Tweet
3 February 2011
Last updated at 20:13 ET
By Neil Smith
Entertainment reporter, BBC News
The stars and director of Brighton Rock discuss their new version of Graham Greene's 1938 novel - a slasher film with a difference.
Young bucks with blades terrorising the community? Rival gangs caught up in tit-for-tat violence? The newspapers are full of such lurid stories.
The same applies to Brighton Rock, in which an ambitious gangster with a razor-slashed face plots to better his station within the criminal fraternity.
The year is 1964, three decades on from the period in which Graham Greene's novel is set, but still removed enough to seem sedate and quaint to modern sensibilities.
Yet for writer-director Rowan Joffe the time is a seminal one - an era, he says, "when young men first began to flex their muscles against an older generation".
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Actor Sam Riley tells BBC Breakfast how nervous he felt working with John Hurt and Dame Helen Mirren
"It started off as a logistical issue really," he explains, when asked how his movie - part funded by BBC Films - differs from the 1947 version starring Richard Attenborough.
"If you're going to adapt the book, what can you do differently from what the Boulting brothers did?"
The answer, he continues, was to update the story to a Brighton under siege both from warring Mods and Rockers and from razor-wielding thugs like lead character Pinkie.
"We initially explored making it contemporary but it didn't work," explains the son of Oscar-nominated film-maker Roland.
"1964 felt a right tipping point into modernity."
From the scooters tearing along Brighton's seafront to the pop tunes emerging from its illuminated jukeboxes, the film evokes its period with style and fidelity.
'Dark piece'
For British actress Andrea Riseborough, there is something fundamentally timeless in this story of doomed love, Catholic guilt and sociopathic tendencies.
"They're not really of their time," she says of Pinkie and her character Rose, a mousy waitress he sets out to seduce when he learns she can implicate him in a hoodlum's murder.
"Rose is not really on the cusp of 1960s sexual liberation, nor in the book was she particularly tied to the 1930s."
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Interviews and colour from Brighton Rock's London premiere
"Pinkie's never belonged to a youth movement," agrees actor Sam Riley, who came to the role following his eye-catching portrayal of Ian Curtis in 2007 biopic Control.
"He doesn't like music or people. He just wants the accessories of power."
The violence in Joffe's film, though stylised, is considerably more graphic than that presented in John Boulting's version.
Yet Riley is fairly confident it will not provoke any copycat incidents. "I hope we're not going to be responsible for a wave of acid and knife crime," he laughs.
"There's a lot of knife crime they say these days, but I don't know whether many lads from Brixton are going to be queuing up to watch our film," he continues.
So who will? Though its cast includes the likes of John Hurt and Dame Helen Mirren, Greene is hardly the box office draw he once was.
In the 1940s and 1950s his works were regularly adapted for the screen, while his screenplay for The Third Man gave British cinema one of its undisputed masterpieces.
But since his death in 1991, film adaptations have been more sporadic, with 1999's The End of the Affair and The Quiet American (2002) being the only ones of note.
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Riseborough on Brighton Rock and her next role as Wallis Simpson in Madonna's film WE
Like those films, Brighton Rock is steeped in a brooding atmosphere that reflects its creator's fascination with moral and spiritual decay.
"It's a dark piece and that darkness is Mr Greene's," says Joffe. "It doesn't feel like an average gangster movie or love story.
"I know I wrote the script with Greene on my shoulder looking extremely grumpy throughout the whole process."
Yet actor Phil Davis was able to find humour in the disparity between his role as an over-the-hill mob minion and an earlier, iconic appearance.
"Thirty-one years ago I was in Quadrophenia so it was something of a trip down memory lane," he recalls.
"I'd been one of the kids on the bike, and now I was the old bloke saying, 'Ain't it disgusting?'"
Brighton Rock opens in the UK on 4 February.
Powered By WizardRSS
Young bucks with blades terrorising the community? Rival gangs caught up in tit-for-tat violence? The newspapers are full of such lurid stories.
The same applies to Brighton Rock, in which an ambitious gangster with a razor-slashed face plots to better his station within the criminal fraternity.
The year is 1964, three decades on from the period in which Graham Greene's novel is set, but still removed enough to seem sedate and quaint to modern sensibilities.
Yet for writer-director Rowan Joffe the time is a seminal one - an era, he says, "when young men first began to flex their muscles against an older generation".
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.Actor Sam Riley tells BBC Breakfast how nervous he felt working with John Hurt and Dame Helen Mirren
"It started off as a logistical issue really," he explains, when asked how his movie - part funded by BBC Films - differs from the 1947 version starring Richard Attenborough.
"If you're going to adapt the book, what can you do differently from what the Boulting brothers did?"
The answer, he continues, was to update the story to a Brighton under siege both from warring Mods and Rockers and from razor-wielding thugs like lead character Pinkie.
"We initially explored making it contemporary but it didn't work," explains the son of Oscar-nominated film-maker Roland.
"1964 felt a right tipping point into modernity."
From the scooters tearing along Brighton's seafront to the pop tunes emerging from its illuminated jukeboxes, the film evokes its period with style and fidelity.
'Dark piece'
For British actress Andrea Riseborough, there is something fundamentally timeless in this story of doomed love, Catholic guilt and sociopathic tendencies.
"They're not really of their time," she says of Pinkie and her character Rose, a mousy waitress he sets out to seduce when he learns she can implicate him in a hoodlum's murder.
"Rose is not really on the cusp of 1960s sexual liberation, nor in the book was she particularly tied to the 1930s."
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.Interviews and colour from Brighton Rock's London premiere
"Pinkie's never belonged to a youth movement," agrees actor Sam Riley, who came to the role following his eye-catching portrayal of Ian Curtis in 2007 biopic Control.
"He doesn't like music or people. He just wants the accessories of power."
The violence in Joffe's film, though stylised, is considerably more graphic than that presented in John Boulting's version.
Yet Riley is fairly confident it will not provoke any copycat incidents. "I hope we're not going to be responsible for a wave of acid and knife crime," he laughs.
"There's a lot of knife crime they say these days, but I don't know whether many lads from Brixton are going to be queuing up to watch our film," he continues.
So who will? Though its cast includes the likes of John Hurt and Dame Helen Mirren, Greene is hardly the box office draw he once was.
In the 1940s and 1950s his works were regularly adapted for the screen, while his screenplay for The Third Man gave British cinema one of its undisputed masterpieces.
But since his death in 1991, film adaptations have been more sporadic, with 1999's The End of the Affair and The Quiet American (2002) being the only ones of note.
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.Riseborough on Brighton Rock and her next role as Wallis Simpson in Madonna's film WE
Like those films, Brighton Rock is steeped in a brooding atmosphere that reflects its creator's fascination with moral and spiritual decay.
"It's a dark piece and that darkness is Mr Greene's," says Joffe. "It doesn't feel like an average gangster movie or love story.
"I know I wrote the script with Greene on my shoulder looking extremely grumpy throughout the whole process."
Yet actor Phil Davis was able to find humour in the disparity between his role as an over-the-hill mob minion and an earlier, iconic appearance.
"Thirty-one years ago I was in Quadrophenia so it was something of a trip down memory lane," he recalls.
"I'd been one of the kids on the bike, and now I was the old bloke saying, 'Ain't it disgusting?'"
Brighton Rock opens in the UK on 4 February.
Powered By WizardRSS