18 JANUARY 1987
Frears talks about the problems of shooting the riots, especially after a friend said: Oh no, not a lot of black people rioting. So we talk about avoiding the TV news-footage approach: screaming mobs, bleeding policemen. What you don’t get in news footage is detail. In The Battle of Algiers, for example, the director humanises the violence. You see the faces of those to whom violence is being done. In the torture scene, you don’t see the act, but only the faces of those around it, streaming tears.
In Sammy and Rosie you do see the circumstances from which the riot comes — the shooting of a black woman by the police. And we see, in the circumstances, how justifiable the riot is. The difficulty arises from the fact that black people are so rarely represented on TV; if when they are shown, they’re only throwing rocks at the police, you’re in danger of reinforcing considerable prejudice. I suppose this depends partly on how you see the riot, or revolt. I know I supported it, but as Orwell says about Auden, it’s easy to say that if you’re elsewhere when the violence takes place.
After Frears said the Alice — Rafi parting scene at the end of the film isn’t dramatic enough I shake my brains and come up with a Miss Havisham scene set in the cellar of the house. I have Alice furiously throwing open a suitcase in which she’s packed the clothes she’d intended to take on her planned elopement with Rafi in the mid-1950s. I also have her showing Rafi the diaries she kept then, in which she poured out her heart to him — the physical and visual representation of what was formerly just dialogue.
To the opera on Friday with a vegetarian friend. A woman in a long sable coat sits next to us. My friend says: I wish I carried a can of spray paint in my bag and could shoot it over her coat. Thought it might be an idea to stick in the film. But where?
20 JANUARY 1987
Debbie McWilliams saw a pop group, the Fine Young Cannibals, on TV and asks the singer, Roland Gift, to come into the office. He shows up looking splendid, proud and vulnerable, with his manager. I ask the women in the office to get a look at him through the office window and let us know if they want to rip his clothes off with their teeth. As most of them seem to want this, Roland inches closer to the part of Danny.
On the way home from the movies the other night, at Piccadilly tube station a group of young Jewish kids gathers at the top of the escalator. Suddenly, around them, are a bunch of Arsenal football supporters who stand and chant ‘Yiddo, yiddo!’ at these kids. The kids look embarrassed rather than frightened, but they do move closer together, standing in a little huddle. It’s a difficult moment. What do you do when it comes to it? Walk on, watch, or pile in? What are you made of? What would you give up? I can see a lot of other dithering people in the vicinity have this dilemma. But no one does anything. The chanting goes on. Then the youths disappear down the escalator, their voices echoing around the building. It’s the first time I’ve seen this kind of anti-Semitism in London. Decide to put it in the film somewhere. The structure is secure enough now for anything odd or interesting that happens to have a place. All the bits and pieces will just have to get along with each other, like people at a party.
23 JANUARY 1987
Problems with Meera Syal, the actress we want to play Rani. Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of the Royal Court, rings to say Meera has already committed herself to Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money. She also wants to play Rani in our film. At the moment the schedule can’t be arranged so she can do both. We don’t want to press her to choose, for fear she’ll choose the Court. It’s painful to her, especially as Asian actors get offered so little work.
Anyway, we’ll deal with it later. In the meantime we’re going to my favourite city, New York!
25 JANUARY 1987
New York. This city is snowbound and every time you look round, someone has skidded on to their back in the street. New York is cold in a way London never is: here your face freezes, here the fluid in your eyes seems to ice over.
The entrance of our hotel, on Central Park West, has a silver-lined overhang in which bright lights are embedded. This ensures that the hotel shines like a battery of torches in a blackout for hundreds of yards around; indeed, if you’re driving through the park you can see it glowing through the trees. In this overhang there are heaters which warm the street and melt insubordinate snowflakes which may drift on to the hotel’s red carpet or float on to the hat of the doorman. Everywhere you go in this city there are notices urging you to save energy while outside this hotel they are heating the street!
Frears is a prisoner in his hotel room, doing publicity for Prick Up Your Ears. Food and drink is brought up to him. Between interviews he looks out of the window at Central Park. His talk schedule is exhausting. There was a time when I thought that talking about yourself to someone who said little, listened intently and made notes or recorded what you said was the ideal relationship. But after the first three hours your tongue is dry, your mouth will not work, your jaws ache, as after six hours of fellatio. The only respite is to question the journalists and hope they’ll revive you by telling you about themselves.
A journalist asks me how I came upon the central idea of Sammy and Rosie. I start to think about it, but it is complicated; an idea usually has many sources.
One source was the great Japanese film Tokyo Story in which an old couple who live in the country go to visit their children in the city and are treated shabbily by them. I started off thinking of Sammy and Rosie as a contemporary remake of this desperately moving and truthful film. Sometimes I wish my own script had the simplicity, luminosity and straightforward humanity of Ozu’s masterpiece, that I hadn’t added so many characters, themes and gewgaws.
Another source was a play I once wrote and abandoned about an Asian politician living in London in the 1960s and having an affair with a young woman. I retained the politician and dropped everything else.
There was also a story I was told about a member of my family who loved an Englishwoman, left her after promising to return to England to marry her, and never came back, though the word is she loves him still and continues to wait.
When Frears has finished his interviews for the day he says a journalist told him, when they were discussing British films, that he didn’t think anything dramatic ever happened in Britain now. This journalist’s view of Britain sounds like Orson Welles in The Third Man talking about Switzerland, only capable of producing the cuckoo clock!
The journalist’s remark hits a nerve. It relates to the British sense of inferiority about its film industry: not only the feeling that the British can’t really make good films, but that contemporary British subjects and themes are really too small, too insignificant as subjects. So British films are often aimed at American audiences and attempt to deal with ‘universal’ or ‘epic’ themes as in Gandhi, The Mission, The Killing Fields, Cry Freedom.
The journalist’s view isn’t entirely surprising since a lot of English ‘art’ also dwells, gloats on and relives nostalgic scenarios of wealth and superiority. It’s easy therefore for Americans to see Britain as just an old country, as a kind of museum, as a factory for producing versions of lost greatness. After all, many British films do reflect this: Chariots of Fire, A Room with a View, the Raj epics, and the serials Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown. Even the recent past, the Beatles, punks, the numerous Royal Weddings, are converted into quaintness, into tourist mugs and postcards, into saleable myths. If imperialism is the highest form of capitalism, then tourism is its ghostly afterlife in this form of commercial nostalgia which is sold as ‘art’ or ‘culture’.