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.