I get home and speak to Frears on the phone. The double imperative: that the rewritten script be handed in on Monday and yet, as he says, be more intricate. ‘Deeper’ is the word he uses. Christ. Have told no one yet about the new ending.
I have the sense today of the film starting to move away from me, of this little thing which I wrote in my bedroom in Fulham now becoming public property. On the crew list there are now already fifty names, at least a quarter of them from Laundrette.
12 JANUARY 1987
Frears comes over. I sit opposite him as he turns over the pages of the script. We talk about each page. Because the film is about the relations between men and women in contemporary Britain and has political content, we’re beginning to realise how important it is that it says what we want it to say. That means working out what it is we believe!
As Frears gets nearer the end I get more nervous. I’ve typed up the scene where Rafi hangs himself and it’s quite different from the innocuous and rather dissipated finales so far.
After reading it Frears says nothing for a while. He jumps up and walks round and round the flat. It’s started to snow outside; it’s very cold. Is he just trying to keep warm?
We talk until one-thirty about this end and worry whether it’s too brutal both on the audience and as an act of aggression by Rafi against the rest of the characters he’s become involved with. We talk about the possibility of Rafi dying of a heart attack! But this is too contingent. It’s the power of the deliberate act that we like.
We discuss Chekhov’s Seagull. I say Rafi’s suicide could be like Trepliov’s at the end of that play: understated, with the action offstage, one person discovering it and then returning to the room to tell everyone else. In this room there’d be: Rani, Vivia, Alice, Anna, Eva, Bridget, Rosie.
We decide to leave it for the moment. More importantly, we’re going to New York soon to cast Anna the photographer. I’m still not clear what she’s doing in the film. I’ve deliberately avoided rewriting her bits.
13 JANUARY 1987
Seven in the morning and freezing cold. Streets covered in snow. Behind me I can hear the tubes rattling along at the back of the house. Outside the careful traffic and people starting to go to work. I’m not in the mood for rewriting this thing. Still a few scenes to be revised, but I’m sick of it. It says on the piece of paper in front of me: fifth draft, but in reality it must be the eighth or ninth. If each draft is about 100 pages, that’s 900 pages of writing!
When I first moved into this part of west London, in 1978, I felt vulnerable. It was like living on the street. People walked by on their way to work just yards from my head. In time I relaxed and would lie in bed and hear and feel London around me, stretching out for miles.
These west London streets by the railway line have gone wrong. In 1978 most of the five-storey houses with their crumbling pillars, peeling façades and busted windows were derelict, inhabited by itinerants, immigrants, drug-heads and people not ashamed of being seen drunk on the street. On the balcony opposite a man regularly practised the bagpipes at midnight. Now the street is crammed with people who work for a living. Young men wear striped shirts and striped ties; the women wear blue jumpers with white shirts, turned-up collars and noses, and pearls. They drive Renault 5s and late at night as you walk along the street, you can see them in their clean shameless basements having dinner parties and playing Trivial Pursuits on white tablecloths. Now the centre of the city is inhabited by the young rich and serviced by everyone else: now there is the re-establishment of firm class divisions; now the 1960s and the ideals of that time seem like an impossible dream or naiveté.
Though I was at school and not politically active in 1968, I was obsessively aware of the excitement and originality of those years. I had the records, the books, the clothes; I saw the 1960s on TV and was formed by what I missed out on. I wasn’t involved enough to become disillusioned. The attitudes that formed me are, briefly: that openness and choice in sexual behaviour is liberating and that numerous accretions of sexual guilt and inhibition are psychologically damaging; that the young are innately original and vigorous, though this special quality is to do with not being burdened with responsibility and the determinations of self-interest; that there should be a fluid, non-hierarchical society with free movement across classes and that these classes will eventually be dissolved; that ambition and competitiveness are stifling narrowers of personality; and that all authority should be viewed with suspicion and constantly questioned.
The past ten years of repression have been a continuous surprise to me. Somehow I haven’t been able to take them seriously, since I imagine the desire for more freedom, more pleasure, more self-expression to be fundamental to life. So I continue to think, in that now old way, in terms of the ‘straight’ world and the rest, the more innocent and lively ones standing against the corrupt and stuffy. I still think of businessmen as semi-criminals; I’m suspicious of anyone in a suit; I like drugs, especially hash, and I can’t understand why people bother to get married. Ha!
14 JANUARY 1987
Frears rings and says the scene where Alice tells Rafi to go, at the end of the film after he’s been chased out of Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat by Vivia and Rani, is boring, boring, boring. There has to be a dramatic action rather than extended verbals as it is now. I say: well what fucking dramatic action? He says: no idea — you do the paperwork, I just do the pictures!
16 JANUARY 1987
Frances Barber seems enthusiastic about the rewrites but says she’d been disturbed by the new end. It reverses the film, she thinks, in that Rafi now seems to accept his guilt for torturing people. Frances says this seems inconsistent with his having argued so strongly for political expediency in the restaurant scene. I say I don’t want him committing suicide out of guilt. It’s that he’s come to the end. No one wants him. There’s nowhere for him to go, neither at home nor in Britain.
Frears has a session with Frances and Ayub, which he videotapes. Ayub is very nervous, not surprisingly. We’ve cast Frances and probably Ayub will be offered the part tomorrow.
17 JANUARY 1987
We look at the tape of Frances and Ayub together. They look good together. Ayub waits downstairs in his agent’s office, refusing to go home until we make our decision. He comes into the room looking dazed with tension. We offer him the job. He thanks us all and shakes hands with us.
Frears has decided that the film should be much more about young people than I’d imagined. Because of Ayub being five years younger than Frances we could as easily cast the people around them down in age as up. Frears says casting it young will make it more cheerful. I’m all for cheerfulness, though worried that Rosie will seem oddly older than everyone else.