Then out into the crumbling, drowning city of tourists which is packed with people in medieval costumes and gold masks. They dance all night in St Mark’s Square and fall to the ground where they sleep beneath people’s feet until morning. Looking at the bridges I wonder how they don’t collapse under the weight of people. I walk with the distributor through this wild celebration to a cinema where Laundrette is opening. The cinema is virtually empty. A man is asleep and snoring loudly, the sound filling the place. To my horror the film is dubbed: strange Italian voices are coming from the mouths of Saeed Jaffrey and Roshan Seth. The Italian hairdresser on Sammy and Rosie said he grew up hearing Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando all with the same voice, dubbed by the same Italian actor.
I watch the audience watching the film. At the points where the audience usually laugh there is complete silence. The film is no longer a comedy.
I get up to speak. The snoring man opens his eyes briefly, looks at me and goes back to sleep. The audience puts questions to me through the interpreter. But though she has a good accent, what the interpreter says to me makes no sense. So I describe how the film came to be made and talk a little about the gay theme. She blushes when I say this. Then she stumbles and backs away from me and the microphone. I glare at her. She recovers and talks to the audience for a long time. But I know she isn’t repeating what I said. So I turn to her and say the aim of the film is to induce worldwide sexual excitement. Now she won’t go to the microphone at all. She is backing away, wide-eyed. The audience whistles and shouts and claps. I get out as soon as I can.
3 MARCH 1987
First day of shooting. I go to pick up Shashi who turned up late last night. ‘I nearly didn’t come at all,’ he says. ‘I’ve got big tax problems. Rajiv Gandhi himself had to sort them out.’ Shashi has three Indian writers staying with him in his flat. They’re working on a script Shashi will direct at the end of the year. He tells me that Indian film-writers often write ten films a year and earn £250,000. Some writers only work out the story and are no good at dialogue, while others just come in for the verbals.
Shashi looks splendid, if a little plump. He’s less familiar with the script than I’d hoped — and in the car he asks me to remind him of the story — but he’s serious and keen. Soon everyone is in love with him.
We shoot the scene of Rosie finding the old man dead in the bath. I turn up and find Frances in a long green coat with a furry black collar. On her head she has a black pillbox hat. Instead of a social worker she looks like an extra from Doctor Zhivago. I take it as a direct blow to the heart, as if it’s a complete misunderstanding of everything I’ve been trying to do. Frances is very nervous and apprehensive, as it’s the first day, and she clings to the coat as if it’s a part of Rosie’s soul. But Frears is enjoying himself. He can get along with actors. Where I’d have them by the throat with my foot in the back of their neck, he sits down and talks gently with them. Frances changes the coat. But it’s not the last we’ll see of that coat.
When Shashi comes on set — we’re shooting the scene outside and inside the off-licence — the local Asians come out of their shops in amazement. One immediately gives him three boxes of crisps. Another gives him perfume and aftershave. For them Shashi is a massive star, like Robert Redford, and he has been around for considerably longer, making over 200 films since he first started, aged eight. When they believe it is him, the kids dress up in their best clothes — the Asian girls in smart salwar kamiz and jewellery — to be photographed with him. Others ring their relatives who come in cars across London and wait patiently in the freezing cold for a break in filming so they can stand next to their idol.
Seeing the off-licence with wire-mesh across the counter, the dogs, the siege-like atmosphere — it is based on places I know in Brixton, where buying a bottle of wine can be like entering a battle zone — Shashi is taken aback, as Rafi would be. Shashi asks:
‘Are there really places like this in London?’
Shashi decides to wear a moustache for the part. It makes him look older and less handsome, less of a matinée idol; but also formidable, imposing and sort of British in the right military, authoritarian sort of way.
4 MARCH 1987
Sarah comes to the set where we’re shooting a scene between Sammy and Rosie set in a looted Asian grocer’s shop. Frances is still tense and unsure and she complains to Frears about Sarah being there watching her as she is trying to create the character of Rosie. Sarah leaves. She is amused by the clothes Frances is wearing, as if a social worker would wear a mini-skirt and three-inch-high heels to work. Before that, of course, the hours in make-up, the hairdresser constantly standing by to adjust any hair that might fall out of place. All seemingly absurd when the attempt is to do something that is, in some ways, realistic. But then the cinema has never stopped being a palace of dreams. Even in the serious cinema there is some emphasis on the ideal. Imagine casting a film with only ugly or even just ordinary-looking actors. The cinema cannot replace the novel or autobiography as the precise and serious medium of the age while it is still too intent on charming its audience!
5 MARCH 1987
Much falsity in what I wrote in anger yesterday, partly to do with my failure to let go of the script and let Frears make the film he has to make. I think that despite the clothes and the paraphernalia of glamour, the voice of the film collaborators can transcend the trivial messages of escape that the cinema must transmit if it is to reach a large audience.
Also, and today I have to repeat this to myself, the film-writer always has to give way to the director, who is the controlling intelligence of the film, the invisible tyrant behind everything. The only way for a writer to influence a film is through his relationship with the director. If this is good then the film will be a successful collaboration; if not, the writer has had it. And most writers are lucky if directors even allow them on the set.
Presumably, it is because of this contingency that serious writers don’t venture into the cinema. You don’t find many American writers — in a country with a film industry — thinking of film as a serious possibility.
Also contra what I said yesterday: I do think the constraints of playing to a wide audience can be useful. You have to ensure that your work is accessible. You can’t indulge yourself; you have to be self-critical; you have to say: is this available? So, to take a literary analogy, you have popular Thackeray and Dickens, say, as opposed to some recent American writing, loaded with experiment, innovation and pretty sentences which is published by minor magazines for an audience of acolytes, friends and university libraries.
I wake up, pull the curtains and it is snowing! The snow is settling too. This morning we’re shooting the aftermath of the riots, when Rafi decides to go out for a walk. He meets Danny and they go to visit Alice.
When I get to the set the snow doesn’t seem to matter. Burnt-out cars are scattered about; there are mobs throwing rubber bricks and police with batons charging them. Padded stuntmen dive over cars and policemen kick them. Among it all, in the awful cold, wanders Shashi, bearing a bunch of flowers. The kids in the mob are locals, not extras. These kids refuse to sit in the caravan with the actors in police uniform in case their friends think they’re fraternizing with the police.