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.