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.