The Elephant to Hollywood

22 Back to the Elephant

I once saw a documentary in which scientists put several hundred rats in a very big comfortable roomy nest and fed them well. The rats all lived very happily alongside each other until the scientists gradually started to decrease the size of the nest, so that the rats had less space. The rats began to show aggression; that was followed by fights – followed by killings. Sound familiar? It does to me. It describes the pattern of social housing in this country, which produces the most violent sections of our society – and it’s the section that I came from.

In 2009 I went back to my roots and the soil was so shallow, there seemed little chance of it ever producing a healthy plant. The reason I went was a film called Harry Brown and it was a movie I just had to do. We filmed on location on a massive council estate that was due for demolition, back at the Elephant and Castle. It’s my home patch and we were working just round the corner from a mural depicting Charlie Chaplin and me (not that I’d compare myself with the great man, it’s just that we came from the same area). I’ve been in many council flats before in my life, but I had forgotten just how tiny these living spaces are, and when I saw the size of the flat that was supposed to be my ‘home’ I immediately thought about that documentary. People need space to live together, and this flat would hardly have had enough room for a dining table that could seat a family to eat, which is something I think is of the utmost importance in bringing up children.

Not only were the flats tiny, but the blocks were accessed by the most dangerous and threatening entrances, exits, stairs and lifts you could imagine. The only conclusion I could draw was that the architects who had designed these monstrosities had complete contempt for the people who would be living there. Still, I thought, at least they were being pulled down. The whole area is now being gentrified and I asked an official I met where they had re-housed the tenants. ‘As far away from each other as possible,’ was his rather enigmatic reply. But not everyone was pleased to be getting out. While we were there, we came across a small BBC team filming the last few residents. To my astonishment they said that their documentary was about the terrible loss of community spirit the tenants suffered when they began to pull down the estate. I looked from them and then back at this eyesore. It was hard to believe…

The last time I’d been back to the area I grew up in for professional reasons was in autumn 1985 when Bob Hoskins asked me to take a cameo role in his film Mona Lisa. I’d first got to know Bob when we were in Mexico together on The Honorary Consul and we’d become great friends – a friendship that had flourished in the slightly less testing surroundings of The Hamptons on America’s East Coast, filming Sweet Liberty with Alan Alda earlier that summer. Bob had invited me to his production office to discuss the part but as I sat in the car getting further and further into the depths of the south London streets I’d grown up in, I began to wonder what I was letting myself in for. I knew it was a small-budget movie, but Bob’s office – a huge, dark run-down Victorian building – didn’t bode well. ‘It was a hospital years ago,’ he said cheerfully as he led me through the maze of corridors, ‘before it became a lunatic asylum, St Olave’s.’ I remember stopping dead in my tracks. ‘But I was born here!’ I said. There can’t be many movie actors who end up discussing their role in a film in the very hospital they were born in.

I know only too well how tough it is to grow up in an environment like the Elephant and I’m aware that I, too, could easily have gone bad – but I took a different course, and the longer we spent in the neighbourhood, the more I wanted to find out why. Quite a bit of Harry Brown was shot at night and that gave me the opportunity to talk to some of the gangs of youths – black, white, British-born and immigrant – who were hanging about. I got to know them and began to win their trust a bit and I was first astonished and then pleased that they were prepared to talk to an old white man on an equal basis. As they opened up, it dawned on me that although we’d had nothing as kids, I had had a life of luxury compared to the young men I was talking to. Our pre-fab house was small, but it was self-contained: it had a twenty-foot-square garden, a garden fence, a front door and a garden gate. It was the first house I’d ever lived in with electricity and hot water taps and an inside toilet and a bathroom. And this house was only a thousand yards from the monstrous blocks where these boys had grown up.

But the house was only part of it. I had a loving family with a father who stayed with us and a mother who cared for us. Most of these boys came from one-parent families – or none. It’s not that single parents can’t do a great job raising their children – after all, there were many kids in my generation whose fathers had been killed in the war – but it makes it much harder, and if they are poor as well, it’s an extra handicap. I was lucky, too, because I had a good education – at least at Hackney Downs and Wilson’s Grammar School. A lot of these boys were bright but seemed to have opted out of school completely. I’m not saying they should be learning Shakespeare or doing Latin and Greek at Cambridge, but on a more practical level, they could benefit from real education and a sense of possibility. One guy I met told me he likes to build things, likes doing woodwork. It doesn’t mean he has to be a carpenter – although that would be a good start: he could be a sculptor or a wood-carver. Kids need to have a direction for their talents, otherwise they won’t know where to go.

And then my generation didn’t have to deal with drugs and the violence that follows in their wake – or at least not on the same scale. Half the time these kids are so drugged up they have no idea what they’re doing: there was constant activity from the police on this estate while we were filming. I remember one day in particular when we wasted half the day on retakes, because every time we were finishing a shot with dialogue, a police siren would come along and ruin it. But even more than that, these kids had nothing to do, and nowhere to go, and that, I think, is essential. I had Clubland, the youth club and the drama class and that was where I found the thing I wanted to do more than anything else, the thing that, in the end, set me on my future course.

If it hadn’t been for the Reverend Jimmy Butterworth, who ran and founded Clubland, I would probably never have made it out of the Elephant. He was a tiny little man – he was only about five foot – and referred to himself as a ‘little Lancashire Lad’, but he was a giant to me. He built that youth club out of nothing but determination and an extraordinary ability to persuade wealthy donors to back the project. It was through this that I met my first real star – Bob Hope. Bob was a very generous man and always gave a lot to charities, but somehow Jimmy had managed not only to persuade him to donate the proceeds of his entire two-week run at the Prince of Wales theatre to the club, but to come and talk to us as well. He made a great impression on me, but I had no reason to think that he had even noticed a gangly teenager hanging on his every word and I didn’t mention it when, years later, I appeared on the Bob Hope Show during the publicity for Alfie. I should have known better… When I got back to England, my agent called to find out if the fee for the show had gone direct to me rather than via him as would have been normal. It hadn’t – and a week later I got a call from Bob himself. He had sent the money straight to Jimmy Butterworth at Clubland. ‘You owe them,’ he said. And I do.

On Harry Brown, I saw for myself the difference that involvement with something creative can make to the lives of kids who have nothing much to do. The director, Daniel Barber, used a number of the young men who had been watching us on the shoot in the movie. It was late one night and as I stood there watching them rehearse, I thought to myself that he had bought himself some real trouble – I assumed they would get bored very quickly and all be gone by take three, which would mean he would have to reshoot. I was completely wrong. As I watched Daniel directing these kids it dawned on me that here was proof of what was lacking in their lives. They were doing something they really wanted to do, they were interested enough to want to know how to do it well and they were responding to an authority figure who knew what he was talking about and was treating them with the dignity and respect their lives were lacking. By take five, they were completely into it and making their own suggestions – I loved watching the way their confidence grew by the minute. Daniel was happy to let them ad lib and the only direction I heard him give was, ‘You can only say “fuck” twice each and no one can say the “C” word or you’ll get us an X certificate!’

The art of directing kids from the street wasn’t the only thing I learnt on Harry Brown. I was also introduced to the art of ecological film-making. There’s one scene where I have to take a gun away from a guy and throw it into the canal, which took about five or six takes to get right. Now, I’m used to throwing guns in canals and there’s always a diver standing there to go in and get the gun at the end of it. So by the time Daniel called ‘print’, I’d thrown about six guns into the canal and I asked the special effects guy where the diver was. ‘There isn’t one,’ he said. ‘Well, how are you going to get the guns back?’ I asked. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it’s a new thing – they dissolve within two hours!’ You see? You think you know everything and then they surprise you with dissolving guns…

Harry Brown was a real wake-up call for me and I wanted it to be a wake-up call for others, too. I had gone into the film thinking that we should just lock up these violent offenders and throw away the key, but I completely changed my mind during the course of it. Prison doesn’t solve the problems that come with the sorts of backgrounds these kids come from. The fact is that we are failing them. If they are brought up with violence they have no option but to join a gang – most of them join for protection, not because they are naturally violent themselves. I did it myself when I was their age, but although we were rough and tough, compared with the gangs now we were like Mary Poppins. In my day it was alcohol and fights, not drugs, guns and knives.

When it came out, some critics compared Harry Brown with Death Wish, because the protagonists in both films end up killing the killers of someone close to them. That wasn’t our intention, and it’s not how I see it at all. Our film is about violence, but it never celebrates violence; Harry Brown never becomes a willing perpetrator, he always remains a victim, and that was very important to me. It works because it’s about a fantasy that I think everyone shares to some extent, of being able to scare the people who scare you – and that is what daily life is like on some of these estates.

Apart from Clubland, which gave me something to aim for, I think I was also helped to a certain extent by national service. I wouldn’t recommend the two years I had to put up with, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend being sent into combat as I was but, as I’ve said before, I do think that six months or so in a disciplined environment – particularly if there’s some training and education involved – would help. All the members of the gang I was in had to do our national service and we all emerged at the end of it very different. I was on an aeroplane once and the pilot came out and introduced himself and it was a guy I’d grown up with. ‘You can’t be a pilot,’ I said. ‘You’re even stupider than I am! I couldn’t fly a plane – how the hell can you manage it?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, they sent me to flying school.’ When we were kids he was in the same Teddy Boy gang as me, on the street.

It was for this reason that I backed the new Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposal for a National Citizen’s Service, which would be a two-month summer programme for sixteen-year-olds. I’m not a party political animal at all – I’ve voted Labour and I’ve voted Conservative in the past – but I was impressed by Cameron’s pledge to give young people like the ones I met round the Elephant a second chance. I felt I did have a rapport with those kids, and I felt my own history very strongly when I walked round the area I came from, and I wanted to put something back. I’ll be watching carefully how the plans develop – because with the downturn in the economy, these kids are going to need all the help they can get.

To me, it’s important, always, to remember where you came from. Walking round the Elephant after the last day of filming on Harry Brown, I felt no great sense of closure, just a sense of satisfaction that I had made it and gone from there to Hollywood – the place I had always dreamed of. I no longer want to make movies back to back as I did in my younger, hungrier days – there were eighteen months between finishing Is Anybody There? and Harry Brown – but the business still fascinates me as much as it did then. But as I stood in front of the mural, paying my respects to Charlie Chaplin and marvelling, yet again, that my picture was up there alongside his, I was happy to know that shortly a car would come to pick me up and take me back to my Surrey paradise. If another script comes along that I really want to do, then I’ll take it on: if not, I won’t. I’ve always said that you don’t retire from the movie business, it retires you – and when it retires me, I tell you now, there won’t be any fanfare or public announcement. I’m an old soldier, like Harry Brown, and I will just fade away from my long public life into the embrace of my family. In the end, they mean more to me than the whole lot put together.