Sarah Gavron made her name with BBC film This Little Life in 2003, a film that won her a Bafta for Best New Director (Fiction) a year later.Brick Lane, an adaptation of the best selling novel by Monica Ali, is the director's big screen debut.
While the making of the film did court controversy Sarah has since been nominated for the Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer at the Baftas and Best Director of a British Independent Film at the British Independent Film Awards.I caught up with Sarah as she promotes the DVD to talk about her attraction to the novel and the filming process.
Brick Lane is your theatrical feature debut what was it about the novel that interested you?
Well it was really so much I mean I read it at the time when everyone else was reading it, you would go on the London underground and there were people of all ages and types reading it. And it actually did occur to me, and I wasn't thinking of it as a film then, how it was appealing across generations and cultures and I that it was because it was a human story. What I loved was this compassionate portrait of a family that was set against this shifting cultural landscape of London and this journey of a woman who was finding her voice and her place in the world and realising that a country that had so long been alien to her is in fact home. And so it was Nazeen's journey above all that drew me to it.
What were the main challenges in adapting the book as it does span twenty years?
Yeah, it was hugely challenging, and partly because sort of distilling it from this five hundred page novel that crosses two decades and satisfying it's many fans was a real challenge. What we set out to do was capture the spirit of the novel rather than be loyal to every moment, because we just didn't have the space to do that, we decided to focus very much on Nazeen.
We made a decision, quite late on in the script writing process having tried many things, to focus on the year 2001 and see it through the prism of that because that is the year than Nazeen meets Karim and her change begins, so we were able to chart her emotional journey.
And how did you deal with the cultural leap yourself was it a culture that you were familiar with or was it quite alien to you?
It was very alien to me, I mean I grew up in London and I knew Brick Lane and I had grown up around immigrant communities all my life however I didn't know that community at all for the inside, and that was a challenge and it was rather daunting but it was one, in many ways, I welcomed.
I think that there is a precedent in filmmaking for directors, you have to tell stories that aren't your own otherwise you make the same film over and over again. In some ways it can be useful standing at the doorway looking in on a world that you aren't totally familiar with your job is to pull out the human stories that are universal but the particular world of what makes it live.
So I made a decision very early on that we couldn't have made the film without the help and collaboration of many many people from that community who came on board as cast and crew in particular I took on board this associate director, that was the role he took on, and he worked alongside me, and he himself was a Bangladeshi London based film maker, so I worked very closely with him and then there were cast and crew, and they really do the work for you and it's your job to pull out the story.
How difficult was it to cast and what was the casting process like?
It was really hard to cast because no on one has cast out of that community before and there isn't a great tradition of acting in it, so it wasn't like you were finding them in the drama schools. So we decided, and also because we were doing an adaptation of a book where the characters are so beautifully described the audience were going to expect to see them as described, so I really had this philosophy of leave no stone unturned we went on this world wide search and it took about eight months.
For the character of Karim we did open auditions in the East London community and thousands actually turned out for that, and the girls we found them in the same way.
For Chanu for example went to south Asia, I went to Bangladesh and India, and met many many people and with Chanu we were three weeks away from shoot, the husband, and we hadn't found him many actors in that part of the world were not comfortable performing in English, which is obviously so important to Chanu. And we looked at some fantastic talent everywhere but finding the right age and the right type and the right physical type.
And then a casting director that we had in India came up with the name Satish Kaushik, who plays Chanu now, he was a well known Bollywood director but he hadn't been on anyone's radar because he had been busy directing but he had also played Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, which was a character I thought was very close to Chanu in many ways. We flew out to Delhi at the last minute and he took us to his restaurant that he owns and he then did his turn as Chanu and it just felt like he was born to play that role. And he was a very dedicated, meticulous, wonderful actor who was great to work with.
How much filming was done in and around the Brick Lane area?
It was done in an around the Brick Lane area in many ways because we shot the interiors of the flat in a studio we built, and we built that for practical reasons because those flats are very small and we needed something that we could work with and let the camera into and all that. We shot the exteriors of the estate a stone's throw from Brick Lane at Stepney Green, at a real estate there, and then we shot some of the street scenes on Brick Lane itself. We created the market on a back lott in a kind of deserted factory in east London just to have more control.
In terms of the issues of filming on Brick Lane we were made to feel very welcome, we went into that community for eight months and lots of people came on board and opened their doors to the actors so they could do their research and lots of people supported the project. It was only when we were three weeks into filming and we were going to shoot a scene on Brick lane itself we heard about this threat that we might be hurt if we filmed on Brick Lane itself.
But we soon discovered that it was coming from this very vocal but tiny minority group who had really latched onto things, some of which weren't even in the film or the book, they were concerned that there would be leech falling into a curry pot on Brick Lane which would ruin their business, but there is no such scene.
So it was based on speculation and rumour partly and it didn't represent the views of the whole community but nevertheless it was a story and it was a story in the press that gathered momentum. We didn't want anyone to be hurt so we relocated, we didn't stop filming or change anything, but we relocated and shot some other stuff then went back to Brick Lane, in a slightly scaled down way, once the protest in the media had stopped being reported and it had died down.
And do you know what Monica Ali's (author) reaction was to the film?
Yeah, I now know her very well and she has been incredibly supportive but I didn't know her at the beginning of the process, and she was very hands off to begin with and didn't get involved with the script or casting and that was her own choice she felt that we should make the film that we wanted to make. When we had a rough cut she came in and saw and , thank God, she really appreciated it and felt we had captured the spirit of the novel.
Watching Chanu, for example, was an unnerving experience watching her character walk off the page. And from that point onwards she has been incredibly supportive and brought ideas and she came to Toronto, where it premiered in the States, and at the Baftas and supported me through the process because she was very familiar with all the issues and the politics around it and how they should be dealt with so she's been great.
You made documentaries and shorts before going into film how much did this background help you as a filmmaker?
I think it really helped actually documentaries is such a different process because you are not working with actors but the good thing about it is you go into worlds that are not your own so that was very useful to me it made me less daunted about going into a culture that was outside my own.
Making shorts is such a good testing ground for trying out new ideas for working with actors and working with the crew. I have made eight shorts, no I think it's ten actually, some more successful than others but you try out many different things and it's a great way of experimenting.
How did you find the transition into film making was there a transition at all?
I think it's daunting and it's more physically challenging and there is more pressure on you because the shoots are longer and the budgets are higher and there is more people involved and the pressure is higher. The film that made the transition for me really, from shorts to longer length filmmaking, was the film this Little Life, which I made for the BBC, and that was a real learning curve and making Brick Lane was building on that with a bigger budget and more pressure. But yeah it's a hard transition but you kind of just get on with it.
Finally what's next for you?
Well I don't yet know I'm developing a couple of projects with Film 4, who made Brick Lane, and I'm very hopeful that one of them will happen because I had a really good experience working with them and they were really supportive to me as a new director and I hope one of them will happen.
Brick Lane is released on DVD 10th March
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in Sarah Gavron