I thought it was a universal story, a family with two kids. They seem to love each other, and they do love each other. The parents want the best for their children, and the kids just want to be kids: like all children that age, they are trying to define themselves. But the family harbors a secret. The book showed that incest is everywhere, even in a family that truly love each other. It is the universal taboo. But Alex’s novel wasn’t the horror we read about in the newspaper and see on the evening news. It wasn’t sensationalist or something only affecting other people; it felt real and complex, and you could see how damaged the characters were right away. Jessie was hurting and defiant, and Tom was wonderful. He was going through his own hard adolescence when he witnessed this horrible act. Ultimately, all the love in the family couldn’t hide what the father was doing. He seemed at first like a great dad, a dad you’d want to have – then you found out what he was, and it was devastating. That was what I wanted to portray: I wanted a family that anyone could identify with, Black, Asian, American, English, a family that has a dark secret.
I see film as a medium that can be understood across all boundaries. I believe in the importance of images. A story on film must be told not through dialogue, like a play, but with what you see. I wanted to end up with a film that honored the book and honored the subject. The worst adaptation is a literal adaptation – somehow you must follow your instincts and be true to the sadness of it. I wanted the audience to receive the impact of the book in the same way that I had.
Before The War Zone, I had been told by directors I had worked with I should direct, but I didn’t want to give up acting to do it. It did intrigue me – the machinations of film-making, the fact that you have to have eighteen-hour conversations about wallpaper, about every single detail of the film; to do it just fascinated me, the chance to get involved with all the elements of film-making that had passed me by as an actor. But then there was the insecurity of an actor as well – if I gave up my job for two years to make this film, would they want me back?
What surprised me about the process of making the film was everything. The screenplay, the crew, the actors, the family we invented. Everyone put such warmth and effort into the production. It was like no set I had been on before. I saw the trailer the other day – and that surprised me, too. They got it right first time, the team who made it. I sat down and started watching it and I had to stop and see it again – it made me cry.
On the day we started filming, I had a general fear of shooting for the first time, but once I’d got the first take under my belt and talked to my actors, it was down to business, to making it work, trying to get the cast up to the emotional standard I wanted. Directing has to be about communication, that was what Alan Clarke had – an absolute ability to communicate with the cast and crew. You either know or you don’t know about directing, and that’s what you have to find out.
I think I knew I had a sense of composition, of filmmaking, and I surrounded myself with the best technical people, so I knew that would work, but to me the one thing that scared me was the actors, because I’d been badly directed myself in the past and I knew what that felt like – it’s a scary thing to be out there as an actor in the first place, and I was asking them to do things that I didn’t know I could do myself. And they did extraordinary stuff.
What has impressed me most about the whole project is the commitment of the crew and the actors who came to it with a passion, with a deep concern for the subject, and even when it was emotionally very difficult for them, they weren’t afraid to push themselves beyond what felt safe. I think they loved this family and were heartbroken at its destruction. This is an important and universal subject – children are everywhere, victims are everywhere, parents are everywhere, but so are abusers.
The War Zone Diary
by Alexander Stuart
For a book as undeniably dark and difficult as The War Zone is, the response it has provoked has been a remarkably positive force in my life.
Even the publication-year furor in 1989, when I was told my novel had won the Whitbread Best Novel Prize (now the Costa Book Award), only to have it snatched away because juror Jane Gardam so objected to my ‘repellent’ book that she complained to Whitbread itself that it would reflect poorly on them as a “family company” (a brewery, no less) if The War Zone were to win, was probably more prestigious – and certainly more interesting – than winning the prize itself.
Although originally commissioned on the strength of a fifteenpage outline for Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson at Hamish Hamilton in the UK, I had no idea when I finished The War Zone whether it would find an audience at all. My young son, Joe Buffalo, was sick with cancer for most of the writing of the novel, and only the fact that I felt driven to complete it, when I had no interest in anything other than spending time with him, gave me a sense that the book might have some worth.
The novel was published simultaneously in Britain and the United States, where, surprisingly, given my liberal use of English slang, it was better received than at home – until the Whitbread controversy prompted British newspapers that had previously ignored the book to break their silence.
Within months of publication, a friend introduced me to film producer Barbara Broccoli – daughter of the legendary James Bond producer, Cubby – who wanted to develop a film of the novel. I liked and trusted Barbara enormously – I made it a condition of our deal that she go down the helter-skelter with me on the pier in Brighton, where I lived at the time, and she did.
She commissioned me to adapt my novel as a screenplay. I wrote two drafts, but it was the same year that my son died, and aside from any problems the subject matter itself may have created in terms of developing a film, my heart wasn’t in it and I was difficult to deal with – I remember arriving at one meeting so angry, it took an hour and a half to calm me down.
When Barbara’s option in the novel expired, another producer, Eric Abraham, approached me. As much a fan of writers as directors – a rare find in the film industry – Eric had a real enthusiasm for the book and also wanted me to adapt it myself. (It’s fairly unusual for authors to adapt their own material, often for good reason.) He was happy to involve director Nicolas Roeg, a friend I greatly admired as a filmmaker, and with whom I had made Insignificance a few years before.
Despite a reputation in the industry for being somewhat abrasive, Eric was enormously supportive over the next couple of years, as I wrote various drafts of the script and we attempted to find finance for what we knew would be a difficult film. Eric stayed on board when I separated from my long-term partner, Ann Totterdell (Joe’s mother), and moved from Brighton to Miami Beach, to rebuild my life after my son’s death.
Eric remained unfazed when – as part of a deal to involve a new director, Danny Boyle, who had just made Shallow Grave (and is now world-renowned for the multi-Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire) – another producer, Sarah Radclyffe, who was also a long-time friend of mine, became a part of the equation.
At the time of Danny’s involvement, after a period in which I had begun to wonder whether the film would ever get made, I felt a new excitement for the project. I was in Australia at the time, with my girlfriend (now my wife and the mother of our children), Charong Chow, who was studying abroad, and we both flew to London to stay at Sarah’s house and meet with Danny.