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!’