19 MARCH 1987
We shoot the eviction and exodus from the waste ground. With the trailers and caravans whirling in the mud and dust, the bulldozers crashing through shops, lifting cars and tossing them about, the straggly kids waving flags and playing music as the police and heavies invade and evict them, it is like a western! Frears runs among it all, yelling instructions through a megaphone.
It is tough on Shashi. India’s premier actor, a god to millions, is impersonating a torturer having a nightmare while bouncing on a bed in the back of a caravan which is being wildly driven around a stony waste ground in a snowstorm. Books scatter over his head. When he emerges, shaken and stirred, dizzy and fed up, he threatens to go back to Bombay. The next morning, when we tell him as a joke that we have to reshoot his scene in the back of the caravan, he goes white.
It is obvious that he has a difficult part. The character of Rafi is complex and contradictory and he has to play against many different kinds of character. Shashi is not used to making films in English and the part is physically demanding. But with his modesty, generosity and unEnglish liking for women, he is the most adored person on the film.
So a glorious day — mostly to do with the pleasure of working with other people, especially the ‘straggly kids’ who jam all day and some of the night by the fire. Most of them are alternative comedians and buskers from the London Underground. Few of them have a regular place to live, and when Debbie wants to inform them of a day’s shooting, she has to send her assistants round the tube stations of central London to find them.
Coming out of my hutch for this film has made me realise how hard it is sometimes to bear the isolation that all writers have to put up with.
20 MARCH 1987
To Kew where we’re shooting the suburban material — in Alice’s house and the street she lives in. We film the scene where Alice comes to the door and sees Rafi for the first time for thirty years. We do several takes and find it works best when Claire and Shashi do least, when they contain their reaction and we have to strain to imagine their feelings.
Here, where it is quiet and sedate, leafy and affluent, we have more complaints from residents than at any other location, though there are no charging bulldozers and we burn nothing down, though severely tempted.
Being brought up in the suburbs myself, this location reminds me of slow childhood Sundays on which you weren’t allowed to yell in the street and your friends were kept in for the holy day. Sundays in the suburbs were a funeral and it’s still beyond me why the celebration of God’s love for the world has to be such a miserable business.
I know now that England is primarily a suburban country and English values are suburban values. The best of that is kindness and mild-temperedness, politeness and privacy, and some rather resentful tolerance. The suburbs are also a mix of people. In my small street lived a civil servant, an interior decorator, secretaries, a local journalist, an architect, a van driver, a milkman, and so on, all living together in comfortable houses with gardens, in relative harmony.
At worst there is narrowness of outlook and fear of the different. There is cruelty by privacy and indifference. There is great lower-middle-class snobbery, contempt for the working class and envy of the middle class. And there is a refusal to admit to humanity beyond the family, beyond the household walls and garden fence. Each family as an autonomous, self-sufficient unit faces a hostile world of other self-contained families. This neurotic and materialistic privacy, the keystone of British suburban life, ensures that the ‘collective’ or even the ‘public’ will mean little to these people. It’s interesting that the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, has repudiated the now discredited notion of the collective in favour of left-wing individualism. He has said: ‘They have got to be told that socialism is the answer for them because socialism looks after the individual.’
My love and fascination for inner London endures. Here there is fluidity and possibilities are unlimited. Here it is possible to avoid your enemies; here everything is available. In the suburbs everything changes slowly. Heraclitus said: ‘You can’t step in the same river twice.’ In the inner-city you can barely step in the same street twice, so rapid is human and environmental change.
I sit in the first sunshine of the year in this English garden in Kew reading the papers. There is much written today about the verdict in the Blakelock case, where a policeman was hacked to death during an uprising on the Broadwater Farm Estate in north London. A man was sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing. The uprising followed the death of a much respected middle-aged black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, who died of a heart attack during a police raid on her home on the estate. The Police Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Newman, claimed that ‘anarchists and Trotskyists’ planned the uprising in advance, though there is no evidence for this. There is confusion and inconsistency in the police account of the incident, to say the least. The police also broke numerous rules and acted illegally in their treatment of two young ‘suspects’. A fifteen-year-old boy was held three days without access to his parents or a solicitor. A sixteen-year-old, with a mental age of seven, was interrogated without his mother or solicitor.
It’s all depressing, as was the incident around which I based the opening of the film: the shooting of a black woman, Cherry Groce, who was permanently paralysed after being shot during a police raid in which her son was being sought.
But what are we doing using this material in the film? Today, when confronted once more by the racism, violence, alienation and waste of the Broadwater Farm Estate uprising, our little film has to be justified over again. After all, real life has become part of a film, reduced perhaps, maybe trivialised. We will make money from it; careers will be furthered; film festivals attended. But aren’t we stealing other people’s lives, their hard experience, for our own purposes? The relation we bear to those people’s lives is tangential, to say the least. Perhaps because of that we seriously misunderstand their lives.
I can’t work out today if the question about the relation between the real people, the real events, and the portrayal is an aesthetic or moral one. In other words, if the acting is good, if the film is well made, if it seems authentic, does that make it all right, is the stealing justified? Will the issue be settled if experience is successfully distilled into art?
Or is the quality of the work irrelevant to the social issue, which is that of middle-class people (albeit dissenting middle-class people) who own and control and have access to the media and to money, using minority and working-class material to entertain other middle-class people? Frequently during the making of the film I feel that this is the case, that what we’re doing is a kind of social voyeurism.
At the same time I can justify our work by saying it is the duty of contemporary films to show contemporary life. This portrayal of our world as it is is valuable in itself, and part of the climate of opposition and dissent.
In one part of me I do believe there is some anger in the film; and it does deal with things not often touched on in British films. In another part of me, when I look at the film world, run by the usual white middle-class public-school types, with a few parvenu thugs thrown in, I can see that the film is just a commercial product.
Frears and I talk this over. He says the film is optimistic about the young people portrayed in it: their vivacity, lack of conformity and rebelliousness are celebrated in it.
In the evening to rushes — uncut takes of the waste ground material. It looks good and people are pleased with their work. Leon from Cinecom is there, as is his boss. Leon sleeps through the rushes and his boss says: For rushes they’re not bad, but it’s not family entertainment.