7 APRIL 1987
We shoot Sammy and Rosie crying and rocking together on the floor at the end of the film, with the women slowly leaving the flat behind them. I get to the studio at eight in the morning and leave at nine in the evening. This seems to me to be an ideal solution to living: erect this saving girder of necessity around you: you don’t have to think or decide how to live!
Frears saw a good deal of the film on Saturday, as it’s being edited as we shoot it. He says: Christ, it’s a weepie, a complete heartbreaker! We’ll have to put hundreds of violins on the soundtrack!
8 APRIL 1987
I look at a good chunk of the film on the tiny screen of an editing machine at Twickenham Studios. It makes me laugh, partly, I think, with relief that it isn’t completely terrible. It’s less rough than Laundrette, more glamorous, more conventional, with Hollywood colours. I look at the scene where Rafi catches Rani and Vivia in bed; they attack him and he climbs out of the window and down the drainpipe. We were thinking of cutting him climbing out of the window, it seemed unconvincing. Yet looking at it in context, I think it’ll work.
Frears comes into the cutting room while I’m watching and talks to Mick, the editor. It’s very impressive the way Frears can hold every shot of the film in his head at once, even though he’s barely seen any of it. He can remember every take of every shot. So when he’s talking to Mick about scenes he shot weeks ago, he’ll say: Wasn’t take 5 better than take 3? Or: Didn’t the actress have her hand over her face on take 11 on the mid-shot and not on take 2?
We talk about the kind of harmless threat of disorder that films like Laundrette or Prick Up Your Ears represent, which partly explains their success. The pattern is one of there being a fairly rigid social order which is set up in detail in the film. Set against this order there is an individual or two, preferably in love, who violate this conventional structure. Their rebellion, their form of transgressional sex, is liberating, exciting. Audiences identify with it. Films as diverse as, say, Billy Liar, Room with a View, Midnight Cowboy, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, have this pattern, following an alienated individual or couple, unable to find a place for themselves in the society as it is. Usually there’s some kind of individual reconciliation at the end of the film; or the individual is destroyed. But there is rarely any sense that the society could or should be changed. The pattern is, of course, a seductive one because we can see ourselves in the alienated, but authentic, individual standing up against stuffiness, ignorance and hatred of love. In all this we are not helped to think in any wider sense of the way societies repress legitimate ideals, groups of people, and possible forms of life.
In some films of the middle and late 1960s, when the rigid social order was eschewed entirely as no longer relevant, and only ‘liberated’ individuals were portrayed, the films have little power or interest, lacking the kind of conflict and tension that the classic pattern necessarily produces.
9 APRIL 1987
Filming in the cellar of a pub in Kew. Cramped and dusty; the lights keep going out. Claire, whose performance until now has been, rightly, contained, starts to reveal her power in this cellar scene with Shashi. Furiously jerking things out of the suitcase she packed thirty years ago, and shoving the whole lot on the floor, she reveals such a combination of wild anger, vulnerability and pain, that when the camera cut, there was complete silence. Even Shashi looked shaken. It was especially difficult for her as the Ghost was in the scene as well, standing at her elbow.
10 APRIL 1987
We spend the day in a South Kensington restaurant filming the confrontation scene between Rosie, Rafi and Sammy when they go out to dinner. This is the pivotal scene of the movie. It starts off simply. The three of them are at the table; the violinists play a little Mozart in the background, the drag queen sits behind them. But the violinists have extraordinary faces: English features, pale shoulders (ready to be painted by Ingres), Pre-Raphaelite hair, and after twelve solid hours of fiddling, very worn fingers.
As the day progresses Shashi and Frances become more heated in their argument. The playing of the violinists becomes more frenzied. The drag queen does a very exasperated flounce. Shashi eats a finger made from sausage meat and spits out the nail, putting it politely on the side of the plate.
I can see Frears’s imagination racing as he uses these few elements to their fullest and most absurd effect. He becomes increasingly inventive, his control and experience allowing him to play. I am a little afraid the scene will be drowned in effects, but I did write the scene in a similar spirit — putting the people in the restaurant and experimenting until something came of it.
Of course, the conditions of Frears’s creativity are different from mine. Alone in a room I can take my time and rewrite as often as I like. I can leave the scene and rewrite it in two weeks’ time. For Frears in that small restaurant crowded with seventy people there is no way of going back on the scene. It has to be done there and then and it has to work. It takes a lot of nerve to play with a scene under those conditions, especially as the medium is so ridiculously expensive.
I notice how comfortable Frances is in her part now. She has discovered who she is playing; and that is something you find out only in the course of filming. But unlike the theatre, there’s never another opportunity to integrate later discoveries into earlier scenes.
If the conditions in which film directors usually work make it difficult for them to be original, a film actor’s life is certainly no bed of roses. You are picked up at seven or earlier in the morning; you may shoot your first scene at ten or eleven, if you’re lucky. Or you may be hanging around until three or four before you begin work. Wendy came in early for several days, thinking they were going to shoot her ‘fuck night’ scene with Ayub that day, then nothing was done, though she didn’t know that until early evening. But if your scene is going to be shot, however bored and cold and confused by the entire thing you are, you have to drag your concentration to the sticking place, you have to pull out your performance immediately. You may have to play a very emotional scene and you have to play it now! But whatever you’re doing, it’s very expensive, so the faster you do it the more you will be appreciated. As there’s little time for exploration and experiment you will probably have to give a performance much like one you’ve given before because at least you can be sure it will work.
When that acting job’s finished there might possibly be another one. Should you turn it down and hope something better will turn up? Perhaps it won’t; but perhaps it will. If it does, the director may be duff or the script no good or the part too small. Whatever happens, most of the work actors get doesn’t stretch them and 80 per cent of the directors they work with will have little talent. Of the good 20 per cent, 5 per cent will be tyrants who think of actors as puppets.
Despite these difficulties, all the British actors I know have one thing in common: they are well-trained, skilled and dedicated people who want to do good work and give of their best within a profession that only rarely gives them the opportunity to reach their potential. No wonder so many actors become neurotic or dull through lack of interest in anything but their careers.