It's been 64 years since Graham Greene's dark thriller about youth, corruption and violence was first adapted for the screen. What prompted writer/director Rowan Joffe to develop the new version now screening across the UK? It turns out that it started with a merger of two leading independent film production companies.
"Studio Canal had purchased Optimum Releasing and part of that purchase involved owning Optimum's back catalogue, their library of movies, one of which was Brighton Rock," he explained at a London press conference. "So I was initially asked to write a remake, which I said I wasn't interested in doing. But my curiosity was piqued and I went and found my old A-level copy of Brighton Rock and re-read it, and then I went back to them and said 'How about doing a straight adaptation of the book?'"
The suggestion was accepted but led to new difficulties. "The next question was when to set it. You've got three choices. You either set it in 1939, which was a no-go for me because that would have been a remake. Or you make it contemporary, so I wrote a treatment that was set in the present day and it began to collapse very quickly around Rose's character, because I found it hard to sustain that level of innocence in a culture that's full of internet and television. Or you look for a third way, so I did, and 1964 just kept coming up as the right time to set the movie.
"You had youth rebellion, you had the last year of the death penalty, you had the first time that British society had really questioned the authority of the church, and you had women having a new voice. You also had the whole country in a schism - if you read Bernard Levin's Run It Down The Flagpole - of, is the way forward to look back to the older pre-war generation and values, or is it to embrace modernity? That age versus youth battle seemed to me to be intrinsic to the novel. And the finally there was a huge crime wave, as a paradoxical result of illegalising gambling. So it felt as if I could sit down with the ghost of Greene and explain, these are the reason's I'm setting it now, and he wouldn't totally despise the decision-making process."
Actress Andrea Riseborough, who plays the heroine, Rose, said that Greene's work had always been a huge influence on her, but that "fortunately I hadn't read Brighton Rock. Reading the book was really detrimental to my development as Rose. It's like reading the inner workings of Pinkie's brain and I found it really unhelpful. So I spoke to Rowan and he quite rightly said, stop reading it, and I did. Also, because we weren't making a remake, little gems that I could get from the book, where Rose was concerned, were wonderful, because we were creating a different version of the same truth. Rowan had gone straight back to the thematic core of the book. I felt when I read the script that it was a very pure representation of what the book was about."
So what made the book so important to Rowan? "It's a little bit like when you fall in love with someone and then someone else asks why you're in love with that person, and when you list all the reasons you're not really communicating the essence of your feelings," he shrugged. "I think my relationship with the book is a kind of unhealthy adoration of it. You have to have that if you're going to spend two years of your life and then quite possibly get so panned by the critics that you never make another movie. You'd better love that book."
Love was also intrinsic to his approach to the story itself. "I'd always wanted to write a love story. But there's something in me that makes the word processor jam whenever I get to anything romantic or sentimental or happy. When I read Brighton Rock as a love story I thought it was the best ever told, because what Greene does is, for example, in order to write about courage he'll write about cowardice - The Power And The Glory is a perfect example of that. Likewise, in Brighton Rock, in order to write about love he writes about hate. That seemed to me to be the most interesting route to get to love. I think there is the possibility of love at the centre of this film and if there wasn't it would be unremittingly bleak and actually rather boring. The fact that Pinkie in the book has enough humanity to hate the way he feels about Rose is what makes him such an interesting character to me."
"The idea that love and hate are one and the same thing was tantalising to me," agreed Andrea. "I think it springs from Graham Greene's own relationship with religion and the fact that, really, Pinkie and Rose are incredibly similar in many ways. Pinkie is the first person in Rose's life who recognises her on any level. She hadn't even wanted to be recognised before and suddenly she's propelled into a world that involves being a sexual creature and belonging to someone and being revered by someone - from her perspective. All of Rose's bravery and tenacity and vigour are ignited by that feeling of first love. It's like a whirlwind."
Both were impressed by Sam Riley's performance in the leading role of Pinkie. "What's crucial about Sam in terms of Pinkie is that he's got to be beautiful," Rowan explained. "That's contentious of course because of Attenborough's important and faultless performance in the 1947 movie and I don't think one would describe his Pinky as beautiful, but what's crucial about that is that Greene describes Pinkie as a fallen angel. The most famous fallen angel, of course, was Lucifer, and Lucifer, the angel of light, was God's most beautiful angel. According to Milton it's precisely that vanity that was the beginning of Lucifer's corruption. I think a lot of that is in Pinkie and I think Sam has that kind of charisma. You get that there is something wonderfully sexy about corruption, and I think that's one of the things that appealed to Greene as a Catholic. Sam has that in spades, but then suddenly he'll look like a little knock-kneed schoolboy with slightly sticky-out ears, and that's Pinkie as well. Pinkie puts on a brave face but he's a frightened little kid, and Sam can do that, partly because Sam is that. The minute I met him I knew I wanted him."
Also vital was casting of Ida, a character with whom Greene himself was deeply disappointed in the original screen version. "I didn't add any extra scenes for her and if I did add some additional elements they compensated for many elements that I stripped away, " said Rowan. "The Ida in the 1947 film, played by Hermione Baddeley, is a tart with a heart. She's a hooker, that's why she's hanging out with these two guys in the pub before she meets Hale and the guys walk off with the money. She's on holiday in Brighton. And only Greene could pull off this incredible thing - that the character who spends the entire movie hunting Pinky and Rose has no reason to do so whatsoever. She doesn't know Fred Hale, she just burns with a sense of, kind of, secular justice. I didn't think that would wash with a contemporary audience and it's the one thing that keeps me awake at night, so what I did was to establish a prior relationship between Hale and Ida. In every other respect I was pretty true to the character in the book other than that, of course, she is now Rose's boss and proprietress of the tea room. I think she's got a very blousey barmaid past which is close to that original Ida but I wanted her to have a slightly sort of Daily Express, Tory authoritativeness. I think that by being the upwardly mobile proprietress of the tea room she's very much the establishment, versus youth, and I think that helped bring her to life.
"From the beginning I wrote the part with Helen Mirren in mind. I thought I didn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of getting her, but by hook and by crook, serendipity and fortuitousness, she became available. We had a window of 48 hours to get her agreement to be in this movie or the movie would basically have been binned. She did read it within that time and I met her in her extraordinary house by the Thames in the east of London - an old customs house - and I laid out a rucksack full of material on the table as I was waiting for her to come into the living room. She took one look at it and said 'Oh darling, I'm not that sort of actress.' Her only concern was who we were casting as Rose. I said she would have to trust me. Within two days of filming starting she came up to me and said 'You got the right Rose.'"
The other crucial element in the film was John Matheson's presence as director of photography. "There's this really specific time that I think John captured beautifully," said Andrea. "It's that washed-out, monochrome bleakness of the particular period, and then these pastel popping colours. Visual stimulus is really important to me as an actress."
Matheson was also helpful when it came to deciding where to film. "We actually filmed about a fifth of it in Brighton," Rowan noted, "with key locations like Madeira Drive and Brighton Pavilion and the beautiful huts along the boardwalk in Hove. I wanted to film more of it there but when I took John Matheson onto the pier and started explaining things he was very quiet. He explained the without putting our CGI budget through the roof he could give me about 20 degrees of camera movement while keeping it looking authentic. He suggested Eastbourne."
"Eastbourne is virtually untouched compared to the melange of telephone pylons and so forth in Brighton" Andrea added. "We stayed in a wonderful place called The Grand which was once a haunt for the Bloomsbury set, who used to go there at the weekends. A wonderful five star Fawlty Towers kind of place..."
"Fawlty Towers meets The Shining," said Rowan.
"Yes, definitely. It gave us a wonderful antiquated view of what Eastbourne was. The pier was also more quaint than Brighton which I think helped us a lot because it made the world feel a lot smaller. In terms of its relation to my own home town, Whitley Bay, it was very different. There was that same smell of candy floss that's been gone for many years but still somehow lingers in the air, sickly sweet; but in the north, of course, there's a sea spray attacking you. I was never a very good Geordie in that sense. I was wrapped in a ski suit."
The location itself was not the only thing complicated by the film's Sixties setting. "I wanted it to be filmed in the way that films in the Sixties were, so it would look authentic, so we even shot it on lenses from the Sixties," Rowan says. But the Sixties approach to health and safety was very different. "We bought the seafront for the day and so were were able to close it down. Because it was closed down it counted as a private road, and because of that the actors were able to ride scooters without wearing helmets - which of course they didn't in those days - and that was the only way around it."
Important to setting the mood was the music - or the lack of music. "I'm a big fan of ska," said Rowan, "and I reckon most mods in that era were listening to some ska so I would have liked to use a lot of that music in the movie, but ultimately I decided that was the wrong way to go because this is film noir, and also because Pinkie in the book is a character who despises music and despises sex and despises smoking and drinking, so I didn't want to make him a card-carrying mod. He just appropriates a bike because it gets him from A to B, a suit because he's vain, a flick-knife because he's a psychopath. That was enough. I didn't want to make my movie feel like I had Quadrophenia-ised Brighton Rock.
"I bought lots of books on film noir and I realised the more I read, the less I understood. In fact I became so confused about what film noir was that I became incapable of stringing a sentence together. People who know a lot more about film than I do I think rightly struggle to define the genre because there is something about it - perhaps its birth in German expressionism imported to the States - that is rule-breaking, so every time you set up a film noir rule another film noir comes along and breaks that rule.
"In the end I just relied on John, who said 'Film noir is basically a lot of uplighting and a lot of shadows on walls. That's all you need to know.' What I did feel was that if I stayed true to the book and to Greene's interest in true crime stories of the Twenties and Thirties, well, what Greene did was to take the classic characters of the gangster and the gangster's moll and put this extraordinary British and Catholic spin on it. To some degree we slipped over the boundaries of noir and into Gothic fairytale. Some critics have really attacked me for doing that but my feeling is that the book is larger than life. It's a very heightened and sort of poetic reality, like a bad dream."
Andrea echoed this, suggesting that one of the positive aspects of a bad dream - if indeed there are any - is the freedom to go with the flow. This same sense of recklessness could also be applied to her character and influenced her own reaction to some of the more treacherous moments in filming, such as the shots of her running along the cliff. "I wasn't scared because she wasn't," she explained. "Had I been standing there now, in my Mac, I might have been. It's impossible to be objective about it, you're just so much in the throes of the story. "
Brighton Rock is out now in cinemas across the UK.
