Alan Clarke

[DB7]

The lost leader

Alan Clarke was one of this country's greatest directors, the man who gave us Scum, Made in Britain and Rita, Sue and Bob Too. Fifteen years after his death, his friends, colleagues and admirers remember him

Friday July 8, 2005
The Guardian

Paul Greengrass
Director, Bloody Sunday
The first Alan Clarke film I ever saw was Sovereign's Company, an old Play for Today from the early 1970s about a young man who joins his grandfather's regiment and is so fearful of being unmasked as a coward that, in the end, he beats another soldier to death. I was 15 years old, and I can still remember today the sense of shock and anger that I felt as I watched it. Later came Made in Britain, Elephant, Scum, Contact, The Firm - a string of the most intense, brilliant, truthful dramas ever seen on British television. These were groundbreaking films that chronicled the Thatcher years and uncovered the terrible cost of the Troubles. As a director, it seems to me that Clarke had it all - he had range, he had vision, he put energy on the screen, he could tell a story, he discovered fantastic actors and got great performances from them, and he could use a camera like a dream. He remains, in my eyes, quite simply the greatest British director of my lifetime.

Lesley Manville
Actor, The Firm
It was very liberating shooting The Firm. We shot the whole film on Steadicam, and very often Alan wouldn't do separate shots for close-ups, so the actors had a lot of physical freedom. It made a huge difference in the performances - that was paramount for Alan. I remember shooting the scene where Gary Oldman's character comes home to his wife (played by me) and they argue and fight and he forces her to the floor to have sex, and you think, this is awful - he's raping his wife. But in fact she starts to giggle and you realise that this is their "thing". This scene was cut for censorship reasons, but I remember shooting it in one long take. It was amazing - not acting in short bursts trying to maintain emotion, but performing it from beginning to end. The acting was everything for Alan, and extraordinary though it may sound, that is rare in a director.

Danny Boyle
Director, Trainspotting

I produced Alan Clarke's film Elephant for BBC Northern Ireland in 1989. There wasn't much producing involved, apart from making sure Alan's per diems were paid promptly. Instead, I got the chance to pick the brains of a genius director. His advice was pragmatic: "Get plenty of coverage as editing solves everything, and stop reading the Guardian - everything you need to know and everything you don't want to know is in the Sun."

Tim Roth
Actor, Made in Britain
Scum was the film that made me want to be an actor. I went to see it at the Prince Charles in London five or six times. I thought, if these guys could be actors, then I could, too. You got the feeling they were people he'd lifted off the streets. When he put me in Made in Britain, I'd never worked in front of a camera; I had no idea about it at all. From him I had a crash course in film-making. After that I assumed all films were made on Steadicam - it wasn't until I did a film with Mike Leigh that I realised that you could have a fixed camera. The fact you could follow the actors around and do long takes made Steadicam so attractive to him. You were limited only by the amount of film in the camera. With Alan, though he pushed you to immerse yourself in the character, it was never the Method, or any other particular system. When anyone asks me what my favourite experience was as an actor, I always hold up Made in Britain. I was as raw as I could possibly be. It was my first job, the one where I lost my virginity.

Corin Campbell Hill
Assistant director, The Firm

"When I catch up with the dog in my brain, I'll let you know," he would say. Alan was a walking stream of consciousness in his zip-up jumper, worn trousers and dishevelled hair. He'd walk and talk you down a hundred paths of how he might make the film. We walked and talked miles. Paratroopers in Northern Ireland, teenage drug addicts, football hooligans, hopeless unemployment - this was his world. He was brilliant to be around, ever-changing, ever-alive. And he fought hard. They were tough films to make and to get made. He pushed himself very hard. He wrestled the films out of himself. They did not come easily. He lived and breathed work. He was a man of contrasts, so warm and open, so quiet and solitary. His last fight - with cancer - was his hardest. He bore his pain with grace. He died so young with so much more to say. There was no one to touch him.

Sandy Lieberson
Producer, Rita, Sue and Bob Too

He had a different perspective from the rest of us and forced us to open our eyes to the society and culture he saw. I brought Alan to LA to spend a few months looking for ideas and stories that might be made in the US. He soon checked out of the comfortable hotel in Beverly Hills, moved to a small hotel on Hollywood Boulevard full of junkies and prostitutes, and then disappeared without trace for two months. We became friends, saw each other regularly, and eventually I had the good luck to produce Rita, Sue and Bob Too. Alan's losing battle with cancer brought many of his friends together for the last few weeks of his life. We met every evening in Alan's room at the nursing home, drank, smoked some dope, exchanged stories and managed to find things we could all laugh at. It made us all more human.

Gary Oldman
Actor, The Firm

The absence from the cultural landscape of a true giant like Alan is immeasurable. Culture moves through such remarkable people. Painting never looked the same after Picasso. Gangsters never looked the same after Coppola. Comedy never looked the same after the Marx brothers or Chaplin. These artists - and the cliche holds - had that most rare thing: true vision. Alan was such a visionary, plain and simple. Though many have tried, no one has replaced him. And I can't think of one British film-maker in recent years who hasn't been affected or influenced by Alan. I feel privileged to have been associated with him.

David Leland
Writer, Made in Britain

Alan once lived in a basement flat in Almeida Street with the writer David Yallop. He said it was so messy it was the only address in Islington where the bin men delivered. Alan and I worked on many projects - Russian labour camps, machinations of multinational corporations, interrogation and torture, and more. Even at the most serious moments, you were never far from a laugh. That I miss. The way we worked together - we were always together, we did all the research together. He would walk and talk. I think we covered every street in Geneva for Beloved Enemy. Once I'd written it, he wanted me to be there on set and during rehearsals. If an actor asked a question he couldn't answer, he'd say, "Dave, you've got a minute to answer, or I'm cutting it." He wasn't afraid to say he didn't know, until he got the answer that worked for him.

· The retrospective Under the Influence: Alan Clarke is at the Riverside Studios, London W6 (020-8237 1111), on July 14-17 and July 21-23 and the Curzon Soho, London W1 (020-7734 2255), on July 24. The two-disc collector's edition of Scum is available on DVD from Odyssey Quest at £15.99.

[alan gowdy]

Not disrespect to the memory of Mr Clarke but I detested "Rita, Sue and Bob Too". I felt dirty just watching it - unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. It could see little in it that merited attention. Sorry.

[Jim]

I tried watching that film as well. I couldn't stand more than half and hour of it before putting a video in.

I must be missing some point or other because I loathed Made in Britain as well!

Will someone tell me what entertainment value there is in junkies; prostitutes; scum-bags as subject matter? I would love to sit through these 3 films mentioned and give some positive feedback, but I don't think I could.

[sanndevil]

Originally posted by alan gowdy@Jul 8 2005, 01:28 PM Not disrespect to the memory of Mr Clarke but I detested "Rita, Sue and Bob Too". I felt dirty just watching it - unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. It could see little in it that merited attention. Sorry.

In that case I would strongly advise against you watching the dreadful SEX LIVES OF THE POTATO MEN. An order of magnitude worse than RITA!

[Clinton Morgan]

'Rita' is an excellent film. The 'zine 'Paintbox' (now an on-line music magazine called 'Is This Music?' http://www.bluejam20.freeserve.co.uk ) had an excellent article about the film. The screenwriter did not want a poncy artsy fartsy "look at me" film director. When Alan Clarke heard this he thought it was quite amusing.

[alan gowdy]

Originally posted by Clinton Morgan@Jul 8 2005, 05:30 PM 'Rita' is an excellent film. The 'zine 'Paintbox' (now an on-line music magazine called 'Is This Music?' A 'U' Trailer For An '18' Film ) had an excellent article about the film. The screenwriter did not want a poncy artsy fartsy "look at me" film director. When Alan Clarke heard this he thought it was quite amusing.

Oh well - we're all different in our tastes. No bad thing.

[Wetherby Pond]

Originally posted by JIM@Jul 8 2005, 03:12 PM Will someone tell me what entertainment value there is in junkies; prostitutes; scum-bags as subject matter? I would love to sit through these 3 films mentioned and give some positive feedback, but I don't think I could.

It's the same challenge as describing what "entertainment value" there is in the novels of Hubert Selby Jr - Clarke wasn't really in Sexy Beast of entertaining people. What he did - brilliantly, in my view - was give a voice to the kind of people who were either totally ignored or subjected to patronising caricatures: in this, he makes Mike Leigh look like a newspaper cartoonist and even Ken Loach look uncomfortably simplistic.

Trevor, the protagonist of Made in Britain, may be repellent, but he's also highly intelligent and articulate, and clearly capable of much more than he's ever been offered. He can spot jargon-ridden bullshit a mile off, largely because he's been fed it all his life - and because he's smarter and wittier than most of the authority figures who have to deal with him, he ends up running rings round them and they in turn wash their hands of him. Clarke doesn't offer any solutions, but he describes a situation that must have been replicated countless times in youth detention facilities (and schools, come to that) up and down the country.

Similarly, Scum is, in part, a forensic demolition of the failings of the Borstal system - which was wound up three years after the film was released (I've yet to determine whether there was a link, but the publicity can't have helped). Here, there are two central characters: Carlin, who chooses the old-fashioned Jimmy Cagney route of rising to the top via his fists, and Archer, who prefers to undermine the system by subverting it at every possible opportunity - very much like Trevor - while assorted subplots demonstrate how a system that's supposed to help troubled teenagers almost invariably ends up having exactly the opposite effect, by brutalising and demonising them to the point where the strong pick on the weak and the weak kill themselves. This isn't remotely entertaining - and nor should it be - but it's hard to ignore the force of its argument. (Incidentally, my comments apply to both versions, though I think the BBC one is generally superior)

Rita, Sue and Bob Too is the only one of that trio that's "entertaining" in any conventional sense, though the comedy is constantly undermined by reminders of the emptiness of its characters' lives - Rita and Sue clearly earmarked for early motherhood, either single or as part of an abusive relationship (such as the one that one of them already has with their father), while the horrible nouveau riche Bob is similarly going nowhere: just about the only thing that gives him any pleasure is getting off with teenage girls, who end up running rings round him. The only thing that keeps it from sliding into total despair is the way that Rita and Sue clearly regard the situation as one huge joke - they're not old enough to be truly pessimistic.

[Wetherby Pond]

Incidentally, it's just occurred to me that the reference to "junkies; prostitutes; scum-bags" is exactly the kind of pigeonholing generalisation that Clarke loathed - not least because in this context it's so flailingly inaccurate. How many junkies or prostitutes are there in the three films mentioned above - or in Clarke's output as a whole?

(Heroin drama Christine springs to mind - though the junkies here are bored teenage kids, worlds apart from the clichéd image of the scab-ridden criminal waster - but I can't recall any prostitutes in Clarke's work at all.)

[alan gowdy]

Originally posted by Wetherby Pond@Jul 8 2005, 06:55 PM The only thing that keeps it from sliding into total despair is the way that Rita and Sue clearly regard the situation as one huge joke - they're not old enough to be truly pessimistic.

A well thought out and spirited defence of the film - but I'm afraid we'll have to agree to differ in our view of it.

[Wetherby Pond]

Originally posted by Wetherby Pond@Jul 8 2005, 07:55 PM Clarke wasn't really in Sexy Beast of entertaining people.

OK, something weird's going on - did someone do a global search-and-replace across the entire forum to change all instances of Sexy Beast to Sexy Beast?

Not that I have any objections to this in principle, but it's had a rather unfortunate side-effect, rather like a time when the Guardian decided to replace the word "poll" with "turnout" in an election-related piece they once ran, which was a little unfortunate for a certain Mrs Pollack, who inevitably ended up as Mrs Turnoutack, much to her displeasure (or possibly amusement).

There are also delicious rumours of a novel whose author decided at the last minute to change the name of her hero from David to Jeff, and a reference to Michelangelo's 'Jeff' apparently made it into print...

[Wetherby Pond]

Originally posted by Wetherby Pond@Aug 20 2005, 12:03 PM OK, something weird's going on - did someone do a global search-and-replace across the entire forum to change all instances of Sexy Beast to Sexy Beast?

Curiouser and curiouser - just so you all know, the first instance of Sexy Beast was originally written T.H.E...B.U.S.I.N.E.S.S.

I suspect this is an attempt to block future attempts at spamming the film of that name (TB, not SB), which I applaud, but are there any other words or phrases we should be wary of using?

[JamesM]

It's a good job our Aitch used the shortened version of the word for "32 Years in the Biz".