares to a cheap advertisement. That just has to go, she says, it’s so ridiculous. Anyway, couldn’t at least fifteen minutes of the film be cut? Like what? Well, Alice’s speech of Rafi on walking down the stairs, just before the cellar scene. One doesn’t listen to all this, she says. Well, I feel like saying, we could chop fifteen minutes out. But that would make the film just over an hour long. We’d have to release it as a short.
For a while after this conversation I am perforated by doubt and think Sheila might be right; our judgement has gone and the entire thing is some terrible, arrogant mistake.
There’s going to be at least another eighteen months of this, of exposure, of being judged. This is a ‘profession of opinion’ as Valéry calls it, where to make a film or write a book is to stand up so that people can fire bullets at you.
I go off to the dubbing theatre where the actor playing the property developer is yelling into the mike about communist, lesbian moaning minnies. This will be put through a megaphone and added to the eviction scene. Frears is in good cheer as ever. When I tell him about Sheila’s attack on the film he says we will get attacked this time around. People will want to engage with the issues the film raises; they’ll want to argue with the movie and they’ll get angry. It won’t be an easy ride as with Laundrette or Prick, with people just being grateful these kinds of films are being made at all.
As we walk through Soho, Frears and Mick are talking once more about the shooting of the black woman at the beginning of the film. They’re now thinking of putting it back. It’s a hard decision to make: do you forfeit an important and powerful scene because it throws out the balance of the film?
I spend the evening leafleting the estates again, as it’s the day before the election. The feeling in the committee room, where people are squatting on the floor addressing envelopes, is that it’ll be close. No one actually thinks we’ll put an end to Thatcherism this time, but at least Thatcher won’t have put an end to socialism.
I’d seen Kinnock at a Labour rally held in a sports hall in Leicester on Friday. There are at least 2,000 people there and it is strictly an all-ticket affair: they are very nervous of hecklers, as the meeting is being televised. There is a squad of large women bouncers who, when a heckler starts up, grab the dissident by the hair and shove her or him out of the hall at high speed. They are also nervous of anything too radical: I’ve been instructed not to use the word ‘comrade’ in my speech, though it is Kinnock’s first word.
The Labour organisation has wound up the crowd expertly and they are delirious, kicking out a tremendous din with their heels against the back of the wooden benches. When I introduce Kinnock, he and Glenys come through the hall surrounded by a brass band, pushing through photographers and fans like a couple of movie stars.
Kinnock speaks brilliantly, contrasting levity and passion, blasting off with a string of anti-Tory jokes. I know that various sympathetic writers and comedians have been sending lines and gags round to his house and he’s been working them into the speeches he always insists on writing himself. The impression is of someone who is half stand-up comic and half revivalist preacher. What is also clear is his humanity and goodness, his real concern for the many inequalities of our society. At the end of the meeting the crowd sings ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘The Red Flag’ and we cheer and cheer. For these two hours I can’t see how we can fail to win the election.
15 JUNE 1987
Everyone still reeling from the shock of the election defeat and from the knowledge that we were completely wrong about the extent of the Labour failure. We lost in Fulham by 6,000 votes, though we’d won the seat at a recent by-election. Someone tells me that the people on the estate I leafleted voted 3 to 1 for the Tories. What this Tory victory means is the death of the dream of the 1960s, which was that our society would become more adjusted to the needs of all the people who live in it; that it would become more compassionate, more liberal, more tolerant, less intent on excluding various groups from the domain of the human; that the Health Service, education, and the spectrum of social services would be more valued and that through them our society would become fairer, less unequal, less harshly competitive; and that the lives of the marginalised and excluded would not continue to be wasted. But for the third time running, the British people have shown that this is precisely what they don’t want.
We invite a bunch of friends to a showing of Sammy and Rosie, mainly to look at two significant changes: one is the putting back of the shooting of the black woman; the other the inclusion of Roland’s long speech about domestic colonialism.
Well, as we stand around in the preview theatre, some people argue that we don’t need the shooting as it’s too obvious. Others say you need its power and clarity. I can see that Frears has made up his mind in favour of it at last. I can also see that he is glad to have put back Roland’s speech as it anchors the first half of the film and gives Danny’s character more substance. The hardest scene to decide about is the very end, with Sammy and Rosie walking by the river. Frears says he hates unhappy endings, so he’d added it to lighten the tone. But someone else says it gives the movie two endings; and, worse than that, it’s an attempt to have it both ways — to cheer up what is a sad and rather despairing film.
Despite these bits and pieces, I feel it now has shape and thrust and pace, due to the incredible amount of work Frears and Mick Audsley have done in the editing.
Sarah also comes to this screening, and we leave together, walking down Charing Cross Road. She has said little so far and when I ask about the film this time around, her reaction is more ambiguous. She says: ‘Yes, this time it wasn’t so easy. Rosie seemed too hard and uncaring; surely I am not hard and uncaring? Perhaps I am like that and haven’t been able to see that side of myself? Perhaps that is your objective view of me. Oh, it’s difficult for me because I have had the sensation recently, when I’m at work or with a friend — it just comes over me — that I’m turning into the character you’ve written and Stephen has directed and the actress has portrayed. What have you done?’
19 JUNE 1987
Frears exceedingly cheerful and enjoying finishing the film, putting the frills on, playing around with it. He never stops working on it or worrying about it. He talks about using some of Thatcher’s speeches: over the beginning, he says, just after the credits, the St Francis speech would do nicely. And somewhere else. Where? I ask. You’ll have to wait and see, he replies.
Stanley Myers, who is in charge of the music, gives me a tape of music which has been put together by Charlie Gillett. It’s terrific stuff: bits of African rhythms, reggae, and some salsa and rap stuff.
8 JULY 1987
To see the almost finished Sammy and Rosie. It’s been dubbed now; the sound is good and the music is on. Frears has put back the scene between Anna and Sammy where she pushes him half out of her studio and interrogates him about his other girlfriends. I thought this scene had gone for good, but Frears continues to experiment. He’d said it would be a surprise where he’d use the Thatcher material. It is. It’s right at the front, before the credits, over a shot of the waste ground after the eviction. It works as a kind of prologue and hums with threat and anticipation, though with its mention of the ‘inner city’ it also seems to be presenting an issue film. But anger and despair following the election have gone straight into the film, giving it a hard political edge. Frears’s struggle over the last few weeks has been to reconcile those two difficult things: the love of Sammy and Rosie for each other, and the numerous issues that surround them. At last he’s given the story a clarity and definition I couldn’t find for it in the script.
I sit through the film in a kind of haze, unable to enjoy or understand it. I can see how complete it is now, but I have no idea of what it will mean for other people, what an audience seeing it freshly will make of it. Only then will the circle be complete. We’ll just have to wait and see.
After the screening someone says how surprised they are that such a film got made at all, that somehow the police didn’t come round to your house and say: This kind of thing isn’t allowed! Of course it won’t be when the new Obscenity Bill goes through.
Later that night I go out for a drink with a friend in Notting Hill. We go to a pub. It’s a dingy place, with a dwarf barmaid. It’s mostly black men there, playing pool. And some white girls, not talking much, looking tired and unhealthy. On the walls are warnings against the selling of drugs on the premises. Loud music, a DJ, a little dancing. A fight breaks out in the next bar. Immediately the pub is invaded by police. They drag the fighters outside and throw them into a van. People gather round. It’s a hot night. And soon the air is full of police sirens. Six police vans show up. The cops jump out and grab anyone standing nearby. They are very truculent and jumpy, though no one is especially aggressive towards them. We leave and drive along the All Saints Road, an area known for its drug dealers. Twice we’re stopped and questioned: Where are we going, why are we in the area, what are our names? Black people in cars are pulled out and searched. Eventually we park the car and walk around. The area is swamped with police. They’re in couples, stationed every twenty-five yards from each other. There’s barely anyone else in the street.
14 JULY 1987
A showing of Sammy and Rosie at nine in the morning. Frears and Audsley have been working all weekend, juggling with bits and pieces. It seems complete, except for some music which has been put on over the cellar scene and seems to dissipate the power of Claire’s performance at that point. Otherwise the film works powerfully, with a lot of soul and kick. We talk about how much has gone back in and Frears says how foolish it seems in retrospect to have taken out so much and then put it back. But of course that process of testing was essential, a way of finding out what was necessary to the film and what not.
We stand outside the cutting room in Wardour Street and Frears says: Well, that’s it then, that’s finished, we’ve made the best film we can. I won’t see it again, he adds, or maybe I’ll run it again in five years or something. Let’s just hope people like it.
Introduction to London Kills Me
One day in the summer of 1989 I was followed along the Portobello Road by a boy of about twenty-one. He was selling drugs, as were many people around there, but this kid was an unusual salesman. For a start, he didn’t mumble fearfully or try to intimidate. And he didn’t look strong enough to shove a person in an alley and rob them. He was open-faced, young and direct; and he explained unasked the virtues of the drugs he was selling — hash, acid, Ecstasy — holding them up as illustration. As I vacillated, he explained lyrically about the different moods, settings and amounts appropriate for each drug.
We started to meet regularly. He liked to stand outside pubs, discussing people in the street. He’d think about which drug they’d prefer and wonder whether they’d purchase it from him, perhaps right now. Then he’d follow them.
He relished the game or challenge of selling, the particular use of words and the pleasures of conscious manipulation. He liked to con people too, selling them fake drugs, or promising to deliver the deal to them later. On the whole he was proud of his craft. He reminded me of the salesmen in Barry Levinson’s The Tin Men. He was in a good position, that particular summer of love. He had a regular supply of drugs and there were plenty of customers. The kid knew there was a limitless market for what he had to sell. After all, drug-taking was no longer the sub-cultural preserve of those who knew its arcane language. Thirty years of a worldwide, sophisticated and mass culture, introduced by the Beatles, the Doors, Hendrix, Dylan and others, had spread the drug word, making certain drugs both acceptable and accessible. There was no combating it.
Now, new drugs like Ecstasy were especially in demand. Unlike LSD, for example, these were party drugs, weekend drugs, without noticeable after-effects. More usefully for the end of the 1980s, they were compatible with both holding down a full-time job and dancing in a field at four in the morning.
So most of the time the kid didn’t much care if he made a sale or not. He wasn’t desperate — yet. He moved from squat to squat and wasn’t yet weary of being ejected, often violently, in the middle of the night. Anyhow, if things didn’t go well he’d leave for Ibiza, Ecstasy Island, where many other young people were headed.
He loved to talk about himself, dwelling in vivid and creative detail on the fantastic adventures and tragedies of his life. Along with his drug dealing, these horrific and charming stories were his currency, his means of survival, enabling him to borrow money, ask a favour or stack up an ally for the future. So he told them to anyone who’d listen and to plenty of people who wouldn’t. Again, it was a while before these stories became repetitive and self-pitying.
This kid’s subject, his speciality let us say, or his vocation, was illegal drugs. He’d discuss enthusiastically the marvels and possibilities of Ecstasy, the different varieties of the drug and the shades of feeling each could induce. He looked forward to the new drugs he believed were being produced by hip chemists in San Francisco. This evangelical tone reminded me of the way LSD was talked about in the 1960s. I kept thinking that had the kid known about, say, the Victorian novel in the same detail, he’d have been set up for life by some university.
But a penchant for getting high and dealing to strangers was getting him banned from local pubs. He’d been stabbed, beaten up and slashed across the face. Sometimes he was picked up by the police, who ‘disappeared’ him into a police cell for two or three days, without charging him or informing anyone he was there. He’d been comforted and warned by social workers, probation officers and drug counsellors. Despite his glorious stories, he led a hard and painful life, not helped by the fact he was foolish as well as smart, indiscreet too, and without much foresight.
The intensity of this kid’s life as he ran around the rich city, stealing, begging, hustling, was the starting point for London Kills Me. But his activities were bound up with the new music — hip-hop, house, acid jazz — and the entrepreneurial bustle surrounding it; the bands, record labels, shops, raves and warehouse parties organised in the squats, pubs and flats of Notting Hill. This reliable generational cycle of new music, fashion and attitude amounted to a creative resurgence reminiscent of the mid-1960s, and, of course, of the mid-1970s punk and New Wave, which was DIY music of another kind.
Notting Hill seemed an appropriate setting for the London branch of what had been a mostly provincial and northern music movement. The North Kensington area had always had a large immigrant community: Afro-Caribbean, Portuguese, Irish, Moroccan. Many Spanish people, escaping fascism, had settled there. Its mixture of colours and classes was unique in London and it had a lively focal point, the Portobello Road and its market. Of the other previously ‘happening’ places in London, Chelsea had become a tourist’s bazaar; and Soho had been overrun by the advertising industry. But like both these places, Notting Hill had cultural history. George Orwell was living in the Portobello Road in 1928 when he started to write the first pages of a play (one character of which was called Stone). Colin McInnes was part of the area’s 1950s bohemia. In the late 1960s the seminal Performance was set and filmed there. Not long afterwards Hockney took a studio in Powis Terrace. And in the 1970s the Clash’s first album featured a montage of the 1976 carnival riot on its cover.
*
In 1959, after seeing Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, Colin McInnes wrote: ‘As one skips through contemporary novels, or scans the acreage of fish-and-chip dailies and the very square footage of the very predictable weeklies, as one blinks unbelievingly at “British” films, it is amazing — it really is — how very little one can learn about life in England here and now.’
A few years later his wish began to be granted. There developed a tradition, coming out of Brecht and stemming from the Royal Court and the drama corridor of the BBC, of plays, series and films which addressed themselves to particular issues — unemployment, or racism, or housing — usually seen through the inescapable British framework of class. This work was stimulated by the idea of drama having a use or purpose, to facilitate society’s examination of itself and its values, creating argument and debate about the nature of life here and now. Many actors, writers, directors and designers were trained to see their work in this way.
Out of this came the brief resurgence of low-budget British films in the mid-1980s. The myriad tensions of life under Thatcher were irresistible to writers and film-makers. Here was the challenge of a Conservatism that had, at last, admitted to being an ideology. Here were ideas — at a time when the Left had none. The cultural reply was not presented in the language of social realism; both victims and heroes of the class struggle were eschewed. These were popular films wishing to reach a large audience hungry for debate about the new age of money and what it meant.
One issue rarely discussed in this way has been drug use. It’s an odd omission as, since the mid-1960s, in most towns and cities of a good deal of the world, young people have been using illegal drugs of various kinds. There hasn’t been much fiction about this subject and the life that goes with it; and remarkably little hard information about drugs is provided to people, though cautionary and scary stories are propagated in the vain hope of frightening them.
Although drugs are fundamental to the story, London Kills Me was never primarily ‘about’ drug use. The film is concerned mainly with the lives of the characters. It was always, for me, a story about a boy searching for a pair of shoes in order to get a job as a waiter in a diner. Even so, when we were seeking out money for the movie — and it was not expensive — there was criticism from potential backers about the drug use in the film. They were worried that they might be accused of ‘recommending’ drugs.
Many films and more television plays are planned meticulously before they start shooting. There are shot-lists and story-boards for every second of the film. The director, cameraman, producer, art director and assistants work out the camera- and actor-moves on scale plans before shooting begins. Making the film itself is then a process of reproduction. It isn’t the necessary requirements of planning that make this way of working seem objectionable. It is the expectation or hope of safety and security that is deadening, the desire to work without that moment of fear — when you really don’t know how to go on — and therefore to create without utilizing the unexpected.
I’ve never written in a planned way and I tried, even as a first-time director, not to work like this. It would bore me to know in the morning what exactly I’d be doing in the afternoon. And Stephen Frears, whose advice I sought, said it was ‘fatal’ to work to a strict plan. Having worked with him twice as a writer, I didn’t want to have any less enjoyment than he clearly had when shooting a film.
Much to my surprise, having written the film and then being in the powerful position of being able to direct it too, I felt less possessive about my dialogue and the shape of the script than I had when someone else was in charge. In the end, all I clung to was the story, to getting that, at least, in front of the camera.
The script of London Kills Me was only ninety pages long: a tight little film without much wastage. I couldn’t see there’d be much to lose in the editing. I thought every scene was essential and in the best place. We wouldn’t waste a lot of time shooting material we’d never use. Editing would be relatively simple. So I was pretty surprised when the first rough assembly of the film was over two and a half hours long. I found myself in the odd position of having written a film and then shot it — and still I didn’t know what sort of movie I was supposed to be making, what the tone was to be. The editing, like writing, I realised, would also become a form of exploration and testing of the material. It was all, even this, an attempt to tell a story by other means.
The Boy in the Bedroom
I hadn’t intended to write the scripts for the BBC’s version of The Buddha of Suburbia. My wish was to hand the book over to someone else, forget about it, and watch the series when it appeared on TV. After all, I’d written and rewritten the book, and promoted it in several countries. It was time to move on. Sometimes I wish I were better at doing things I don’t really want to do, but it can also be a strength.
The first writer hired to make the adaptation took my text and presented it as Karim’s voice-over, with accompanying pictures. I could see the point of the narration, and later, when Roger Michel and I were writing the script, we discussed it constantly and experimented with it. (There are, after all, scores of good films which use a first-person voice-over.) In the end, however, it seemed lazy and had a deadening effect, as if the events were not happening in the present. If the serial wasn’t to be like watching an illustrated talk, the first-person point of view had to be abandoned. The challenge was to dramatise everything.
The second writer was, apparently, instructed to ‘capture the spirit’ of the novel. Consequently, opening the script at random, I saw a scene set in a chip shop, featuring characters whose names I didn’t recognise, as if this ‘spirit’ was not necessarily present in the scenes I’d created, of which only a minimum remained.
Directors came and went, having refused to shoot the scripts. Finally, having been informed that at this rate the project would never get made, and being made to feel that my misgivings were obstructing it, I agreed to write it. An office would be provided at the BBC. The latest director, Roger Michel, and I would collaborate.
I enjoyed packing my briefcase in the morning, buying my newspaper at the tube station on the corner, getting on the bus and going to the office, like other people. It made me feel normal, in what was, for me, a far from normal period.
*
Only a few months before, my father had died; my father, who’d always encouraged me to take up this precarious craft and living, and never suggested I become a doctor, accountant or bus driver, had made me see that someone like me could do something like this, although the odds were not in one’s favour. And, once I’d started seriously to do it, he kept me going. Strangely, now I think about it, I never rebelled against this conviction and it remained implacably within me. You would have thought, with such a parent, who burned to be a novelist, and insisted I live the life he craved for himself, the sensible son would, without hesitation, sign up for the Navy. It’s possible, however, that my resistance consisted of my including him, parodically, in The Buddha; I know he was shocked, but he never complained.
Also during the same period, a film, London Kills Me, which somewhat innocently I’d directed, wanting to see if this was something I might like to learn about, had been roundly abused. Finally, I was sick, waiting to go into hospital for a back operation. I couldn’t stand or even shuffle without thinking a dagger was being turned in my lower back, and electric shocks administered to my legs, all day, perhaps by critics. How much pleasure pain sucks from life, making one weary and dispirited! I was swallowing pills by the handful, imagining that if I took enough the pain would stop for good. However, I had at least made a decision.
*
For over a year I’d been rolled and thumped and examined naked and robbed blind by numerous osteopaths, physiotherapists, chiropractors, aromatherapists and acupuncturists. (Everyone I knew swore by their own genius who had brought them back from imminent invalidity; for all of them in London, and further afield, I dutifully removed my trousers and bent over.) I had had more hands on me than Linda Lovelace, and on a few occasions went to bed with packets of frozen Brussels sprouts strapped to my lower back by pyjama cords. But one day, on a routine visit to an acupuncturist who favoured ‘the natural way’, I was lying on the table with pins in me, imagining I’d been reincarnated, in this life, as a cactus, when I heard odd noises. I twisted my stiff neck to look at him behind me, and opened my eyes wide. My physician was dancing barefoot at the end of the table, with his eyes closed. Not only that, he was waving a joss stick and murmuring an incantation. It was at that moment I decided to go under the knife. But this being on the National Health Service, I was waiting, waiting, for the releasing incision.
And so, when Roger and I got started, I was bad-tempered and more impatient than usual. It is difficult for an adapter, working on another person’s characters and ideas. But if that person is lying on his stomach at your feet, his mind jumbled and wheeling madly, while a secretary treads his aching back, it must be particularly trying. Fortunately Roger Michel was well-organised. He worked out the order of the scenes and the entire structure. As we had decided the serial should last four hours, in hour-long episodes, the most important thing, at that length, was that everything held together. Each episode had to have a shape, as did the whole story. Most of the characters had to be kept going and developed, but new ones had to be introduced too. It was a challenging technical exercise.
Steadfastly, Roger struggled to maintain the novel as it was. I wanted to try adding new material, ideas that had occurred to me since publication. For instance I wanted to develop the relationship between Changez and Jamila, so that he became a sort of Scheherazade. The disciple of Conan Doyle and Harold Robbins would tell stories to maintain his reluctant but beloved wife’s attention, enabling him to gaze on her for as long as he could make her listen, hoping that as the tales unfolded, one within another, she would fall in love with him. And perhaps she would. I wanted to see if she could be seduced by his stories of India, a place she’d never been but which determined the nature of her life. After all, some scholars believe that all great stories originate in India, as did the original tales of the Arabian Nights. The framing device, of stories within stories, is considered to be of Indian origin. Already in the novel I had hinted at this development of the Changez/Jamila relationship, but I’d left it at that, in order not to move too far away from Karim. But since I’d finished the book, the characters remained in my mind, they were people I knew well. It would be enjoyable to give them more life.
But we discovered that there wasn’t sufficient room for new tangents. Already it was proving difficult enough to get the story as it existed, told in four hours. So most of our work was organisational, plus essential cutting and fiddling around. We had numerous disputes and arguments, but the bulk of the work had already been done, in the novel. We completed the scripts in six weeks.
The most difficult part of casting The Buddha was finding someone to play Changez. The dialogue I’d written for him was in strange Anglo-Indian grammar; the sentences ran like mazes. Roger found Harish Patel in Bombay; he was the last actor they saw on that casting trip. I met Harish a few days after he’d set foot for the first time in London. He’d been thinking hard about how Changez talked, walked and used his crippled hand, determined to include his own amazement and confusion at this country in the part.
The shoot itself was interminable, during a wet and cold winter; the light went early, sometimes at two-thirty. We filmed The Buddha in the streets where I’d grown up, on the roads where I’d cycled every day. Naveen Andrews, playing Karim, wore a copy of my school uniform, and sat miserably in a bedroom not unlike the one in which I listened to the John Peel Show on the radio, to drown out the sound of my parents arguing. (Its introduction was a brilliant Jimmy Page guitar break from Led Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’). This was the room in which, after school, I’d written novels instead of doing my homework. Then I’d pack them up in brown paper and string and carry them to the Post Office where my grandmother worked behind the counter, and send them to publishers in London. (It was never long before they came back, the first chapter a little rumpled, with a printed rejection slip pinned to the front. The pain of that final, impersonal rejection, not of a book, but of one’s whole self! Good-bye hope!)
It was the room to which I’d brought my first girlfriends back, after parties, having walked miles home at four in the morning from Peckham or Crystal Palace, shouting out lines from Ginsberg, (‘angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night …’) after my father brought home the Penguin American Poets collection which also included Corso and Ferlinghetti. Parties: there were plenty. I hung out with a large group of boys who knew one another from school and spent the weekends together, playing records, slitting their wrists, jamming, tripping, having sex, often in the houses of absent parents. Later, the more adventurous remnants of this group, called ‘the Bromley contingent’ by Johnny Rotten, formed Siouxsie and the Banshees and Generation X. At school they were a group I’d longed to join, just as Karim desperately wants Charlie Hero to be his friend. But they didn’t admit just anyone who’d frayed their jeans and dumped their grandfather’s tied-up vest in the sink, along with a tin of orange dye. Their sartorial and tonsorial snobbery, along with a freezing coolness, could only have been a version of their parents’ resistance to the vulgar — in the suburbs the working class were never far away, on the heels of the lower middle class. I was finally deemed fit to join after I ran away to the Isle of Wight Pop Festival.
*
In February 1993 I was, fortuitously, invited by an American magazine to interview David Bowie. He’d attended, ten years previously, the school I’d gone to, though he had got out long before us, leading the way so that others, like Charlie Hero, could follow. ‘I knew at thirteen,’ he said to me, ‘that I wanted to be the English Elvis.’ Throughout the 1970s he’d extended English pop music: he’d established ‘glam rock’, worn dresses and make-up, claimed to be gay, and written clever, knowing songs. He’d introduced people like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop to British audiences and written songs about Andy Warhol and Dylan. His influence on punk was crucial. And he’d made, with Brian Eno, experimental music — Low, Heroes, Lodger — which had lasted, which you could listen to today.
He wasn’t merely rich or successful either. I could see he had movie-star glamour, that unbuyable, untouchable sheen which fame, style and a certain self-consciousness bestow on few people. He was, as well, extremely lively and curious, very enthusiastic about movies and books, and in particular, painting and drawing. (At school we’d had the same art teacher, Peter Frampton’s father.) Bowie was a man constantly bursting with ideas for musicals, movies, records; he appeared creative all day, drawing, writing on cards, playing music, ringing to ask what you thought of this or that, travelling, meeting people.
I had agreed with Roger that I would ask Bowie to give permission for various old tracks, like ‘Changes’ and ‘Fill Your Heart’, to be used on the film. He agreed; emboldened, as we left the restaurant and his black chauffeur-driven car sat there, engine running, I asked if he might fancy writing some original material too. He said yes and asked for the tapes to be sent to him.
A couple of months later Roger and I went to Switzerland to hear what Bowie had done. How could we not feel intimidated? What could schoolboys like us say to the greatest and most famous, who had written over three hundred songs, including ‘Rebel-Rebel’? (In the pub in Bromley High Street we played his records on the jukebox constantly, kids at different tables suddenly yelling, as one, during conversation ‘Suffragette City, oh yeah!’) Now we were sitting a few paces from Lake Geneva; yards away, in the other direction, was the house in which Stravinsky composed ‘The Rite of Spring’. And in the studio the familiar pictures of The Buddha ran on the monitor suspended over the mixing desk, which was dotted with dozens of buttons, levers and swinging gauges, alongside which were banked computers. All this, not to launch space ships, but to make sweet music!
At the end we sighed. Relief was palpable. Bowie saw, though, that some of the music altered the mood of the scene. Repeatedly he re-wrote, adjusted cues and thought about how composing music for films is different to writing songs. Later he produced an excellent album called The Buddha of Suburbia, developing ideas he’d begun on the film.
They were heady, enjoyable days. The series was, in the end, broadcast as we’d made it. Typically, the BBC did, the day before transmission — although they’d had the tapes for months — attempt to censor it a little, but their nerve held.
The Road Exactly: Introduction to My Son the Fanatic
The idea for My Son the Fanatic, as for The Black Album, was provided by my thinking about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, announced in February 1989. At that time various politicians, thinkers and artists spoke out in the media about this extraordinary intellectual terror. A surprising number of statements were fatuous and an excuse for abuse and prejudice; some expressed genuine outrage, and most were confused but comfortingly liberal. The attack on Rushdie certainly made people think afresh about the point and place of literature, about what stories were for, and about their relation to dissent.
But few commentators noticed that the objections to The Satanic Verses represented another kind of protest. In Britain many young Asians were turning to Islam, and some to a particularly extreme form, often called Fundamentalism. Most of these young people were from Muslim families, of course, but usually families in which the practice of religion, in a country to which their families had come to make a new life, had fallen into disuse.
It perplexed me that young people, brought up in secular Britain, would turn to a form of belief that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived. Islam was a particularly firm way of saying ‘no’ to all sorts of things. Young people’s lives are, for a lot of the time, devoted to pleasure: the pleasure of sex and music, of clubbing, friendship, and the important pleasure of moving away from one’s parents to develop one’s own ideas. Why was it important that this group kept pleasure at a distance? Why did they wish to maintain such a tantalising relation to their own enjoyment, keeping it so fervently in mind, only to deny it? Or was this puritanism a kind of rebellion, a brave refusal of the order of the age — an over-sexualized but sterile society? Were these young Muslims people who dared to try nothing? Whatever the reason, there was, clearly, a future in illusion; not only that, illusions were once more becoming a sound investment. But what sort of future did they require?
To the surprise of most of us, it sometimes seems that we are living in a new theocratic age. I imagined that the 1960s, with its penchant for seeing through things, and pulling them apart with laughter and questions, had cleared that old church stuff away. But the 1960s, in the West, with its whimsy and drugged credulity, also helped finish off the Enlightenment. It was during the 1960s that weird cults, superstitious groups, new agers, strange therapists, seers, gurus and leaders of all kinds came to prominence. This need for belief and the establishment of new idols was often innocuous — a mixture of the American idea of self-fulfilment and the Greek notion of fully extended man, vitiated by a good dose of ordinary repression.
But the kind of religion favoured by the young Muslims was particularly strict and frequently authoritarian. An old religion was being put to a new use, and it was that use which interested me. I wondered constantly why people would wish to give so much of their own autonomy, the precious freedom of their own minds, to others — to Maulvis, and to the Koran. After all, the young people I met were not stupid; many were very intelligent. But they put a lot of effort into the fashioning of a retributive God to which to submit.
Clearly, where there is a ‘crisis of authority’, when, it seems, people aren’t certain of anything because ancient hierarchies have been brought down, the answer is to create a particularly strict authority, where troubling questions cannot be admitted. ‘There’s too much freedom,’ one of the young men, Ali, kept saying to me, someone who’d always thought that freedom was something you couldn’t get enough of. This intrigued me.
Ali worked for a well-known supermarket chain, stacking shelves, though he had a degree. It was boring work; to get anywhere you had to grovel, or go to the bar and drink and exchange unpleasant banter. Sometimes you had to shake hands with women. Anyhow, the Asians didn’t get promoted. A reason for this, he liked to muse, was that the major businesses were run by Jews. He applied for jobs all the time, but never got them. I couldn’t see why this was so. He was certainly courteous. He brought me presents: a tie, mangos, the Koran. He was intellectually curious too, and liked showing me the new books he bought constantly. He knew a great deal about the history and politics of the Middle East, about which, he claimed, the average Westerner knew little. Ali knew the West, but the West didn’t know him except through tendentious media images. The West, therefore, had no idea of its own arrogance, and was certainly not concerned about the extent to which it had no interest in anything outside itself.
Just when I thought there wasn’t much Ali and I could argue about, he would say he didn’t disapprove of the killings of journalists — and others — in Algeria. They were ‘enemies’; he took it for granted that they were guilty. Perhaps, for him, the fact they were murdered made them guilty. During such conversations he liked to quote Malcolm X’s phrase at me: ‘By any means necessary’, a modern motto of liberation thus becoming a tool of tyranny. I couldn’t recall the context in which Malcolm X’s phrase was first used, but it was clear that it could be applied to anything; its meaning had become unstable. These days not even language would hold still. Indeed, Ali himself could be called a ‘fundamentalist’, a word newly minted to mean a fanatical Muslim. It was a word he even applied to himself. At the same time he complained about Muslims being portrayed in the press as ‘terrorists’ and ‘fanatics’. This argument, which had begun because of a book, continued to be about language and about what words mean, as much as anything.
The ‘West’ was a word, like liberalism, for anything bad. The West’s freedom made him feel unsafe. If there was too much freedom you had to make less of it. I asked him about the difficulty of giving up things. He had been keen on clubs; he’d had an affair with a married woman. Renunciation made him feel strong, he said, while giving in made him feel weak. Wasn’t the West full of addicts?
The West, therefore, was a place full of things he disliked — or where he liked to put them; and where people gave in to things he disapproved of. He gave me a flyer for a Muslim rally in Trafalgar Square that stated, ‘Endemic crime, homosexuality, poverty, family breakdown, drug and alcohol abuse shows Western freedom and democracy just aren’t working.’ Because of this, Ali and his friends would never bring up their children here. But it also meant that he hated his own background, the forces that influenced him and the place he lived in.
His attitude kept reminding me of something I had heard before. Finally I realised it took me back to a paragraph in Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind (Milosz is here referring to Eastern European communist intellectuals): ‘The official order is to evince the greatest horror of the West. Everything is evil there: trains are late, stores are empty, no one has money, people are poorly dressed, the highly praised technology is worthless. If you hear the name of a Western writer, painter or composer, you must scoff sarcastically, for to fight against “cosmopolitanism” is one of the basic duties of a citizen.’
Constraint could be a bulwark against a self that was always in danger of dissolving in the face of too much choice, opportunity and desire. By opposing that which continually changes around us, by denying those things we might want, we keep ourselves together. In the face of such decadent possibilities and corrupt pleasures — or where there is the fear of what free or disobedient people might do — Islam would provide the necessary deprivation and could attenuate the repertoire of possible selves.
Open the Koran on almost any page and there is a threat. ‘We have adorned the lowest heaven with lamps, missiles for pelting devils. We have prepared a scourge of flames for these, and the scourge of Hell for unbelievers: an evil fate!’
There is, then, sufficient regulation and punishment available. Without harsh constraint things might get out of hand, particularly in the post-modern world, where no one knows anything for sure. And so, against the ‘corruption’ of the West to which so many had innocently travelled, a new authority could be posited — that of Islam and, in particular, those who spoke for it. Without the revolutionary or opposing idea of Purity there wouldn’t be those who knew what it was and could tell us when it had been violated. These men — and they were always men — became very powerful. The young invested a lot of authority in them.
Edward Said wrote: ‘There are now immigrant communities in Europe from the former colonial territories to whom the ideas of “France” and “Britain” and “Germany” as constituted during the period between 1800 and 1950 simply excludes them.’
It must not be forgotten, therefore, that the background to the lives of these young people includes colonialism — being made to feel inferior in your own country. And then, in Britain, racism; again, being made to feel inferior in your own country. My father’s generation came to Britain full of hope and expectation. It would be an adventure, it would be difficult, but it would be worth it.
However, the settling in, with all the compromises and losses that that implies, has been more complicated and taken longer than anyone could imagine. Yet all along it was taken for granted that ‘belonging’, which means, in a sense, not having to notice where you are, and, more importantly, not being seen as different, would happen eventually. Where it hasn’t there is, in the children and grandchildren of the great post-war wave of immigrants, considerable anger and disillusionment. With some exceptions, Asians are still at the bottom of the pile; more likely to suffer from unemployment, poor housing, discrimination and ill-health. In a sense it hasn’t worked out. The ‘West’ was a dream that didn’t come true. But one cannot go home again. One is stuck.
Clearly this affects people in different ways. But without a doubt it is constraining, limiting, degrading, to be a victim in your own country. If you feel excluded it might be tempting to exclude others. The fundamentalists liked to reject the usual liberal pieties, sometimes for historionic reasons. But their enemies — gays, Jews, the media, unsubmissive women, writers — were important to them. Their idea of themselves was based, like the MCC, or like any provincial snob, on who they excluded. Not only that, the central tenets of the West — democracy, pluralism, tolerance, which many people in Islamic countries, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, are struggling for — could be treated as a joke. For those whose lives had been negated by colonialism and racism such notions could only seem a luxury and of no benefit to them; they were a kind of hypocrisy.
Therefore, during our conversations Ali continuously argued that there are no such things as freedom or democracy, or that those abstractions were only real for a small group. For him, if they didn’t exist in the purest possible form, they didn’t exist at all. Milosz might call Ali’s attitude, with some sadness, ‘disappointed love’, and it was a disappointment that seemed to attach itself to everything. Which isn’t to say there wasn’t hope too. For instance, he believed that when the existing corrupt rulers of Muslim countries were swept away, they would be replaced by ‘true’ Muslims, benign in every way, who would work for the benefit of the people, according to the word of God. If the present was unsatisfactory and impossible to live in, as it always would be for him, there was the perfect future, which would, probably, safely remain the future — the best place for it, for his purposes.
Fundamentalism provides security. For the fundamentalist, as for all reactionaries, everything has been decided. Truth has been agreed and nothing must change. For serene liberals on the other hand, the consolations of knowing seem less satisfying than the pleasures of puzzlement, and of wanting to discover for oneself. But the feeling that one cannot know everything, that there will always be maddening and live questions about who one is and how it is possible to make a life with other people who don’t accept one, can be devastating. Perhaps it is only for so long that one can live with that kind of puzzlement. Rationalists have always underestimated the need people have for belief. Enlightenment values — rationalism, tolerance, scepticism — don’t get you through a dreadful night; they don’t provide spiritual comfort or community or solidarity. Fundamentalist Islam could do this in a country that was supposed to be home but which could, from day to day, seem alien.
Muslim fundamentalism has always seemed to me to be profoundly wrong, unnecessarily restrictive and frequently cruel. But there are reasons for its revival that are comprehensible. It is this that has made me want to look at it not only in terms of ideas, but in stories, in character, in terms of what people do. For a writer there cannot be just one story, a story to end all stories in which everything is said, but as many stories as one wants, serving all sorts of purposes and sometimes none at all. The primary object, though, is to provide pleasure of different kinds. And one must remember that perhaps the greatest book of all, and certainly one of the most pleasurable, The One Thousand and One Nights, is, like the Koran, written in Arabic. This creativity, the making of something that didn’t exist before, the vigour and stretch of a living imagination, is a human affirmation of another kind, and a necessary and important form of self-examination. Without it our humanity is diminished.
Sex and Secularity: Introduction to Collected Screenplays One
To me writing for film is no different to writing for any other form. It is the telling of stories, only on celluloid. However, you are writing for a director and then for actors. Economy is usually the point; one objective of film writing is to make it as quick and light as possible. You can’t put in whatever you fancy in the hope that a leisured reader might follow you for a while, as you might in a novel. In that sense films are more like short stories. The restrictions of the form are almost poetic, though most poems are not read aloud in cineplexes. Film is a broad art, which is its virtue.
Nevertheless, it didn’t occur to any of us involved in My Son the Fanatic, for instance, that it would be either lucrative or of much interest to the general public. The film was almost a legacy of the 1960s and 70s, when one of the purposes of the BBC was to make cussed and usually provincial dramas about contemporary issues like homelessness, class and the Labour Party.
I had been aware since the early 1980s, when I visited Pakistan for the first time, that extreme Islam, or ‘fundamentalism’ — Islam as a political ideology — was filling a space where Marxism and capitalism had failed to take hold. To me this kind of Islam resembled neo-fascism or even Nazism: an equality of oppression for the masses with a necessary enemy — in this case ‘the West’ — helping to keep everything in place. When I was researching The Black Album and My Son the Fanatic, a young fundamentalist I met did compare his ‘movement’ to the IRA, to Hitler and to the Bolsheviks. I guess he had in mind the idea that small groups of highly motivated people could make a powerful political impact.
This pre-Freudian puritanical ideology certainly provided meaning and authority for the helpless and dispossessed. As importantly, it worked too, for those in the West who identified with them; for those who felt guilty at having left their ‘brothers’ behind in the Third World. How many immigrant families are there who haven’t done that? Most of my family, for instance, have long since fled to Canada, Germany, the US and Britain; but some members refused to go. There can’t have been a single middle-class family in Pakistan who didn’t always have a bank account in the First World, ‘just in case’. Those left behind are usually the poor, uneducated, weak, old and furious.
Fundamentalist Islam is an ideology that began to flourish in a conspicuous age of plenty in the West, and in a time of media expansion. Everyone could see via satellite and video not only how wealthy the West was, but how sexualised it had become. (All ‘sex and secularity over there, yaar,’ as I heard it put.) This was particularly shocking for countries that were still feudal. If you were in any sense a Third Worlder, you could either envy Western ideals and aspire to them, or you could envy and reject them. Either way, you could only make a life in relation to them. The new Islam is as recent as postmodernism.
Until recently I had forgotten Saeed Jaffrey’s fruity line in My Beautiful Laundrette, ‘Our country has been sodomised by religion, it is beginning to interfere with the making of money.’ Jaffrey’s lordly laundrette owner was contrasted with the desiccated character played by Roshan Seth, for whom fraternity is represented by rational socialism rather than Islam, the sort of hopeful socialism he might have learned at the LSE in London in the 1940s. It is a socialism that would have no hope of finding a base in either 1980s Britain, or in Pakistan.
What Hussein, Omar and even his lover Johnny have in common is the desire to be rich. Not only that: what they also want, which is one of the West’s other projects, is to flaunt and demonstrate to others their wealth and prosperity. They want to show off. This will, of course, induce violent envy in some of the poor and dispossessed, and may even encourage their desire to kill the rich.
One of my favourite uncles, a disillusioned Marxist, and a template for the character played by Shashi Kapoor in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, had, by the mid-1980s, become a supporter of Reagan and Thatcher. Every morning we’d knock around Karachi, going from office to office, where he had friends, to be given tea. No one ever seemed too busy to talk. My uncle claimed that economic freedom was Pakistan’s only hope. If this surprised me, it was because I didn’t grasp what intellectuals and liberals in the Third World were up against. There was a mass of people for whom alternative political ideologies either had no meaning or were tainted with colonialism, particularly when Islamic grassroots organisation was made so simple through the mosques. For my uncle the only possible contrast to revolutionary puritanism had to be acquisition; liberalism smuggled in via materialism. So if Islam represented a new puritanism, progress would be corruption, through the encouragement of desire. But it was probably too late for this already; American materialism, and the dependence and quasi-imperialism that accompanied it, was resented and despised.
In Karachi there were few books written, films made or theatre productions mounted. If it seemed dull to me, still I had never lived in a country where social collapse and murder were everyday possibilities. At least there was serious talk. My uncle’s house, a version of which appears in My Beautiful Laundrette, was a good place to discuss politics and books, and read the papers and watch films. In the 1980s American businessmen used to come by. My uncle claimed they all said they were in ‘tractors’. They worked for the CIA; they were tolerated if not patronised, not unlike the old-style British colonialists the Pakistani men still remembered. No one thought the ‘tractor men’ had any idea what was really going on, because they didn’t understand the force of Islam.
But the Karachi middle class had some idea, and they were worried. They were obsessed with their ‘status’ or their position. Were they wealthy, powerful leaders of the country, or were they a complacent parasitic class — oddballs, Western but not, Pakistani but not — about to become irrelevant in the coming chaos of disintegration?
A few years later, in 1989, the fatwa against Rushdie was announced and, although I saw my family in London, I didn’t return to Karachi. I was told by the Embassy that my safety ‘could not be guaranteed’. Not long after, when I was writing The Black Album, a fundamentalist acquaintance told me that killing Rushdie had become irrelevant. The point was that this was ‘the first time the community has worked together. It won’t be the last. We know our strength now.’
I have often been asked how it’s possible for someone like me to carry two quite different world-views within, of Islam and the West: not, of course, that I do. Once my uncle said to me with some suspicion, ‘You’re not a Christian, are you?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m an atheist.’ ‘So am I,’ he replied. ‘But I am still Muslim.’ ‘A Muslim atheist?’ I said, ‘it sounds odd.’ He said, ‘Not as odd as being nothing, an unbeliever.’
Like a lot of queries put to writers, this question about how to put different things together is a representative one. We all have built-in and contrasting attitudes, represented by the different sexes of our parents, each of whom would have a different background and psychic history. Parents always disagree about which ideals they believe their children should pursue. A child is a cocktail of its parents’ desires. Being a child at all involves resolving, or synthesising, at least two different worlds, outlooks and positions.
If it becomes too difficult to hold disparate material within, if this feels too ‘mad’ or becomes a ‘clash’, one way of coping would be to reject one part entirely, perhaps by forgetting it. Another way is to be at war with it internally, trying to evacuate it, but never succeeding, an attempt Farid makes in My Son the Fanatic. All he does is constantly reinstate an electric tension between differences — differences that his father can bear and even enjoy, as he listens to Louis Armstrong and speaks Urdu. My father, who had similar tastes to the character played by Om Puri, never lived in Pakistan. But, like a lot of middle-class Indians, he was educated by both mullahs and nuns, and developed an aversion to both. He came to love Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong, the music of black American former slaves. It is this kind of complexity that the fundamentalist has to reject.
Like the racist, the fundamentalist works only with fantasy. For instance, there are those who like to consider the West to be only materialistic and the East only religious. The fundamentalist’s idea of the West, like the racist’s idea of his victim, is immune to argument or contact with reality. (Every self-confessed fundamentalist I have met was anti-Semitic.) This fantasy of the Other is always sexual, too. The West is re-created as a godless orgiastic stew of immoral copulation. If the black person has been demonised by the white, in turn the white is now being demonised by the militant Muslim. These fighting couples can’t leave one another alone.
These disassociations are eternal human strategies and they are banal. What a fiction writer can do is show the historical forms they take at different times: how they are lived out day by day by particular individuals. And if we cannot prevent individuals believing whatever they like about others — putting their fantasies into them — we can at least prevent these prejudices becoming institutionalised or an acceptable part of the culture.
A few days after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, a film director friend said to me, ‘What do we do now? There’s no point to us. It’s all politics and survival. How do the artists go on?’
I didn’t know what to say; it had to be thought about.
Islamic fundamentalism is a mixture of slogans and resentment; it works well as a system of authority that constrains desire, but it strangles this source of human life too. But of course in the Islamic states, as in the West, there are plenty of dissenters and quibblers, and those hungry for mental and political freedom. These essential debates can only take place within a culture; they are what a culture is, and they demonstrate how culture opposes the domination of either materialism or puritanism. If both racism and fundamentalism are diminishers of life — reducing others to abstractions — the effort of culture must be to keep others alive by describing and celebrating their intricacy, by seeing that this is not only of value but a necessity.
Filming Intimacy
I am in a screening room somewhere in the suburbs of Paris, waiting for the film of my novel Intimacy to begin. A few months ago, during the shooting, I saw some of the rushes, but I have seen no cut material. Now the film is almost finished, with most of the scenes in their definitive order and a good deal of the music in place. The only missing scene is the final one, where the characters played by Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance meet for the last time.
The French director Patrice Chéreau sits somewhere behind me. There is a handful of people present, the editor and others connected with the film. But the room is big; people seem to disappear into the plush velvet of the deep seats. I forget they are there.
Although Patrice and I worked closely together at times, and the film was shot in English, the script was written by his own writer, a woman, in French. I had decided I’d spent long enough with the material and lacked the heart to look at it again. Nevertheless, the film will be something that a number of us — director, writers, actors, editor, cameraman — have made together. And after all the talk, I have little idea what it will be like; evaluating a film from the rushes is like taking a few sentences from a novel and trying to work out the plot. So it is my film but not mine. I made the characters and most of the story, but Patrice transformed, cast and cut it; and, of course, his style and voice as a director are his own.
Patrice arranged to come and see me in London a couple of years ago. He was shy, he said, and didn’t speak good English. My French is hopeless, but it seemed better to meet without an interpreter. Whether or not you want to spend a lot of time and energy working with someone you barely know is something, I guess, you can realise only intuitively.
Patrice explained that he wanted to make a film of Intimacy, which he had read in French. Also, he said he liked my stories, particularly ‘Nightlight’, collected in Love in a Blue Time. In this story a couple who run into each other by chance begin to meet once a week, on Wednesday afternoons, to make love. Somehow, they never speak; after a while they are unable to.
At that time I did not know Patrice’s work in the theatre, opera and cinema as a director and occasional actor. I had seen neither of the films for which he is best known internationally, La Reine Margot and Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, and had no idea of his impressive reputation in France. This made it easier for me to see him without enthusiasm or dismay. After we’d looked at one another for a bit — not unlike the couple at the beginning of the film, about to embark on something big, neither one knowing the ‘little things’ about the other — I said he should take what he wanted from my work and make the film he wanted to make.
It was easy to say. I didn’t quite mean it. Nonetheless, it seemed like a good way to start, and I knew, at least, that I did want to start. Later I thought, what can these two strangers, a gay Frenchman and a straight British-Indian make together, if anything? What is possible between us and what impossible? How far can we go? What will this do to me? It would be the first time I’d worked with a non-British director. Would there be anything particularly ‘French’ about Patrice, or, for that matter, ‘English’ about me? My instinct was that the French have a better visual sense than the English, though less narrative grasp. But this was really only a prejudice.
Patrice is, I suppose, ten years older than me and about the same size, with similar back problems. He is gentle, unpretentious and willing to be amused. He is modest but not unaware of his own ability. He is certainly less impatient and bad-tempered than me. He goes out more than I do. He is more decisive. I noticed that we tended to dislike the same things, which is always a comforting complicity.
In the end, I am not sure what it is that my imagination likes to do with him, but just looking at Patrice, or hearing his voice on the phone, cheers me up; he makes me want to try to be a better artist. He respects me, and I him, but not too much.
*
When I first started to write, as a teenager in the suburbs, I wanted to be a novelist. I thought that writing books in a room on my own was all I would do. The work was self-sufficient. For me, as a young man, that was the point. There were no intermediaries or interpreters — the reader just read what you wrote. Some people, I guess, become writers because they’re afraid of others or addicted to solitude. Perhaps they read a lot, or drew or watched television alone as children. Being with others might be the problem that isolation can solve.
However, when you are writing at last, the same questions appear repeatedly. Why am I doing this? Who is this for? Why write this rather than that? I’m sure people in other professions don’t have an existential crisis every morning. It’s as if you are seeking any excuse to stop. You can, of course, grow out of these questions, or tire of yourself and your own preoccupations. Or you can hope that collaboration will push you past them. A director will have different doubts and fears. You want to see how others work, and — why not? — be changed by them.
My first professional project was a play called The King and Me, produced at the Soho Poly theatre in 1980. It was about a woman’s infatuation with Elvis Presley, and was directed by Antonia Bird, who I knew from the Royal Court. Her enthusiasm, and the final production, made me feel that what I’d written had some objective merit. A couple of years later, working with the theatre company Joint Stock, I collaborated with the director Max Stafford-Clark and the actors we selected, to ‘make’ a play for the Royal Court — Borderline. I discovered how enjoyable it could be to write for specific actors. Writing new scenes and lines in the rehearsal room, it was possible, almost straight away, to see whether they worked. After, I found it difficult, and depressing, to return to my room and, alone, begin to generate material from scratch.
Since then I have collaborated with more than a dozen directors. Most of my work, including the prose, has passed through others’ hands before it reaches an audience. If being imaginative alone can be difficult enough, I am both scared and intrigued by what others will do with what I have started.
What will you think or say if you free associate, if you let your mind run without inhibition? There are plenty of anxieties there. What, then, will it be like making mistakes, saying daft things, having strange ideas, in front of someone else? Will you be overwhelmed or forced into compromise by the other; or vice versa? Will you feel liberated by them, or will new fears be aroused? Which fears might they be?
The challenge of collaboration is to find a process where both of you can be fearlessly foolish; to see whether your union will be a dilution or expansion of your combined abilities. You want to be surprised by the other, not limited by them. Neither of you wants to waste time pursuing an idea that is uninteresting.
However, collaboration is like friendship or like writing; you can only start off with a vague idea of where you are going. After a bit, if you’re lucky, you begin to see whether or not there is a worthwhile destination ahead.
Most artists with a distinct voice soon develop their area of interest — the characters, scenes, moods — which they will work on for most of their lives; and most artists, like most lives, are repetitious. A collaboration is an attempt, then, to enlarge or multiply selves, to extend range and possibility. You might make something with another person that you couldn’t make alone. Whether the purpose of this is the final product — the film — or the intimacy of partnership, the pleasure of meeting someone regularly, to talk about something that excites you both, I’m not sure. Probably it is all of these things.
Each of the many directors I have worked with in the theatre, television and cinema has been interested in sponsoring a different aspect of my work. There was a particular thing the piece said to them, that they wanted to emphasise, or to say through me. Then, once the work commenced, I began to write for them, for their idea of the project, and to their doubts and strengths. This process makes you become a different kind of writer — a different person, to a certain extent — with each director.
I can think of scores of good collaborations. The ones that come to mind are from dance, or theatre, or music. I think of Miles and Coltrane; Miles and anyone; and of Zakir Hussain, John McLaughlin and Jan Garbarek; of Brian Eno and David Byrne. The list could be endless.
It would be a mistake to put the purity of isolated creativity on one side, and collaboration on the other. In a sense all creativity will be collaborative: the artist works with his material, with his subject and with the history of his chosen form.
As well as this, most artists, I assume, relish a certain amount of the unexpected, of chance and contingency, of something odd but useful that might just turn up. What did you see, hear, say, yesterday? How might it be incorporated into the present work? Something going wrong in the right way can be fruitful. Another person could be the ‘contingency’ that helps this to happen. Maybe all artistic activity is a kind of collage, then, the putting together of various bits and pieces gathered from here and there, and integrated into some kind of whole. How are the elements selected or chosen? I don’t know. It has to be an experiment.
Which isn’t to say that all attempts at collaboration always work. A couple of years before I met Patrice, I was asked by a director to come up with an idea we would then develop into a script.
Together, he and I sat in an expensive rented room every weekday afternoon, for a month. Most of the time he seemed to have his head in his hands, while I made notes on various stories I was writing, and then put my head in my hands. What we could never do was put our heads in each other’s hands. We would go round and round, and back and forth, but rarely forwards. Occasionally we’d have an idea we liked, or break into laughter, but we remained mysterious to one another, too guarded and too respectful. I expected him to take the lead, to tell me what he wanted. Or maybe he expected me to take the lead and tell him what I wanted. The project disappeared into a miasma of misplaced politeness. After these sessions, on the tube going home, I would become claustrophobic, thinking I would go mad or start screaming. The work became like being at school, or in a hated job. I suspect the problem was that we were both trying to do the same thing, write, and were inhibiting one another.
*
There was little hesitation in Patrice; he didn’t lack tenacity or appear to doubt that this was a film he wanted to make. A film never leaves you alone, even when you’re not with it, and there is always more you could be doing. A film, a project beginning in a room with a couple of people saying ‘why don’t we try so-and-so’, ultimately involves scores of people, a huge amount of money and, more importantly, an enormous store of hope and belief.
Patrice and I started to meet regularly in London. We decided early on that Intimacy was too internal, and, probably, too dark, to make a film — a conventional film, that people might watch — on its own. It could, though, function as the background to, or beginning of, another film. We needed something else ‘on top’; more stories, characters, action.
I showed him a collection of my stories in manuscript, Midnight All Day, to see whether there was anything in them he fancied. Some of the material from the story ‘Strangers When We Meet’ went into the film; parts of ‘In a Blue Time’ were utilised, and, possibly, ideas from other stories; I forget which.
During our meetings we improvised stories; we gossiped; we talked about the theatre, literature, our lives, our relationships with parents. If our age seems ‘unideological’ compared to the period between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s; if Britain seems pleasantly hedonistic and politically torpid, it might be because politics has moved inside, into the body. The politics of personal relationships, of private need, of gender, marriage, sexuality, the place of children, have replaced that of society, which seems uncontrollable.
So we talked about bodies, about death and decay; about Lucian Freud and Bacon, and the hyper-realism of some recent photography and how close you could get to the face without losing the image altogether. We talked about how many contemporary visual artists are interested in the body and its needs: the body rather than the mind or ideas; and the body on its own, in relative isolation. The history of photography and painting is, among other things, the history of how the body has been regarded.
We talked about what bodies do and what they tell us. After the twentieth century it is, it seems, a culture of disgust and of shock that we inhabit, in which humans are reduced to zero, the achievements of culture rendered meaningless — a stance often called the human condition. Yet this kind of fastidious despair can become an aesthetic pose, creating its own cultural privileges and becoming a kind of vanity.
We talked about my character Jay, about London and the speed with which it is changing into an international city, about the couple who meet without speaking. Why don’t they talk rather than touch? What is the terror of communication? If you speak to someone, what might happen? If you don’t, what other possibilities are there? To what extent are people disposable? What do we owe them or they us?
Patrice seemed interested in the power of impersonal sexuality, in passion without relationship, in the way people can be narcissistically fascinated by one another’s bodies and their own sexual pleasure, while keeping away strong feeling and emotional complexity. We talked about what sex enables people to do together, and what it can stop them doing. Impersonality frees the imagination, of course; but, in the end, the imagination isn’t sufficient when it comes to other people. What we usually need is more of them and less of us. We have to let a certain amount of them in. But that can seem like the hardest, most frightening thing, particularly as you get older, particularly when you feel you have failed before.
What Patrice wanted was to capture the desperation of Jay and Claire’s lovemaking. These intense sessions were called ‘the Wednesdays’ and would punctuate the film, being different each time.
We are, of course, fascinated by what goes on in other couples’ privacy. Their bodies, thoughts and conversation are compelling. They were for us as children and continue to be so. However, I can’t help wondering whether sexuality is better written than filmed. Looking may be more erotic than reading; it is more immediate. But looking may also fail to capture the intricacies of feeling; it won’t necessarily increase our understanding. In fact all it might do is make us embarrassed or conscious that we are watching a choreographed sexual act; it might merely make us feel left out.
Perhaps this is because of the way sexuality is usually portrayed on film. Patrice and I talked about keeping the camera close to the bodies; not over-lighting them, or making them look pornographically enticing or idealized. It will be a sexuality that isn’t sanitized, symbolised or bland, that isn’t selling anything. The point is to look at how difficult sex is, how terrifying, and what a darkness and obscenity our pleasures can be. Patrice will, therefore, have to make a sexually explicit film. To a certain extent the actors will have to go through what the characters experience, which will be difficult for everyone.
This will, initially, I guess, seem shocking in the cinema. Not that it won’t take long for the shock to wear off, and for the act to seem common. The kiss between the boys in My Beautiful Laundrette seemed outrageous and even liberating, to some people, in the mid-1980s; now you can hardly turn on the television without seeing boys snogging, particularly on the sports channels.
Interest in sexuality takes different forms at different times: it might be paedophilia, perhaps, or miscegenation, gerontophilia, lesbianism or fetishism. But there always seems to be some aspect of desire that is of concern. It’s the one thing that never goes away, or leaves people’s minds. Perhaps desire never stops feeling like madness.
Shocking people, however, can be a mixed blessing. It can be amusing to disturb but there can be no guarantee that you won’t be resented for the annoyance you have caused. Recently someone gave me what they considered an ‘important’ novel to read, warning me that it was ‘shocking’. The novel was as they described — it did offend and displease me — mostly because it was violent. The violence kept my attention even as it horrified me. Not that it was a good novel. I was no better off after reading it than I was before. I felt, in fact, that the violence was partly directed at the reader. I had been shaken awake by someone who had nothing to tell me.
*
The conversations between Patrice and me would fertilise the film rather than determine it. I generated ideas for him to use, alter or throw away, as he liked — trying not to become too possessive of them. Certainly, Patrice had his own interests and preoccupations which intersected in some places with mine. He is not the sort merely to find a style to fit the writer. What we tried to do was find a starting point in order to help one another.
Not long after a series of these talks, the French scriptwriter began work. Scripts started to arrive regularly at my house. They got longer and longer. It is always like this and it always seems endless, the continuous sifting of material. Patrice moved to London, looked for locations and began to see actors for the main parts. Almost all the male actors we met were terrified of having others see their bodies: there was no way they would strip for the camera. The women seemed to expect that this would be required.
As the film went into production I was less involved. Some directors, like Stephen Frears, enjoy the writer being around — it is, after all, something of the writer’s world that has to be captured. Therefore the creative work continues on the set, and during the editing. Other directors can become quite paranoid about writers, feeling them to be critical, cramping presences. After the initial meeting, the next time they want to see the writer is at the wrap party, or the première. The writers can seem to have too much authority over the material. On the other hand, it can also be traumatic for the writer to acknowledge that the director will need to change the script in order to possess it, to feel it’s his. Writer and director can become jealous of one another. Not that Patrice is like this. He has worked with many writers.
For me, the writer can have one crucial function. Directors, particularly after they have made a number of films, can become over-involved in the technique of film-making. Writers, too, of course, can become over-interested in language, say, or in certain technical problems only of interest to them. Perhaps decadence in art is like narcissism in a person — there’s no one else in mind.
But audiences, I like to believe, look ‘through’ the film-making and even the performances, to the story, to the characters’ lives and dilemmas. They require a human truth, in order to examine the violence of their own feelings. If they cannot see something of themselves in the story, they are unlikely to see anything else. It should be part of the writer’s job to remind the director of this. The writer’s detachment from the film-making can be an advantage: like the director, he will have a sense of the whole film, but can also function, at times, as a stand-in for the needs and desire of the audience.
During the filming Patrice sometimes dropped by in the evening for a drink. I could see on his face how stressful and difficult making a movie is. On top of everything else, Patrice was making a film in a foreign language, with a mostly English crew, in a city he didn’t know well.
Unsurprisingly, most film directors I know are a walking bag of maladies. They want you to know how tough their jobs are. What exactly is tough about it? I suppose it is hard wanting something to be so good; it is hard to care so much about something which could so easily be dismissed, a mere film when there are so many films. Fortunately, Patrice mostly shot what he needed and was pleased with the actors’ performances.
*
Now the almost completed film rushes at me. The camera moves quickly; the cutting is fast and the music loud, in the modern manner, but not only for effect, as in videos, but to show us the force, speed and impersonality of London today. Perhaps it takes a foreign director to make London look the way it feels. This seems like the city I live in. The method of filming represents, too, the wild fury of Jay’s mind.
At the end of the screening my mind and my feelings seem to be going in all directions at once. I try to clear my head. What do I feel? Relief, confusion, excitement, dismay, delight! Bits of criticism surface. I have to try and say something coherent. My mind feels crowded with important and irrelevant remarks.
As always Patrice is patient; he listens; we talk and argue. I am laudatory, critical and apologetic at the same time. I have ideas for cuts, changes, rearrangements. There are several things I don’t understand, that don’t seem clear. I keep saying that I have only seen the film once. He tells me that that is the number of times, if we are lucky, that the audience will see the film. More screenings, he says, and you’ll be too sympathetic; you’ll understand too much.
He is right; my compliance will do him no good. Most directors have plenty of that as it is. If we argue, both of us, along with our friendship, will survive.
In the end, when finishing the film, I know he will go his own way, which is all he can do. That is what I would recommend; it is what I would do. For me, it is enough that what has been accomplished was worth the effort and a pleasure. Whether anyone else will agree is another matter and up to them.
Mad Old Men: The Writing of Venus
Sometimes, if I am writing, and things are not going well, or if I am just bored, I will stop to read, until I want to write again. It is rare that I will read much fiction; the last thing a writer needs is another insistent writer’s voice in his head. So these days I read only on trains or planes, where I can get dreamy with a book away from others, and with nothing else to do, and no other obligations. Also, it is an increasingly rare pleasure to discover a writer one has hardly heard of before, a writer one instantly likes and wants to read more of, a writer who speaks to you.
It was on a long train journey that I first read Tanizaki’s novel Diary of a Mad Old Man. It had been sent to me by an American friend who knew I’d just read Tanizaki’s The Key. I had been told it was his best book, but I was keen to read other works. Tanizaki’s name might not mean a lot even to well-informed readers — he was a huge influence on Mishima — but his books have remained in print in most European languages.
Diary of a Mad Old Man, a novella, is the story of a dying man and his son’s wife, with whom he becomes infatuated, even as she treats him cruelly — and violently — at times. Other parts of the novel concern the kabuki theatre and the actors who work in it. It is not only a good novel: had it just been that, I could have read it and put it down. But as I began to read, there was a surge of recognition: I had been seeking this for a while. In the three years since the last film Roger Michel directed from my work, The Mother, I had been considering a similar idea to Tanizaki’s, one I hadn’t been ready to write, not knowing how to approach it. The difficulty of beginning a new piece of work is often the difficulty of finding a point a view, a way into the story, a place to start.
I read Diary of a Mad Old Man quickly and didn’t read it again. It was not my intention to adapt the novel for film. This had already been done, and it seemed pointless to try to squash a work successful in one form into another. I would have to start again. But there was a lot in the story which appealed to me. Unlike Tanizaki, though, I was interested in another subject I believed I could use too: friendship between older men. One way to engage with another writer, to get closer to him than by mere reading, is to ‘write around’ his ideas, to develop them in your own register until the original becomes almost unrecognisable.
On most Fridays for years I have been having breakfast with a group of friends in Notting Hill. Occasionally, we would persuade a couple of younger women to join us. Mostly, nevertheless, it was only older men — actors, writers, theatre and film directors — people I’d known since I first began to work in London, in the mid-70s. One morning we were talking about sleep and how to induce it, a popular and important subject amongst the over-forties. We discussed sleeping pills and sleeping draughts, and then about how to overcome the inevitable addiction. One of my friends and I would then shuffle off to the chemist, where he would get his pills. This friend said he found our Friday mornings to be particularly relaxing, compared to the difficulty of the rest of his life. He suggested he’d be happy sitting in a coffee shop, like old men he’d seen in Cairo, discussing world affairs while drinking tea and smoking a hookah.
It seems like a good idea; but how satisfying would it really be? In his long autobiographical essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’, Tanizaki movingly tells us how he built his house. He speaks of a kind of Zen attentiveness; he wants to praise age, slowness, wandering, curiosity, and the infinite pleasures of aesthetic appreciation. As in his fiction, baths and toilets are never far from his thoughts. Tanizaki tells us he likes to listen to the ‘softly falling rain’ while sitting on the toilet.
It is an admirable essay in many ways, reminding us of the virtues of silence and of listening; of space, emptiness and patience. Interestingly, Tanizaki’s attitude towards the West at that time is not unlike that of some of the Muslim world today. The West represents the dangerous new: tradition and stability is being destroyed by an inferno of consumerism and postmodern sexuality. Tanizaki speaks of suffering ‘a severe nervous disorder’.
The attitudes expressed in the essay sit uneasily with the rest of his work; indeed, they seem to be at odds with it. To a certain extent this illustrates the falsity, or impossibility perhaps, of an autobiography, of the belief that one can say, ‘I am speaking the truth,’ and be sure that that is what one is doing. This assumes that ‘the truth’ resides in what one knows, rather than in that which one doesn’t. It might have to be admitted, then, that the ‘truth’ of an artist is more likely to be discovered in their fiction than in direct witness. In his ‘lies’, and in the relation between the characters, Tanizaki seems to get closer to the way things seem. Not only do his people not know anything about themselves for certain, they certainly don’t know who they will become; the more they try to control themselves, the more out of hand everything becomes. It is not insignificant that, after writing screenplays and directing a movie, Tanizaki translated into Japanese Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray — the story of a sexually obsessed man who is unable to remain true to the image he has of himself.
By the time he wrote The Key, Tanizaki’s work had been stripped down to the essentials of human interaction. He wrote: ‘Western writers are overrich in their production. The offerings of writers like Zola and Balzac are like a feast within a feast. Just looking at the menu is enough to make us melancholy and get our laxatives ready.’
The Key concerns a middle-aged, ordinary couple with an adult daughter who still lives with them. From the ruins of what appears to be a long dead marriage, something starts to stir. We like to believe — it is a common misconception — that erotic relationships only deteriorate, that there is nothing new that can happen between a long-established couple. This is something we are so certain of that it must be incorrect. A deep involvement may become so distressingly pleasurable that we might feel dangerously addicted. As such a relationship develops, distance might be required, as the relationship begins to feel dangerous, even incestuous.
The novel opens with a middle-aged man drugging his sexually cold wife in order to spend more time with her feet. The sexuality of both of them is in the process of being re-aroused by the constant presence in their house of their daughter’s fiancé. Here jealousy makes passion possible. As Lacan puts it, ‘The other holds the key to the object desired.’ Tanizaki doesn’t bother with social detail but provides only the most necessary information about the city and the characters’ social circumstances. And despite the fact that his characters are always medicating themselves — they are often sick, or imagine they are; no one is ever allowed to forget their body — his novels are frantic. In The Key, and in Diary of a Mad Old Man, the male and female characters, of whatever age, are too passionately involved with one another’s desire — and the satisfaction, humiliation and family complications which follow from it — to settle for the seemingly nirvanic existence their circumstances might allow.
The couple begin drinking heavily; she becomes more Westernised. A formerly modest woman, she repeats, with her husband, the ways of lovemaking she has just practised with her lover, whom she meets in the afternoons. When she then calls out the name of this other man — the man who will, at the end of the book, marry her daughter — the husband writes in his diary, ‘At last, as her voice was rising once again, I took her. At that moment I felt I had burst into another world. This was reality, the past was only an illusion. Perhaps it would kill me, but this moment would last for ever.’ His wish is granted. In the end, he dies, or is killed, perhaps by the effort involved, while making love to his wife.
Desire is the devil in Tanizaki, a torment you can never escape or fulfil, except temporarily. Yet without it there is inertia, emptiness, routine. On top of this, particularly as people age and there is less novelty available to them, desire is only sustained by others; by jealousy, rivalry, secrecy and human obstacles. Relief is only ever a reprieve, and the characters are forced towards extinction by their never-ending desire. Tanizaki is not an experimental writer himself; he is a straightforward writer, not a modernist. But his characters’ lives become experimental once they engage with what they really want, once they realise they cannot escape their sexuality. Self-knowledge is impossible, foolish even, and wisdom a waste of time. All you can do is try to follow your body.
Feet are important to Tanizaki but there is something else too. Perverse objects are invested with symbolic magic. The fetish, not unlike Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’, enables the child to pass from the mother to the world, carrying a piece of her. It could be anything: shoes, an item of underwear, hair, leather, silk, depending on where in his life the subject became fascinated by something he desired but was unable to understand. Freud even quotes the example of a man who fetishises ‘the shine on someone’s nose’. Couldn’t a fetish be a book? Presumably this wouldn’t be unusual in a writer.
In the end, as it would have to be, we discover that the key to The Key is writing — the human desire to make an authentic mark. Whether it be a cave drawing, scratching one’s name on a cell wall, writing a novel, or cutting one’s arm, all are communications, addressed to someone else, whether or not they exist in reality. The Key is constructed from diaries; the entire adventure is sustained by the erotics of secret writing and the fact that none of the characters can be sure whether the other is reading their diary at all. They can only hope — and fear — that they are. It is only here, in the intimate confessional of their words, in the truth of their unconscious, as it were, that one may come to know the other.
What is amazing to me is how a writer like Tanizaki can still speak to us. Before, let’s say, the mid-70s, when the Murdoch press began in earnest in Britain, it seemed there were areas of privacy into which no one but the novelist could venture. A novel didn’t have to be sexually explicit to lay bare and obvious the intricacies of subjective private life. It did this fictionally and metaphorically. These were made-up stories, but we knew they represented real people in their deepest selves. But the ‘real’ itself was protected, it was behind the veil. Now, it seems, we know everything because nothing is hidden. I feel I would recognise Bill Clinton’s penis in a crowd of other penises.
Yet a novel like The Key can still resonate and seem aggressively contemporary, making our desire seem as strange, and even alien — surely the point of literature — as it was before the age of explicitness. What is the truth about sexuality? Is sex pornography, prostitution or perversion? Is it being blown by a stranger in a toilet? Is it being tied up or is it fantasy? Or is it really full genital sex with one’s spouse while thinking of no one else? Tanizaki shows us that sex is everywhere, and it involves not only transgression, but punishment, too, and suffering; it is a dirty business and probably has to be.
Tanizaki’s work reminds me in some ways of the photographer Araki’s work. (There is a photograph by Araki which leads me to Tanizaki. It is a nude in black gloves and stockings, with a key suspended from a band around her throat.) Araki has never taken an ugly picture; he is a photographer who, given time, would photograph the whole world. His pictures are a diary of his numerous interests. He is, obviously, more explicit in every way than Tanizaki, and perhaps more perverse. (In Tanizaki the women speak, act and deny; in Araki they are only ever objects.) But Araki is very good at picking up on the sexuality of the ordinary. He can photograph flowers, fruit, street scenes, and see the sexuality in them. Is this the extremity of perversion, or is it love for the world?
In Tanizaki’s earlier novel Naomi, the male protagonist, much older than his lover, who becomes a convert to the pleasures of group sex, states, ‘I started a diary in which I recorded everything about Naomi that caught my attention.’ Naomi herself becomes almost a prostitute, except that, subversively, she refuses to be paid for the pleasure she receives and gives.
Written four years after The Key, Diary of a Mad Old Man is, of course, another diary. ‘Even if you’re impotent you have a kind of sex life,’ writes the seventy-four-year-old protagonist, somewhat optimistically. Unfortunately, he has false teeth, and, looking at himself, states, ‘Not even monkeys have such hideous faces. How could anyone with a face like this appeal to a woman?’
But he does appeal to her — in some way — though Tanizaki doesn’t give us her point of view. And she appeals to him. This woman, his son’s wife, Satsuko, is spiteful, sarcastic, a bit of a liar, a little power-crazed. Even so, he begins to love her, horribly so. With some encouragement from her, he tries to peep at her in the shower. When she slaps him, he buys her jewellery. In return she lets him kiss her feet and suck her toes. She forbids him to kiss her — making it clear she finds him disgusting — but at one point she lets drop a little saliva into his mouth.
His deterioration, the story of a man becoming aware of his imminent death, takes up as much space as this intriguing lovemaking. There is also more than enough about pills, painkillers and suppositories. (Physical illness and decline serves, perhaps, as a metaphor for sexual corruption.) Then, in a delirium, he recalls a recent dream about his mother, a beautiful woman who smokes a pipe and whose feet, like those of Satsuko, he admires. ‘Mother’s feet were fairly broad, like those of the Bodhisattva of Mercy.’ His mother, he knows, would be appalled by him ‘petting’ with his son’s wife, ‘even sacrificing his wife and children to try to win her love,’ as he puts it.
When, for a short time, the old man’s health improves, he requests to be taken on a trip to Kyoto. He wants to see the city for the last time, and to find a burial place. He also wants to have his headstone carved. He will have the imprints of Satsuko’s feet — which he will take himself — carved into his headstone, along with an image of the Bodhisattva of Mercy. The women he loves, mother and ‘lover’ combined, will be walking on him throughout eternity.
It seems scandalous, humorously dishonest even, for an old man to prefer a young woman’s feet to his own wife, or to anyone in his family. Yet Tanizaki appears to be saying that even at the very end of a life the self doesn’t only want to survive. The Diary shows, at least, the persistence of desire; it is, perhaps, a tribute to its strength. But there is no doubt that it is a fetishistic relationship, and could be described as infatuation, not as love. This might have been intriguing had Tanizaki provided more idea of what Satsuko wants from the old man, apart from his fascination. He seems to suggest that she is only materialistic, and manipulative; anyhow, the relationship doesn’t alter much as it goes on.
Tanizaki’s Diary of a Mad Old Man provokes more questions than it seems to answer, which is part of its intelligence. How little guilt the protagonist feels, and no embarrassment, over his attachment to Satsuko’s feet! He seems so at ease with his fetish that we cannot forfeit the impression that he has pursued it before. But Tanizaki fails to tell us the place of such preoccupations in the old man’s life, whether this is a late outbreak — a final burst, as it were — or whether his fetishism has been his life’s work. If you were adapting the novel for film these are questions you’d not only have to ask, but to decide on.
In 1927, around the time he was thinking about religion and society, Freud wrote an essay, ‘Fetishism’, in which he mentions the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot, and of worshipping it when it has been mutilated. He says, ‘It seems as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated.’ Tanizaki became interested in Freud as a student and the Complete Works were translated and published in Japan between 1929 and 1933. Also in this paper, Freud tells us that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, being an ‘approach to the genitals from below’. But not any penis. Here Freud makes a bold, new move: he tells us that the fetish stands for the missing penis of the woman; of, in fact, the mother. All fetishists, according to Freud, have an aversion to the actual genitals, for which the object is a substitute. Not that this is unusual. Freud makes a further startling statement here, ‘Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital.’ (Freud suggests that it is enough to make anyone homosexual.)
If an old man sucks on a younger woman’s toes, is he, at this moment, regressing also to childhood? Oddly, and perhaps wisely — showing his subtlety as a writer — Tanizaki doesn’t comment on the old man’s obsession: he merely shows it. Tanizaki is a psychologist in the sense that he is spellbound by his characters’ internal lives, of that which is offered only symbolically to the world. But he’d never be so crude as to tie a whole aspect of experience to one cause. By not being over-insistent or too schematic, Tanizaki leaves us with more symbolic complexities. The work of an imaginative writer is to suggest, not to solve.
Yet without doubt there is something of an enigma in the book here. The old man himself, an intelligent, cultured man, has no curiosity about his own preferences. It seems unlikely, but he never questions this sudden enthralment. This is not so unusual: Freud asserts that few people seek analysis because of a fetish. Most go because they have difficulties at work; the fetish might not be mentioned for a long time, if at all. Not that fetishistic pleasure would be that unusual. For Freud, the child is the ultimate narcissist and pervert, concerned only with his own pleasure and, perhaps, how to stage and re-stage it. Others are merely actors in this scenario. Perhaps sexual feeling is so powerful it has to be modified, by an obstacle, in order to be bearable.
In his own way Tanizaki does take these ideas further, throwing open the whole question of love itself, of what it is we love about the other. The characters in his work are deeply involved with others. But in what way and what does it mean? How do perversion and love interact? Is fetish love real love? Is being excited by only a part of the other real sex? Is fetishism a version of love, or its obverse? Is it only, as Havelock Ellis designated it, ‘auto-erotic’?
Much as they might like to be, Tanizaki’s characters cannot be self-sufficient. They never stop needing one another, or trying to solidify that need. As both characters struggle for ultimate, complete control over the other, the engagement is almost comical. Tanizaki is aware that in the end you are always dependent on the other; indeed, you are, partly, creating them, having them play a role with which you identify. This is not only the case in exhibitionism or voyeurism, but in sadism too. Yet the freedom of the other, which resides in their words — or perhaps a diary — will ultimately elude you; it has to. Total control would end in the death or murder of one of the subjects, at which point the game ends.
The novel left me with a strong after-impression, and the sense that the film I wanted to write would be concerned with some of these ideas. After I’d made some notes and sketched out several scenes, the director, Roger Michel, and I, began to assemble the elements of the film, which would concern two elderly actors and a girl who comes to stay with one of them.
It wasn’t long before Venus began to move away from the Tanizaki set-up. The relationship had to be less claustrophobic and more complex, always dipping and turning. If the man wants something from the girl, she wants something else from him, so that their relationship becomes a series of successful misunderstandings. Failed exchanges are, at least, a kind of exchange. Venus also concerns a girl finding a father; at the end, briefly, she finds a mother too. Then she can leave home again.
It is the girl who makes the story work. Her entry on to the scene disturbs all their lives. But why a girl? Even political correctness always leaves someone — or a group — out; it needs to. A new scapegoat is created. I noticed that young working-class women — slags, mingers, munters, dogs, chavs — were easy targets, perfectly representing our greed, lasciviousness, immorality. Condemned for the pursuit of pleasure, and regarded only as consumers without inner texture, they are one of the few groups who can be satirised without complaint, damned for their stupidity and inarticulacy; a group with no lobbyists and little power. It is a new snobbery, and almost unnoticed. Why not develop such a character, and, combining them with the conventional idea of a stranger coming to stay, see where it goes?
I couldn’t move forward with the film until I saw how it might end. I tried numerous exits. Perhaps I didn’t want to accept it could only end one way. It was Roger who saw it had to finish with a journey and a death. As a child my family would go on holiday to the Kent resorts, and I’d started taking my children to Whitstable with its beach huts and stony beach. For a while I’d been thinking of setting a story there. Of course, both The Key and the Diary end with the death of the male protagonist; and it is, in fact, illness which precipates them into late desire. How else, then, could the novel end? It is only death which gives life true intensity.
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