Brighton Rock - Q & A with writer/director Rowan Joffe

So I went to a BBC Q&A with Rowan Joffe yesterday, writer/director of the upcoming Brighton Rock. Rowan talked first about Brighton Rock and then went on to make some more general points about writing, directing and the business.

Asked why his production of Brighton was set in the sixties - and why remake it in the first place - he said the book Brighton Rock was a classic of British literature and why shouldn't there be more than one production of it? (as with Shakespeare, for example).

However, he obviously didn't want to go up against the classic Attenborough 1939 version, and thought that a contemporary setting would run into character problems - namely finding someone as naive and innocent as Rose in today's saturated media environment would be incredible.

So he decided to set it in the 1960's, namely 1964. This chimed with the theme of youth supplanting the older generation in the book, as youth society then was rebelling and respect for institutions such as the church and government were collapsing. A time of change.

Also the aspect of "cool" that accompanies the sixties, along with the opportunity to make a fantabulous soundtrack didn't put off the producers apparently. Don’t underestimate this “cool” aspect, but also don’t let it direct the story in any way – story is that most important.

On that fundamental issue of story, Rowan realised, after analysing the book, that it was not a story about a gangster on the make, but rather a love story. A quick synopsis in case you’re not familiar with the tale.

Pinky is a viscous little psycho who almost singlehandedly wipes out the established gangster hierarchy in Brighton, but is seen committing one of the murders by innocent country girl Rose. However, instead of killing her as the reader expects, he decides to woe her, linking them in a perverse and almost a sadistic relationship. Ultimately he marries her…and that’s as much as I can remember (I read it years ago)

Rowan's take on this is that it was not a gangster film but a love story. He mentioned that Greene, when deciding to write about a virtue - love in this case - decided to examine it from it's exact opposite - hate. And there is much about Pinky that is hateful.

This was a method Greene was apparently very fond of. It's an inspired way to contemplate a subject. One explores a subject through it’s absence – the shadow it leaves or the whole it can’t fill. The yin yang symbol flashes to my mind here, two opposites only existing because of and in spite of each other. Without each other they can’t exist, though they are locked in constant conflict. Indeed, they define each other and bring each other into existence.

Yey, I'm a secret hippy.

That was about it on Brighton Rock, but he littered the talk with some great advice. Some snippets:

• Scenes need to add up to images to attract a good director
• The script should be the vessel for the best ideas of the people on the film - don't be precious about it.
• As a writer and director understand the story and you'll be open to new, good ideas. Don't understand the story and you'll panic and make the wrong decision.
• You need to play and experiment and fail - and that is allowed in TV land, but not at all in film.
• You can never get the brilliance that is in your head fully onto the page. If you think you have, then you're wrong.
• Have a writing structure (eg 9-5) as professionals have to write to order, not when they feel like it. But saying that, if you’re inspired, carry on.
• Writer's Block doesn’t exist -it's an excuse, fear, laziness, the internal editor. You can always write something - even if it's just a to kill list – and once you've done that, then you should be clear to start on the proper job.
• It's much harder to write originally than to adapt - though even with adaptation you encounter unique problems
• It's a vocation. Only write if you have to.
• Failure is the greatest way to learn.

He also talked at length about being a writer/director and the types of skills they involved. Both are very different obviously, but at heart the same absolute directive applies - put Story above anything else.

Directors need social skills to bring out the best in actors, and need to be able to play the political game of the industry, to navigate the media to one's advantage. They are like the managers of football teams - it's all in the planning and preparation - in effect, once that's done the film could conceivably be shot without them being present.

He also talked a bit about formatting screenplays - how they look, the white on the page. While it is good to keep dialogue and action paragraphs spare and lean, be careful of being too ambiguous - you have to hit just the right level of showing the story while not alienating the reader with big clunky paragraphs - and bear in mind your audience, which at the first hurdle will be overworked, underpaid script readers.

One way to try to evaluate what you've written is to imagine that your screenplay has been written by the most obnoxious, vain, arrogant idiot you can conceive - one who you want to tear apart. If you still like the script then, you might be onto a winner.

Well, hope these little notes of wisdom and insight help ya. Rowan came across as very pleasant, down to earth guys. I’ll certainly go see the film.

It's out in cinemas from 4th February.
Cheerio!

Cinema Quotas: Yay or Nay

The old quota argument has been rearing its seductive head recently, in a blog on the guardian and a bit of a discussion on the Shooting people. Being someone on the outside trying to break in, surprisingly I slightly favour it, though I'm far from well-informed on the matter.

However, Saturday night I learnt a little bit more. At a wedding I sat next to a guy who works the association that represents the interests of Cinemas in the UK. As I don't yet have an actual film to sell him I thought I'd fire the quota question at him. Bear in mind I'd had a few drinks so might be misquoting him - or just making it up.

A resounding no. He hates the Quota idea - thought it was an excuse to make crap films and pointed out that it removed competition - that if I made a film under a quota environment, then every other film made in the same environment would earn exactly the same amount as my one, regardless of how many tickets each film sold. Maybe on this I did mishear him, as I do find that rather hard to believe - surely a more nuanced system could be used?

But his other points were harder to argue against and indeed more encouraging - when I pointed out Hollywood's choke hold on distribution, he quickly came back with two factors that he said would soon be game changers:

Digitisation - not in production but in distribution. Currently, each film print (the film roll you put in the projector to project the film onto the screen) cost thousands of pounds to make and has to be physically distributed around the world. It has to be properly stored in cinemas and physically threaded and projected for each and every show. With the advent of digitisation you can send a film across a secure Internet link and just drag and drop it. This will bring costs down, allowing films to be copied for free and therefore involving less financial risk/investment from the distributor, so they can buy and show - hopefully - more films.

Social Media - It's changing our lives and our viewing habits. But it, combined with this digitisation in cinemas, will enable people to democratically vote as to what film they want to see in the cinema on say a Saturday night... interesting and empowering. But then the argument devolves from distribution ruling the marketplace / industry to marketing and hype ruling the industry, which social media can again influence but I think is still ultimately down to the bucks. So a slow improvement there maybe
While this guy was a complete free-marketer – trust the market, it will all work out – and politically my natural place is opposite, I can see some sense in his argument. Handing out free money to self-entitled media brats to make self-indulgent films is a worst case scenario that would come true to some extent – indeed, some would argue it already has under the defunct Film Council.

But my answer is that the market generally sinks to the lowest common denominator and must be artificially righted. The market seduces people into the choosing the easy way / easy entertainment. There is a scenario where people don't want to watch something challenging but if they are pushed into watching it then they are grateful afterward. However, it’s dangerous to say this because you come across as culturally elitist.

But then isn’t that is also part of the filmmaker’s remit – to answer a need they see in the cultural landscape, one that may not be popular but can still be important, and address it narratively. As Churchill said, democracy/the mob/the market is the best of a bad bunch of systems. To say the market it will look after itself is in some ways naive, and maybe self-delusional. It’s a way to wash our hands of the responsibility, put our trust in something we see as bigger than us but is in actual fact just a mess of complexities and not some wonderful self-organising higher intelligence. The market is not God – it is in fact the Frankenstein story, humanity creating a beast that will kill us. The market argument ignores that there’s an almost "moral" sense of quality that should be intellectually imposed – this may sounds hubristic or arrogant but I think that might be a failure of self-confidence more than anything else. Anyway, enough random thoughts on the market economy.
The Quota idea is a seductive one, and while I think it would be a good move I don’t see the government suddenly turning around and giving away money - it just ain't gonna happen. But maybe the future ain’t so bad even without quotas. Films will become more connected to the audience, more reactive to the audience, and fulfil the audiences needs more directly. Maybe it’ll even slim down the exec/middle man level and contact filmmakers directly to their audience. I just hope I’m wrong and people do choose those artistically, morally, and narratively challenging films.