Filmed against cultural tensions and a war of words, Brick Lane was a baptism of fire, director Sarah Gavron tells Louise East
When producer Alison Owen (Hear My Song, Elizabeth, Proof) asked Sarah Gavron to direct the film of Monica Ali's bestselling novel, Brick Lane, the first-time director thought long and hard about taking on the project.
"I knew it was going to be a hard film to make but there was so much in it that appealed to me, I wanted to do it." What nobody could have anticipated was just how hard filming Brick Lane would turn out to be.
The real Brick Lane is a narrow winding road in London's East End, its pavements lined with curry houses. For centuries, it's been home to wave after wave of immigrants and refugees, most recently Bengalis who now form the biggest Bengali community outside Bangladesh.
It was against this backdrop that Monica Ali set her 2003 novel, which told of newly-arrived "village girl" Nazneen and her new yet unfamiliar husband, Chanu. Production on the film was already well under way in the summer of 2006, when news broke of a newly-formed community action group, determined to halt filming.
What lay at the heart of their grievances was a claim that Ali's novel portrayed Bangladeshis as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated; "a despicable insult". Reporters were dispatched to Brick Lane. The leader of the Campaign Against Monica Ali's Film Brick Lane gave interviews hinting at blockades and the involvement of others "less peaceful than me".
The timing was delicate; it was not long since Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play, Behzti, had been closed after protests by Sikh pressure groups, and only months after the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill was passed.
Then the intellectuals got involved. In an extraordinary and public war of words, Germaine Greer and Salman Rushdie went to battle, the former backing the community's "moral right to keep the film-makers out", the latter responding by calling Greer "philistine, sanctimonious and disgraceful".
It was, says Gavron, "an amazing and compelling story running alongside the film itself. I wish I had distanced myself from it more because there was a disjunction between what was actually happening, and how it was being reported.
"We had done a lot of work with the community and we had a lot of people from the Bangladeshi community in the cast and crew who supported the project. Then there was this minority and because there was an implicitly violent agenda there, they got heard."
CERTAINLY, MUCH OF the community resentment appeared to be either manufactured or ill-informed. A scene in which a leech falls from a woman's hair into a cooking pot in a Brick Lane restaurant was widely criticised, yet no such scene exists in either book or film. At an organised protest, there were almost as many members of the press as protesters who numbered no more than 70, all but two of them male.
Nonetheless, Owen's production company, Ruby Films, decided to pull out and film elsewhere. "We weren't deterred," Gavron says firmly. "We relocated and then we came back. Of course, it impacted on us in many ways but it didn't affect what the film was. We came back and shot in Brick Lane. Brick Lane is in there."
The questions at the heart of the Brick Lane debate are as complex as the area's history. Does an artist have the same duty to represent the world as a documentary-maker - well-rounded, balanced, and factually accurate? Who has the right to make art about Brick Lane? Does Monica Ali (half Bangladeshi)? Does Sarah Gavron (not Bangladeshi)?
"What the Bangladeshi professionals who worked alongside me understood was that we weren't making a representation. It wasn't reality we were after, so much as an emotional truth. It wasn't about showing the [ council] estate as it was, but as Nazneen felt it was. For art's sake you take huge liberties with the truth because you create something emotionally truthful.
"Really, this is the story of a woman on a journey to find her voice, to find where home is and her place in the world. The shifting cultural landscape is the most interesting thing about London, but Brick Lane is not a story of them and us. It's a portrait of a family."
Regarding the troublesome notion of authenticity, Gavron cheerfully points out that she has "one foot in the camp" by virtue of being a woman telling a woman's story; "Let's remember that only 7 per cent of films are made by women. In film-making terms, women are much more of a minority than south Asians are.
"Culturally, I was an outsider but in film-making, there's a precedent for that. You see it with Shekhar Kapur making Elizabeth or Ang Lee making Sense and Sensibility. As a director, your job is to be a storyteller. You go into these different worlds and it's actually rather useful to be an outsider." Although this is Gavron's first feature film, she has a solid background in documentary-making. In 2003, she made her name with a television drama about premature birth, This Little Life, which scooped her two Baftas, including one for Best New Director, and the Dennis Potter Screeenwriting Award.
YET SHE CAME relatively late to directing, attending the National Film and Television School only in her late 20s. "Growing up, I didn't have a sense that you could be a director. I watched a lot of Hollywood movies and didn't think about whether that was authored or not."
Terence Davies's film, The Long Day Closes, changed all that and, influenced by directors such as Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and, later, female film-makers including Jane Campion, Mira Nair and Lynne Ramsay, Gavron's own thoughts turned to direction. "It was really only then that I realised that there was somebody at the helm of it and it could be a woman."
Quite apart from the objections of community groups, the film threw up a number of complications right from the start. Casting was tricky; after an eight-month search, Satish Kaushik, who plays Chanu, signed up just three weeks before filming. Then, too, there was the thorny issue of how to portray Nazneen's humorous, perceptive but very internal voice on the big screen.
"What we felt was that we'd use everything at our disposal to illuminate her emotional journey. One decision we made was to compress the time frame and set it in the year of her change so you could see what was happening to her. The other was to use a subjective camera, so what we created was not reality as such but the world as she experiences it."
While the controversy over the film's production has receded, it lingers still. In September, it was dropped, at short notice, as the 61st royal film performance, its content suddenly deemed "inappropriate". The London premiere was notable for its high police presence - and lack of protesters - and on the morning we meet, there are letters in the newspapers from the novelist, Hari Kunzru, and Lisa Appignanesi of English PEN in support of Ali, Gavron and the film.
"What's reassuring is that there's been a lot of intelligent debate in the press," Gavron says. "This film is not a representation, it's one story, a fictional story. People know that. They can chose to go and see a film and it's not representing their whole world. Hopefully, many more stories will come out of the community and that's the positive thing."
Brick Lane is on limited release
