17 MAY 1987
Frears and I talk about the odd way in which Sammy and Rosie has developed. The oddness is in not being able to say in advance what kind of film it is since the process seems to have been to shoot a lot of material and then decide later, after chucking bits of it away, what the film will be like. It’s like a structured improvisation. Frears says: Shouldn’t we be more in control at the beginning? Surely, if we had more idea of what we’re doing we could spend more time on the bits we’re going to use? But, with some exceptions, it’s difficult to tell what’s going to be in the final film, partly because I’m no good at plots, at working out precisely what the story is.
21 MAY 1987
Frears and I were both moaning to each other about the Tory Election broadcast that went out yesterday. Its hideous nationalism and neo-fascism, its talk of ‘imported foreign ideologies like socialism’ and its base appeals to xenophobia. Seeing the film once again Frears has taken the socialist Holst’s theme from ‘Jupiter’ in The Planets, later used for the patriotic hymn ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ (which was, incidentally, played at the Royal Wedding) from the Tory broadcast, and played it over the eviction scene, giving it a ritualistic quality.
Later there is intense discussion of the film between David and Karin, Mick, Bevan, Frears and I. I find these discussions quite painful. But Frears invites them. He listens carefully to everything people have to say and then he goes back to the film. So secure is he in what he is doing that he isn’t threatened by criticism; he can absorb it and use it to improve his work.
An election has been called. I do some leafleting for the Labour Party. I cover estates which I walk past every day, but haven’t been inside since the last election. In the meantime, the buildings have been ‘refurbished’. From the outside the blocks and low-rise houses look modern: rainproof, wind resistant, nature-blocking. I wonder if they have really changed since the last time around. My trips to New York and Los Angeles now seem utterly unimportant when there are parts of my own city, my own streets, for Chris-sakes, five minutes’ walk from me, that are unknown to me!
I walk off the main road and across the grass to the entrance of the first block. The door is open; the glass in the door is smashed. A woman in filthy clothes, in rags I suppose, stands in the entrance waving her arms around. She is in another place: stoned. I go on through and into the silver steel cage of the lift. Inside I hold my nose. At the top of the block the windows are smashed and the wind blows sharply across the landing. Broken bottles, cans and general detritus are whisked about.
Someone has a sign on their door: ‘Don’t burgle me I have nothin’.’ Many of the doors have been smashed in and are held together with old bits of wood. The stench of piss and shit fills the place.
An old distressed woman in a nightdress comes out of her flat and complains that a party has been going on downstairs for two days. One man comes to the door with a barely controlled Alsatian. Come and take back this fucking leaflet, he screams at me; come and get it, mate!
There are at least two dogs on each floor, and you can hear their barking echo through the building.
It is difficult to explain to the people who live here why they should vote Labour; it is difficult to explain to them why they should vote for anyone at all.
23 MAY 1987
Last day of shooting. Bits and pieces. Colin McCabe at the ICA, Sammy and Rosie by the river (for the last shot of the film) and Aloo Baloo at the Finborough pub in Earls Court for the ‘Sammy and Rosie in London’ part of the film. It is a strange day because these are all things Sarah and I have done together; they are places we go. So you live them and then go back a few weeks later with some mates, a camera, and some actors, and put it all in a film. Sarah has yet to see the film and that’s good, I think, as it is improving all the time. But she rang me last night, angry at being excluded, thinking this was deliberate, or just more evidence of my general indifference. Whatever it is, she has started to call the film ‘Hanif Gets Paid, Sarah Gets Exploited’.
5 JUNE 1987
Frears and Stanley Myers are working away on the music. Charlie Gillett, the great rock DJ and music expert, is suggesting various bands and styles of music to go over different parts of the film. David Byrne, from whom we’ve heard not a word for ages, has finally said he’s too busy to do anything.
Sarah finally comes to see the film. She sits in front of Frances Barber. After, she tells me she likes it. She confidently says she can see it as an entire object, just a good film, something quite apart from herself.
10 JUNE 1987
My agent Sheila goes to see the uncompleted Sammy and Rosie and rings this morning. Some of it’s wonderful, she says. But it’s heartless and anti-women. Why anti-women? I ask. Because all the women in the film are shown as manipulative. And Rosie doesn’t care for Sammy at all. When he sleeps with someone else it doesn’t appear to bother her. I thought, she says, that this was because you were going to show Rosie as a lesbian. I ask her why she should think this. Because most of her friends are lesbian. Plus, she adds, you make Sammy into such a weak, physically unattractive and horrible character it’s difficult to see how she could take much interest in him. Is he what you and Stephen think women like?
Sheila doesn’t like the end of the film, with Sammy and Rosie sitting crying on the floor. It makes them seem callous, especially with all the women trailing out of the flat and not doing or saying anything. In addition she dislikes the ‘Sammy and Rosie in London’ sequence, one of my favourites in the film, which she compares to a cheap advertisement. That just has to go, she says, it’s so ridiculous. Anyway, couldn’t at least fifteen minutes of the film be cut? Like what? Well, Alice’s speech of Rafi on walking down the stairs, just before the cellar scene. One doesn’t listen to all this, she says. Well, I feel like saying, we could chop fifteen minutes out. But that would make the film just over an hour long. We’d have to release it as a short.
For a while after this conversation I am perforated by doubt and think Sheila might be right; our judgement has gone and the entire thing is some terrible, arrogant mistake.
There’s going to be at least another eighteen months of this, of exposure, of being judged. This is a ‘profession of opinion’ as Valéry calls it, where to make a film or write a book is to stand up so that people can fire bullets at you.
I go off to the dubbing theatre where the actor playing the property developer is yelling into the mike about communist, lesbian moaning minnies. This will be put through a megaphone and added to the eviction scene. Frears is in good cheer as ever. When I tell him about Sheila’s attack on the film he says we will get attacked this time around. People will want to engage with the issues the film raises; they’ll want to argue with the movie and they’ll get angry. It won’t be an easy ride as with Laundrette or Prick, with people just being grateful these kinds of films are being made at all.
As we walk through Soho, Frears and Mick are talking once more about the shooting of the black woman at the beginning of the film. They’re now thinking of putting it back. It’s a hard decision to make: do you forfeit an important and powerful scene because it throws out the balance of the film?