Aisling has a seductive accent and a powerful personality. She seems puzzled by Carol’s motivation. I try not to answer her questions too specifically (not difficult, given how tired I am), because her unease is exactly the quality we want.
I also meet Paul Webster, who has succeeded David Aukin as head of Channel Four Films – now renamed Film Four. Paul is a good friend of Tim’s – he produced Tim’s movies Little Odessa and Gridlock’d – and is someone I knew when he worked at Palace Pictures, which released my film Insignificance. He seems genuinely excited by The War Zone, and I am relieved that it is in such good hands.
Sunday February 22, 1998
I drive to Devon with Dixie, who endures my tired and grumpy mood (I blame the jetlag!). We arrive at our picturesque collection of cottages, which are a few miles from Bideford and very welcoming, in time for dinner with Tim and Ray – ‘the Top Man,’ as Tim calls him. I meet Freddie for the first time, and find him encouragingly bright and enthusiastic about the film – he’s read the novel as well as the script, and seems to understand what Tom is about.
I have a great time talking to Ray about everything from Sinatra and Sammy Davis (he loves the Rat Pack) to Stoli vodka and my script for Among the Thugs. Ray knows all the old football hooligans, like Harry the Dog, not to mention various East London hoodlums.
Ray himself is an intriguing mix of balls and heart: he loves the whole gangster chic, whether East End or Lower East Side, and I’m sure could handle himself in a tough situation, but he’s also a real family man, surprisingly considerate (only surprising because of our stereotype of a certain kind of man) and in touch with his emotions. I think he’ll be a perfect Dad, largely because the role scares the shit out of him.
He told Tim he wanted to play the part because he’s always playing abusers, and ‘it would be nice to play a good guy for a change!’ Maybe he was joking, but I think a key for him to Dad’s character is that he refuses point-blank to admit to himself what he is. Ray was phenomenal in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, but here he’ll have to expose a part of himself that, as the father of his own teenage daughter, demands real courage and has certainly scared away other actors in the past. Anyway, it’s great to have him around, if only so that I can tease Dixie that Ray is the archetypal New Man.
Monday February 23, 1998
We have a read-through of the script today with our four leads, Lara, Freddie, Tilda and Ray. Tim has me read the directions aloud. Thanks to his desire to have a largely visual film, driven more by looks and gesture than dialogue, there is far more action in the script than I would usually include, so I have a lot to read, and reading it in front of the cast makes me feel self-conscious. It’s a good discipline, though, in terms of the writing – just as bookstore readings have always made me want to be lethal in tightening up my prose.
Tonight at the pub, I jokingly tell Ray I am going to pick a fight with him. ‘No, you’re not,’ he says, extremely convincingly. ‘You wouldn’t be able to write with no fingers.’
‘I could type with my nose,’ I tell him.
‘Ah,’ he grins, ‘but you wouldn’t have one of those, either.’
Friday February 27, 1998
Today for the first time, I see the interior of the house we are using as the family’s house in the film. My one-word response: ‘Fuck!!!’
It’s truly horrible: the art department has transformed a solitary Devon home, surrounded by windswept fields, into the most monstrous memory anyone could have of childhood. It’s dark, poky, totally claustrophobic and decorated with various styles of specially produced wallpaper that could drive anyone to commit murderous acts. In fact, I think it will look quite subtle on screen, but the effect of the house is to make anyone who enters it want to leave immediately.
I have spent the week getting to know various members of the unit. Michael Carlin, our Australian-born production designer and the bastard responsible for this aberration of a house, is a great character to have around, thanks to that dependable Ozzie ability to cut through any bullshit. I discover that Australians think of Brits as the great unwashed, when he tells me an Ocker joke: ‘Where do you hide a five-pound note from a Pom? Under a bar of soap.’
I am deeply impressed by the wartime shelter his department has built on the sea front here – a recreation of the one I used in the novel for the key scene in which Tom witnesses his father abusing Jessie.
The art-department job, which is constructed of plywood and plaster above a rocky ocean promontory, is actually far more striking and dramatic than the bunker which inspired me, on the hillside at Branscombe.
I originally chose it for this section of the novel because I wanted a space that would be horrific and memorable – the first time I saw it, the real shelter in Devon stank of urine, and was littered with used condoms.
The art department’s version on the rocks here looks, if anything, even more desolate, yet with a kind of vast, Turneresque seascape behind it that locates our characters firmly in a very primal Britain, just as Tim and I have wanted to do since our earliest discussions.
Tonight, I have dinner with Tilda Swinton and her husband, John, at their cottage, which is just across the way from where Tim, Ray, Dixie, Sarah Radclyffe, Seamus McGarvey, Michael Carlin and I are staying. Tilda has just had twins, which is perfect timing for us, as the mother in the film gives birth to a baby in a car wreck right at the beginning.
Tilda has a gracious, redheaded beauty, and is warm and real, absolutely enjoying motherhood at the moment (no doubt helped by the fact that the twins are both asleep by 8:30 p.m.). We talk at length about my son, Joe Buffalo – staying in Devon has been quite strange, because this was a geographical starting-point for the book just before Joe was born, and somewhere I used to visit fairly regularly with Joe and his mother, Ann Totterdell. Seeing Tilda and John with their babies brings back memories, most of them wonderful but some also tied to the later pain of Joe’s cancer and death.
On a lighter note, we are all still reeling from Freddie’s unannounced disappearance yesterday. Our young lead actor, who’s in virtually every shot, quietly organized a taxi for the hour-plus ride to the nearest railway station, then took a train up to London for the night – three days before we are due to start shooting. Despite the general fear and chaos this caused, he scores well for initiative.
Sunday March 1, 1998
Good pub lunch with everyone today. Afterwards, while we are all resting, Tim calls me from his cottage, two doors down. ‘Cup of tea?’ he asks. We start shooting tomorrow, and he seems, if not nervous, then certainly slightly tense. It’s a huge responsibility for him, but nothing he has done or said since our first meeting has cast any doubt in my mind that he can pull it off.
Our producers, Sarah and Dixie, cook dinner for everyone tonight, and we gather around the table, all a little anxious but trying to hide it. The house is full of kids at the moment: Sarah’s two sons, Callum and Sam, are here with her husband, Bill, as are Michael Carlin’s wife, Laura, and baby daughter, Maeve, and it’s an effective distraction. As a good-luck totem, Tim gives me a champagne cork with a coin in the top of it, which he says he does at the start of every film.