(Charong and I are now living in Los Angeles, having moved here from Miami in August 1997.) My birthday today. A videotape of The War Zone screen tests arrives, together with a birthday card from Tim, Dixie, Sarah and everyone in the production office – a great birthday gift. I play the tape, a little nervously but mostly feeling confident that Tim has chosen well.
We have discussed the casting of the parents, Ray Winstone and Tilda Swinton, and I am excited by both, because we want parents who in the first instance appear sympathetic – a father especially who, on first sight, would seem like a good father, a man to be trusted, at least as far as his children’s welfare is concerned.
It is the children who are still to be decided upon, because we want newcomers who have never acted before.
The tape contains two or three options each for Tom and Jessie, from the thousands of teenagers who have been seen by the casting director – although I know that Tim is already fairly clear in his mind whom he would like to use. Ray and Tilda generously offered to take part in screen tests with the kids, and Seamus McGarvey, our brilliant young director of photography, has shot them in the widescreen format we intend using for the film, so when I see the tape, there is a real sense of how the film might be.
I watch the early tests with interest, but I know Tim has saved his favorite family for last, and when I see them, I know he’s right.
Lara Belmont, as Jessie, has the perfect mix of really interesting beauty (as opposed to simply glamour), vulnerability and strength that her character needs, and Freddie Cunliffe has the nervous smile, the awkwardness and what looks like a totally believable potential for trouble that immediately brings Tom alive for me.
It’s funny to think that, like a fabricated Hollywood publicity story, Lara has actually been found by our casting director walking through Portobello Market in London, and Freddie turned up to an open casting only because his friend wanted to play the role of Tom – Freddie merely thought he might get a day’s work as an extra.
Aside from the fact that Lara and Freddie look so good individually, I am encouraged by how believable they are as brother and sister – and how complete they look with Ray and Tilda as a family. At one point in the screen test, Ray tousles Freddie’s hair (and looks as if he might clip his ear, should it become necessary) and Lara makes a joke, then they all gather together – and I can see that the War Zone family I first imagined back in 1983, when I was about to become a parent myself and first outlined the book, has become a flesh and blood reality.
I call Tim and Dixie at home, to tell them how happy I am with the screen tests. Tim seems relieved. There are only a couple of weeks now before I fly to England to meet the cast and crew, and go down to Devon to look at our locations. Our start date for the film is Monday, March 2nd. It’s finally happening!
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Friday February 20, 1998
I fly into London early this morning, tired after the long haul from Los Angeles. I never sleep well on planes. I go straight to Dixie’s flat in Hampstead, where I’m staying. I take a bath, then make it back into the West End just in time for The War Zone production meeting/pre-shoot cast and crew party at the Berkeley Square Cafe.
I feel somewhat jetlagged and slightly dazed as I sit listening to various members of the production discuss their needs and expectations. With Lara and Freddie in mind, Tim and Dixie have deliberately assembled a crew who are as friendly and positive as possible – in Tim’s words, people the kids would want to hug, if necessary.
This is a difficult subject to deal with, so we want the process of making the film to be at least bearable, and at best a memorable experience for all involved. Most of the crew has made a huge effort to work on the film and feels it’s an important subject that needs to be addressed. Lara and Freddie’s parents have read the script and are aware of what’s involved, as are Lara and Freddie themselves. The last thing any of us wants is for the production to scar the kids in any way.
After some words of encouragement from Tim the meeting breaks up and the party begins. Christine and Christine, two friends of mine who have a chocolate shop in Brighton, have made a special War Zone cake for the occasion. I am introduced to everyone, but after a while the faces and identities start to melt into a jet-lagged blur.
Tilda and Freddie aren’t there, but I am especially interested to meet Ray and Lara. Ray is instantly likeable, a big man with a nononsense East London accent and a face you could love or fear in about equal measure. I sense him sizing me up, deciding whether I’m all right, and I reckon I’ve passed the test when he calls me ‘Al.’
Lara is simply beautiful – slight, deceptively vulnerable at first, aware of all the difficulties the film might raise, but at the same time confident and excited. She has a great laugh – more than anything, I remember her laughing at the party. I have a very encouraging conversation with her younger sister, who has read the script, too, and thinks it important that Lara does it.
I meet Kate Ashfield, who will play Lucy, a local Devon girl who cleans house for the family, and who must suggest the subtlest sense that something is wrong, while also dealing with Tom’s teenage crush on her. And I talk to Aisling O’Sullivan, the Irish actress who has the highly challenging role of Carol, Jessie’s London friend and mentor.
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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
I go to bed filled with anticipation about the start of production tomorrow. It’s been almost ten years since the book was published, during every year of which I have worked on various drafts of the script with various producers and directors. Now we are finally getting to make it!
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Monday March 2, 1998 Didn’t sleep well last night – I’m still on California time. I get up at 5:30 a.m., email Charong in Los Angeles, then shower and wait for the minibus to take us to the production base at Hartland Abbey at 7:00. From there, after a communal breakfast amid a bustle of energy and nerves, we go to the house, where Tim, Seamus and the crew are already setting up for the first shot – which is also one of the first shots in the film, of Tom cycling up to the Devon home he hates.
Tim looks totally comfortable as a director, answering the endless questions from every direction that a film shoot entails, looking through the viewfinder to make sure he’s happy with the composition, joking with Freddie to keep him relaxed. I wonder if for Tim there’s an element of acting the director – and when the actuality takes hold.
We turn over at 9:00 a.m., with the weather providing just the backdrop Tim wants: moody skies, a little rain, the house suitably isolated and desolate against the landscape. It’s a strange feeling to know that the camera is turning and the film has really started. There is a little cheer and a round of applause once the first take is in the can.
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Tuesday March 3, 1998 Our second day of shooting – and my last in England before I fly back to LA to write another draft of Among the Thugs. Tim wants me around for the whole of the shoot – which is unusual. Ordinarily the writer is the last person anyone on a film unit hopes to see once shooting has started, especially directors, who often feel threatened that the writer will be watching hawk-like for every word that is changed – but I’m contractually bound to do the script for Kiefer, and anyway I feel uncomfortable being on a film set for too long, even if it’s my own work that’s being filmed.
Today is fine because Tim’s wife, Nikki, is here and we have a chance to chat, but mostly, unless I have something specific to do such as rewrites, I’d rather not be around.
Before I leave to be driven the four or five hours to Heathrow (I’m staying in an hotel overnight and flying home early tomorrow), I watch the first day’s rushes – the material we shot yesterday of Tom cycling up to the house, and of Ray, Tilda, Freddie and Lara inside.
It looks amazing, rich and darkly textured, with the impact of a European film – even a touch of Tarkovsky, whose Mirror is one of my all-time favorite works. Seamus has done an incredible job lighting our film, giving it the gentle, classical feel Tim always wanted.
The moment when Tilda washes Ray’s bare back in the kitchen, after he has come home from work, looks unlike anything I have seen on screen in recent years: a tender exchange between a loving, adult couple – literally a slice of kitchen-sink drama, but with a visual beauty that the trademark British films of the 1960s usually lacked.
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Sunday March 22, 1998 Today I call the cottages in Devon from LA and have a long chat with Tim, Ray, Dixie and Michael Carlin, who were all having dinner/ getting drunk together.
They keep asking why I’m not there! They have now shot the scene between Ray and Lara in the shelter (which the locals are calling ‘the old shelter’, a tribute to the art department’s weathering process), and I think they are all very glad to have got through it.
Ray has rationalized it by saying that unt
il that point, he had never really had to push himself as an actor. Lara found it utterly draining, but seems comfortable talking about it now. The film is about to enter its fourth week of shooting, of an eight-week schedule. Charong and I are planning to go to England for the final two weeks. As we finish our conversation, Tim says firmly, ‘Get your arse over here!’
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Wednesday April 15, 1998
Charong and I arrived in London from LA on Monday, and the weather couldn’t be more different now than it was in late February. Whereas then there was an Indian spring (if such a thing exists), now England is back to full-on winter. The War Zone is night-shooting outside London, near Borehamwood, and today, as we are driven to the location around 4:00 p.m., huge golfball-sized snowflakes are falling but thankfully not settling.
Tim is shooting the nighttime car crash that comes near the start of the film, and by the time the stunt driver is ready to go around midnight, the snow and the icy rain that followed it have stopped. Even though we have worn warm, waterproof clothes, the wardrobe department has provided us with extra layers, and we are glad that they have. It is icy cold in the dark, but the excitement and tension – flipping a Volvo over a fallen tree is expensive, and you can’t do it too often on our budget – creates a camaraderie among everyone present.
The first take of the car crash goes perfectly. The Volvo’s headlamps cut through what looks like a dark country lane (actually a private road, necessary for legal and safety reasons), then the car hits a ramp hidden by the fallen tree, shoots up into the air and turns over, landing with a dull thud and the sound of its dying engine and spinning wheels. The cameras covering the scene continue to turn as the dust settles, then our first assistant director, Nick Heckstall-Smith, checks that the driver is safe, and, although it is a perfect take, a second Volvo is flipped, as a backup.
The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition Page 29