THE ART OF ADAPTATION

Brighton Rock

Point of View
An exquisite masterwork showcasing British filmmaking at its finest; brimming with sexual tension, nail biting suspense and captivating intrigue, writer director Rowan Joffe is an exceptional visualist and storyteller, filling each frame of this stylish romantic noir thriller with meticulous detail.  Joffe draws the best out of his remarkable cast, particularly Sam Riley and Andrea Riseborough as the doomed lovers, Helen Mirren as a devilish femme fatale and Andy Serkis as a slimy gang lord. If you are looking for a tender love story that you can easily fall in love with, vibrant characters that jump of the screen, and a sumptuous Brighton of the 60s, this intelligent and charming film offers first rate entertainment. Reviewed by Daniel Dercksen.  Rating 5/5 

The Story
Adapted from Graham Greene's brilliant 1939 novel, BRIGHTON ROCK charts the headlong fall of Pinkie, a razor-wielding disadvantaged teenager.
At the heart of the story is the anti-hero Pinkie's relationship with Rose - an apparently innocent young waitress who stumbles on evidence linking Pinkie and his gang to a revenge killing that Pinkie commits.  After the murder, Pinkie seduces Rose, first in an effort to find out how much she knows and latterly to ensure she will not talk to the police. A love story between a murderer and a witness, can Pinkie trust Rose or should he kill her before she talks to the police? Can Rose trust Pinkie or is she next in line?

Writer-director Rowan Joffe
Director Roland Joffe's son Rowan is making his debut as a feature director with the film noir Brighton Rock. Joffe, whose mother is Tony Award-winning actress Jane Lapotaire ("Piaf"), wrote several TV movies in England, as well as the 2007 feature, "28 Weeks Later" and last year's George Clooney thriller, "The American." He wrote and directed the 2008 British TV movie "The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall," which won the British Academy of Film and Television Award for best single drama.

Joffe talks abour Brighton Rock
Did you have any trepidation choosing to adapt and direct such a well-respected book as "Brighton Rock," especially since the 1947 film version is a classic.
Yes. This film was in many ways a very, very foolish undertaking. It is my debut movie as a director and we are working in an industry where it's basically one strike and you are out. The reason why "Brighton Rock" is foolish in that context is that "Brighton Rock" is not a strategic career move. No matter how good the movie is, it will be compared to the black-and white classic. No matter how reverent or humble one's approach to the material is, you will be perceived by a large chunk of critics as arrogant and stupid, and they will set out to punish you for that.
A critc in the Telegraph started his review saying, "I haven't bothered to see this movie because it doesn't deserve to be seen."
That's pretty cheeky.Yes … I have to be honest with you, my career has taken a massive kick in the teeth because neither is it a massively commercial film or the most obvious or easily digested story because it is a period story. It was something I went into knowing I wasn't going to be rocketed to overnight success. But I decided to do it because I loved the project, and by love, I mean it wasn't a rational decision.
The film received three nominations last year from the British Independent Film Awards. Did the indie critics and audience embrace the film more than traditional critics and moviegoers?
The British Independent Film Awards seemed to enjoy giving us manifold nods, whereas more establishment areas of the industry, BAFTA and more old-fashioned broadsheets, I think decided that this wasn't worthy of that kind of consideration, which is a decision they made.
We also had some very, very tough competition. "The King's Speech" was probably the most successful British film of the period and we came out right up against that and "Black Swan." But the only thing I am sad about if I'm honest is that Andrea Riseborough's performance didn't get any award traction. She is the backbone of the film, I think.
Your "Brighton Rock" is based more on the original novel than the 1947 film.
Very much so. I said right from the outset I wasn't interested in doing a remake of the film. I don't like remakes. My feeling was this is one of the most popular, cherished and critically acclaimed books of the 20th century, so like a Jane Austen or a Shakespeare play, it is surely worthy of more than one adaptation. I think to a certain extent people bought that idea, but the '47 movie is so iconic, I think we never really escaped [comparisons]. That is probably why smarter and better and greater directors than me have steered clear of it.
The updated setting was one aspect that critics disliked, so what were the reasons for this?
I had many. There's nothing endemically 1939 about the novel, in fact Greene said so himself. I wanted the audience to feel like they were watching a contemporary film, not a period gangster film. I felt that at the heart of the novel there was a battle between Ida and her sense of traditionalism and the youth and rebelliousness of Pinkie. The backdrop of the Mods and Rockers riot of 1964 seemed like a good setting to demonstrate this. The time frame also worked well as at this time feminism was beginning to take off and Britain had its last hanging.
As well as a setting that suits the overarching narrative, there's also a really strong film noir aesthetic that permeates throughout the film, some exceptional uses of light and shadow really indicative of this. Was this something that he was keen to replicate?
Yes, in 1939 when Greene wrote the original novel, true crime stories were popular in the US. Brighton Rock was really to honour true crime in the UK and the best way to do that in the original film was to adopt the film noir style.
Wasn't Carey Mulligan set to play Rose but then left the project when she got "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"?
Carey Mulligan was not available at the last minute, and that massively reduced our budget. In fact, it almost derailed the entire movie. We were originally budgeted for about $20 million, and we ended up having to make it, let me say, for considerably less.
It was quite a challenge to make something epic and, I hope, visually exciting. We shot the whole film on lenses that were made in 1964, so the film is saturated from the equipment on up with the feeling of the time it is set in. We shot it with a real passion for the traditional British cinema -- the kind of cinema that Britain used to produce in the 1960s and 1970s -- the old epics. We wanted as much of that as we could. Because cinematographer John Mathieson has such a robust professional and financial relationship with outfits like Panavision and Technicolor, we were able to call in a lot of favors and shoot a much bigger movie than we could actually afford to shoot.
Did you get any pointers in directing from your father?
You know, Dad is normally in some far-flung part of the world or pointing a movie camera, so I don't always get to talk to him. But what I actually take with me on the set is more from my mum. Mum has been a theater actress for many years. I guess what I take is sort of a love of, respect for and hopefully an understanding of what makes actors tick.
Did you always aspire to go into the family business?
No. in fact it was the opposite. It was because Mum and Dad were in the industry I grew up determined to have nothing to do with it. I trained for some time and practiced oil painting. At the same time I wrote plays at college and when I graduated and came to live in London. Filmmaking only came together with the synthesis of those two things fairly late in life after I had written a few screenplays. I just got annoyed as a screenwriter having to give my screenplays away to someone else to direct. It was a little bit like having to give a baby away.
I felt that writers are treated a little unfairly because all movies end up being the director's baby. I thought I could either sit around and complain about being a screenwriter or I can have a go at directing. Fortunately, my first few goes, which were for British television, weren't a totally disaster and I ended up getting a BAFTA.
Are you working on another movie?
As a writer, I have just written a movie for Mike Newell called "Agent Zigzag," and as a director I am adapting a New York Times bestseller, "Before I Go to Sleep," which is to be executive produced by Ridley Scott and something I hope to start shooting by the end of the year. It's very much a thriller.

One of the greatest villains in literary history
When asked the inevitable question why make another 'Brighton Rock', producer Paul Webster is quick to point out that they have not made a remake of the film, but an adaptation of the book.  'It's just a brilliant story', says Webster.  'It features one of the greatest bad guys ever created in Pinkie Brown.  Graham Greene was in love with cinema and is eminently adaptable because he writes so cinematically'.
As well as a knack for bringing much-loved novels to the big screen, Webster (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement), is also constantly on the look out for up and coming talent.  So when writer/director Rowan Joffe first caught Webster's attention after he had seen Joffe's first TV drama, he didn't waste any time tracking him down and making his interest known.  Webster explains, 'I'd seen Secret Life, which was produced by Jane Featherstone at Kudos, and thought it was brilliant.  So I hunted Rowan down and literally said "I'm there for you if you ever want to make a feature film".'   
The idea of making another adaptation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock came about through Ron Halpern, who is in charge of exploiting StudioCanal's back catalogue, and Will Clarke, who ran Optimum in the UK.   Kudos were talking to them about a number of titles they were interested in remaking, one of which was Brighton Rock.   
Unbeknown to Webster at the time, Joffe's US agent, Bob Bookman, who is also StudioCanal's agent was thinking along the same lines.  'There was some kind of morphic resonance going on', laughs Webster. 'Suddenly all the elements came together and next thing we knew we were making the film'.  But Rowan was not so sure about the idea when the project was first put to him, as Webster points out.  'I remember talking to Rowan at the time and he just said "No I couldn't possibly do it.  It's such a famous film and book, it's far too daunting; we're on a hiding to nothing."  But, as I have now learnt about Rowan, he went away and thought things over in an incredibly detailed way and came back to me and said "right, I know how to do this".  He pitched it back to me and it was a brilliant take on the original story'.
From StudioCanal Features' point of view it was vital for the company's first production project to be something unique and wholly British, as Will Clarke,  at that time CEO of Optimum Releasing, explains. 'We'd already identified the project as the first of our production ambitions as we wanted something unique and cinematic.  We just hadn't found the right 'take' to make us take the leap.  This was until Rowan pitched us his idea for the film, which blew us away.  Around the same time we were speaking with Paul Webster on a few ideas and he mentioned a great writer/director, Rowan Joffe, who had done some wonderful work that he wanted to work with. The stars seemed aligned so it was a no-brainer for us from then on in'.
'Just the word 'remake' was enough to put me off the whole idea', says Joffe, 'because the original 1947 movie is, as we all know, a classic and has this extraordinary performance by Richard Attenborough which, given the time, was really quite ground-breaking.' 
But when Rowan thought more in terms of the book, he changed his mind. 'In my view, Brighton Rock could be considered the same way a Shakespeare play is - in that it is a strong enough work of literature that it deserves more than one adaptation.  When I re-read the book I got very excited by the character of Pinkie. Very excited by his relationship with Rose and very excited by the possibility of making a movie that was truer to the book in some ways.  Obviously the original film was co-written by Graham Greene himself so to that extent we could never equal or better the authenticity of his script but because we weren't labouring under the censorship and morals of the late forties, what we could do is make a film that was as dark, violent and as perversely sensual as the book.  That was one of the reasons I thought I'd like to have a go.'
Joffe's first task when approaching the project was to decide when to set the film. 'My initial thinking was do I set the movie when the book is set i.e. 1939 or try and bring it to modern day?'  For many reasons setting it in the modern day didn't work. Some were technical in that the story hinges on the playing of a record and the idea of a jumping CD didn't seem to have the same romance, but there was a more profound reason a modern day setting wouldn't work.  For the story of Brighton Rock to be really effective you have to believe in the idea of the innocence particularly embodied in Rose.  The world we live in now is one where it is almost impossible to exist with that degree of naivety.  Simply the existence of televisions in everyone's homes and the internet and everything else meant that you couldn't create a convincingly sheltered character, so for that reason I needed to find another way to make it modern without compromising the story'.
Joffe came up with the idea of setting the film in 1964 because he felt that year represented the beginning of modernity.  It would still have a contemporary edge but more importantly it meant a chance to explore one of the most interesting periods of modern history in terms of the change in youth and gang culture as well as in the British legal system. 
'The novel is about the rise through the gangland ranks of a 17 year old hero', Joffe explains. '1964 was the first time in British history that teenagers flexed their muscles economically, culturally and physically.  Plus of course Brighton was the setting of the quasi-riots between emerging teenage Mods and older Rockers, which contextualizes Pinkie's 'youth rebellion' perfectly.   1964 was a year after off-track gambling was legalized, spawning more than a hundred betting shops a week up and down the country and engendering, paradoxically, a massive wave in organised crime. The Sixties was the era of the great British gangster, the kind of working class hero that the frightened and ambitious Pinkie longs to be. It was also the last year in which the death penalty was actively carried out.  The threat of hanging would be a crucial motivation in Pinkie's desperate attempts to get rid of witnesses to his revenge killing.  So it just seemed an almost God-given year to set the film in. I will never know if Graham Greene would have approved but it was a very Greene-like time to tell the story'.
One of the other key elements of the original story was Catholicism, which was at the root of much of Greene's writing, particularly in exploring the power of good, evil, Heaven and Hell as he did in 'Brighton Rock'.  Therefore, perhaps surprisingly, in his original script Joffe decided to leave out any overt references to Catholicism through anxiety on the part of the investors as to how an audience might respond to it as a theme in the film.  But having taken it out, everyone involved soon realised their mistake, as Paul Webster explains. 
'Once we tried it without the emphasis of Catholicism in the story and the moral conflicts the key characters have as a result, it all fell flat on its face and it soon became clear that this was the beating heart of the story'.   Joffe continues, 'Greene converted to Catholicism in order to marry the woman he was passionately in love with and this engendered a life-long love/hate relationship with the Catholic Church.  Saying that, Catholicism was something that fascinated him and I think something that he approached in a very human and a very intellectual manner.  So it was not just a theme in Brighton Rock but the whole of Greene's oeuvre and absolutely endemic to Pinkie and Rose's characters.  But also what makes Brighton Rock more than a crime thriller is that it's not just the noose that Pinkie's frightened of but the possibility of eternal damnation, which lends the story an epic scope.'
When asked about his intention to stay truer to the book, Joffe explains, 'the creative process behind writing the original screenplay is still something of a mystery.  For example, regarding the famous last scene of the movie where the record gets stuck and the only part of Pinkie's message we hear is 'I love you, I love you, I love you..', Greene and co-writer Terence Rattigan famously fought over whose idea it was, so we can never really know Greene's creative process in any great detail.   What Joffe did go back to the book for was his inspiration for the murders of Hale and Spicer.  In the 1947 film Greene appeared to shy away from the brutality of the original book where it is hinted that Fred Hale was choked to death by Pinkie with a stick of rock, with Hale pushed off the ghost train in the original film. Joffe transferred this idea to Spicer's death.  'In the original movie Spicer falls down some stairs which I found slightly less dramatic for a modern audience than the perverse, violent and brutal death with the stick of rock'.

Finding their Pinkie & Rose
Despite inhabiting them more than 60 years ago, Richard Attenborough left some pretty big shoes to fill in terms of finding a 'Pinkie' for the film.  As Joffe recounts, 'The biggest fear I had when I was writing and as we began casting was that I wouldn't find a Pinkie.  It wasn't so much that I wanted to find a better Pinkie than Attenborough but I felt that if mine was not at least equal to him in some way then the movie would get a critical panning, so I was very nervous about who to cast.   I'd seen and loved Sam Riley in Control and this was a very different movie, although there were similarities in that both the characters of Ian Curtis and Pinkie had dark hearts.   So Sam came and met us all and the minute he walked in I thought my God, this an actor unlike any other English actor alive today.  He is someone with all the charisma and good looks of Alan Delon but he's also got a kind of edge and a mischief and occasionally a demonic ability too.  There's something wonderfully shrewd and manipulative about the Pinkie that Sam has managed to deliver and I knew pretty much the minute I met him that I wanted to offer him the part'. Read more

Creating a modern classic film noir
Rowan Joffe readily admits his initial idea of how he wanted the film to look was heading off in a different direction before he talked to Director of Photography, John Mathieson (Robin Hood, Stoned, Hannibal, Gladiator).
'I met with a number of DoP's and the minute John walked into the room I could almost smell the talent.  Of course I had seen the work he'd done, and I was bowled over that someone who'd shot Gladiator would even consider working with a first time feature director. But John loved the script and when I talked about wanting to partly enhance its modernity by shooting in a fairly modern documentary style John was quite blunt about it and said, "look, that modern documentary style for me characterises the worst 10 years of British cinematography in history; I think you should have a rethink".  I realised he clearly had his own mind and I liked what that brought out in me because it forced me to delve deeper and rethink my strategy.  And what John provided us with is a piece of classical cinematography and a real understanding of what noir means'.  Read more


THE ART OF ADAPTATION


HOME