The charges and fighting look terrifying and we haven’t shot the main riot yet. That’s tonight. Frears says: If we can get through that we’ll be OK, we’ll survive!
6 MARCH 1987
Night shoot. A row of derelict houses and shops with asbestos over their windows with gas-fired jets in little window boxes in front of them to give the impression of the neighbourhood in flames. In front of this are exploding cars, fire-engines, ambulances and a divided mob of 200 extras plus police with riot shields. There are four cameras. It’s massive, for a British film, and brilliantly organised. I think of the script: it just says something like: in the background the riot continues!
The rioting itself is frightening, thrilling and cathartic. It’s not difficult to see how compelling and exciting taking part in a riot can be and how far out of yourself such compulsion can take you. On some takes the kids playing rioters continue to attack the extras in uniform after we’ve cut. Some of the extras playing police threaten to go home if this doesn’t stop!
Late at night from the mob emerges a strange sight. Nearby is a hostel for the blind and about fifteen bewildered blind people with dogs emerge from the mob and walk across the riot area as cars explode around them and Molotov cocktails are flung into shops. At the far end of the set they release their dogs into a park.
I see rushes of yesterday’s material. It looks pretty effective. I can see how thrilling it must be to film large-scale set-pieces. It’s far easier and often more effective than the hard stuff: subtle acting and the delineation of complicated relationships.
Each day Frears asks me to give him a detailed report of the rushes: what was that scene like? he asks. And the other one? He refuses to watch rushes. The discovery that he can avoid this has liberated him from the inevitable discouragement of staring daily at his own work and its limitations.
10 MARCH 1987
More rushes and some of the riot material cut together. At last it comes alive! I talk to Oliver (the lighting cameraman) about the way he’s shot it. He’s eschewed the pinks and blues of Laundrette, going for a more monochrome look, though at times the screen positively glows! Originally I was sceptical of this, liking the heightened and cheap quality of Laundrette. But Oliver felt that the more real Sammy and Rosie looks the better as the oddness of the story and strangeness of the juxtapositions are sufficient unreality. He has given the film a European quality, sensuous and warm. I haven’t seen a film like it made in Britain.
It’s a hard film to make and much to do in six weeks. Everyone looks exhausted already, not surprisingly. They start work at eight in the morning and usually knock off around eleven at night. With night shoots we’ve been starting at six in the evening and finishing at seven in the morning, though people aren’t getting to bed till nine.
The worries about Ayub: he’s stiff at the moment and the humour of the part is beyond him. He’s better in close-up, being handsome. In mid-shot he wilts and looks as if he doesn’t quite know what to do with his body. His pleasantness of character comes through, playing against the unpleasantness of Sammy. But it’s going to be difficult for him in the first big part he’s played. Wendy looks effective in the rushes, powerful and vulnerable. American actors are trained for the screen. Where you sometimes feel Ayub is delivering his performance to the back of the stalls, Wendy understands the intimacy of the cinema.
On the way to today’s shoot, in an East End loft, a battleship passes along the river. The taxi I’m in stops. ‘Why have you stopped?’ I ask. ‘I can’t go on,’ the driver says, gazing at the ship. ‘My eyes have misted over. Doesn’t it do you in?’ I refrain from telling him the battleship is French. When I turn up I find they’ve managed to work the battleship into the scene. Let’s hope people think it’s a symbol.
In the script most of the scenes between Anna and Sammy take place in Anna’s bed. But Frears opens them up, using the whole space, even creating a new scene by moving into the loft’s tiny bathroom which has a spectacular view over London. Because of these scenes I write new dialogue for Anna about an exhibition she’s having, called ‘Images of a Decaying Europe’.
13 MARCH 1987
Today Frears rails at the actors for lacking flair, for thinking too much about their costumes, for being too passive and not helping him enough. He’s been cheerful all through it, but now the strain is starting to tell. It’s partly because the scene we’re shooting — outside Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat, with Rosie returning with Danny on a motorbike, the Ghost walking past, Vivia watching Rafi from the window and Rosie’s two friends also watching Rafi — is very complicated. The cold — working fifteen hours a day in snow flurries — is getting people down. Frears also blames me for this scene going badly: ‘You should never set a scene as complicated as this outside,’ he says. ‘Haven’t you learned that yet? I can’t control it out here!’ In fact, this is the only scene in the film we will have to reshoot.
16 MARCH 1987
To Frears’s last night to discuss the waste ground eviction scene at the end of the film. It has to be choreographed precisely and it hasn’t been yet. What I’ve written isn’t clear. So we work out, almost shot by shot, the final relationships between the characters. The problem with the end of the film, with the eviction as opposed to the already shot riot scene, is the danger of it being sentimental. Ambiguities and ironies have to be excavated just as Rafi and Sammy and Anna bumbling around during the riots made all the difference to a scene which could easily be one-dimensional.
Have the idea that in order to reflect on what has gone on in the film it might be a good notion to have, during the closing credits, some of Anna’s photographs shown to us.
17 MARCH 1987
Shooting the waste ground material on the large piece of unused ground under the motorway. Bit of a shock to turn up at the location and find Frances Barber in a black and white corset. I look at her wondering if she has forgotten to put the rest of her clothes on. Her breasts, well, they are jammed into an odd shape: it looks as though she has two Cornish pasties attached to her chest. I tell Stephen she looks like a gangster’s moll from a western. He takes it as a compliment. ‘That’s exactly what I intended,’ he says. ‘John Ford would be proud of me.’
Between takes, the corset debate continues between us, as in a snowstorm Shashi sits in a filthy flea-ridden armchair in front of a smoking fire, surrounded by young people in grey costumes banging tins. Frears argues that the corset is an inspired idea; it liberates Rosie from do-goodery; she looks bizarre, anarchistic and interesting, not earnest or condescending. What he then describes as the ‘simplistic politics of the film’ he says are transcended by imaginativeness. At the end of the argument he calls me a prude and for the rest of the afternoon he refers to me as Mrs Grundy.
The corset depresses me because after everyone’s work on the film it is still easy to hit a wrong note. I feel uneasy in complaining because I think Frears’s judgement is less conservative than my own; I could be wrong. Maybe, too, I’m being sentimental about the woman the character is based on, a more dignified and sensitive person than the one signified by the corset.