Rebecca O'Brien

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Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Sorry, okay, I'm rolling sound, steady, microphone, the

Unknown Speaker  0:08  
other way. The copyright

Mike Dick  0:10  
of this recording is vested in the British entertainment history project. The name of the interviewee is Rebecca O'Brien, film producer. The date was the 22nd of March, 2017, and the interviewer is Mike dick, okay, Rebecca, can you briefly tell me who you are and what you

Speaker 1  0:31  
do? So my name is Rebecca O'Brien, and I am a film producer, and that is what I do, I produce films, and I do producing in all its forms, but I suppose the thing I'm best known for is the fact that I've produced pretty much all of Ken loach's films for the last 30 years, not all of them, but most of them. And together he and I formed a company called 16 films in 2001 and we've been working together exclusively since then. Great.

Mike Dick  1:15  
We'll get on to that in the near future. Okay, tell me when and where were you born?

Speaker 1  1:21  
I was born. In fact, I was born in London in 1957 at Hyde Park corner. There used to be a hospital there, which is now a posh

Mike Dick  1:33  
hotel. Could you give me just for posterity again? Could you just give me the date of date and 25th

Speaker 1  1:37  
of October, 1957 and my parents at the time, lived in London, but returned to Scotland. They both came from Scotland. They both returned to Scotland a couple of years later, when my grandfather was when my grandmother was dying, and we lived we got a house in Scotland, and we lived there. Basically throughout my childhood, I lived in Scotland. I went to school in Edinburgh, and yes, so I my home was in Scotland, and so I consider myself Scottish, even though I wasn't born there. But my parents, I think one of them, my mum was born in Scotland, and my dad was born in London, but again, they lived most of their lives in

Mike Dick  2:27  
Scotland. Tell me a bit more about your parents.

Speaker 1  2:30  
Sam, well, yes, interesting. My father was born into quite an aristocratic world. His mother was a lady in her own right. They were the Earls of Haddington, and his father was the son of the was the son of an O'Brien from Ireland, from County Clare. So, like the the O'Briens, who were the inheritors of the from the kings of Ireland, so it was like a, I mean, they didn't have a title themselves, either of my parents, my mother, my mother, was more landed gentry from Scotland and Yorkshire background. But my father grew up in a very sort of privileged world where people moved from house to house depending on the season, and he was taught by governors, and then he went to a prep school, and then he went to Eton, and then he went to Cambridge, and he joined the Irish Guards, and then later became a, I think he worked in insurance for a little bit, but basically, despite having, despite being a rather brilliant man, he didn't do it do much with his life. He survived by playing stocks and shares and stock exchange. He also was an alcoholic, and so when that reared its ugly head at some point, you know, I think in the late 60s, my parents split up and he went to live with his stepmother in North Berwick. My mother stayed on and lived in Peebles, where we had our house. We had a very big house, but it wasn't a big house. We the house that they bought was a was a ruin, and my mother basically did it up from scratch. She was very talented interior designer and artist, and that's what she she did, but she didn't have she had a lot of problems as well. She was a manic depressive, as it was defined in those times, and she was all right for the first few years of our lives. But, I mean, I'm one of four siblings. My. Have an older sister and two younger brothers. I

Mike Dick  5:01  
just wanted to find out how your parents had actually met, and given the

Speaker 1  5:05  
circumstances they met through sort of relatively posh Scottish society. Yes, so sort of an unusual background, really. They weren't particularly wealthy in their own right, because my my father was the second was a younger brother, and my mother. My mother was quite well educated. Actually, she she act. She ended up going to Edinburgh University. But whilst she was at Edinburgh University, she had a nervous breakdown and ended up in hospital in Dumfries for six months during the while the coronation was going on. But and she was very eloquent about her illness, and she was one of the first people to really talk openly about being what is now known as bipolar. In fact, one of her proudest, proudest moments was, was was being on a TV panel discussion. I think it was a brains trust or something like that. And the program was called insanity or illness, and she was there representing the insane. She with her diamonds on the telly,

Mike Dick  6:22  
sort of early memories of childhood.

Speaker 1  6:24  
Oh, the child, my childhood. I mean, I don't remember much in the 50s, but I went once we moved to, I mean, we moved about a bit from London, we moved to a few houses before we bought kerfield, the house in Peebles. But that's where my memories really start properly. Peebles kerfield was a beautiful Georgian house with a Victorian extension. It had about 40 rooms, and it was in a garden of about eight acres. It was a little estate, really. And as children, we had the most amazing time we had. We were chucked out to play in the garden every day, and we had an, you know, an idyllic country life style, with a huge house to run around in a lot of freedom. My mother was a very allowing sort of person. We didn't see much of my dad, really, he was either at work or hiding. But we, but we had the run of the place, and we, my mum organized us to do things all the time. We were did a lot of sport. We did a lot of just, I mean, the playing, the free play in the garden, was fantastic, you know, just with with this incredible, beautiful countryside all around us, and we were very free to go where we wanted, more or less. And so we were quite sort of free range children, which was a wonderful way to grow up. Where did you go to school? Went to school at a school called St Margaret's convent in Edinburgh. We're not Catholics, but it was the nearest private school to where to Peebles, in a way. And I think there are two st Margaret's in Edinburgh, and in fact, the other one is secular. And I think they meant to send us there, but they chose the wrong one by mistake. So we went to convent. I don't think it was that good a school, particularly I think it was very much run of the mill. I don't feel that I really got a particularly great education there. I got I I left, I did my O grades there, and then went. My parents decided that they'd send me and my sister down to London to do our A levels in London. So we went to a boarding school in South Kensington called Queen's gate. And that was that was a real eye opener and a very different experience. I mean, it was quite weird going to boarding school at that age, but there were a couple of very, very good teachers there. There was my my English teacher was Penelope Fitzgerald, the author, and she was brilliant, and there was a great art teacher, but I wasn't allowed to do art because I was told when I got there that I should do that, not being an academic subject, it would be better if I chose something else. So I did geography and English and maths. I swapped art for maths, unfortunately. I mean, I would love to have done art, but I didn't, and, but I ended up being head girl of the school like my sister before me. I think the only other two head girls at that school who were sisters were the red graves and but I was told by my head. History is that I would sail through my exams, and so in a blase sort of way, I didn't really do any work, and I didn't sail through my exams. I got terrible results, but they all thought I had potential to go to Oxbridge. So I, after leaving Queens gate, I went to Cramer's for a term, and got some better results, and did Cambridge entrance and I got a very good result on the Cambridge entrance exam. And I got an interview, but I didn't get in, but I used it. I used that result to get into Bedford College, which was part of London University in in Regents Park at the time. So I went there, and I read geography with economics. After, after a crazy year of an in between year where I I did, I did the the cramming, and then I and then I ran a cafe in Edinburgh, at the Fruit Market Gallery for a year, for nine months.

Mike Dick  11:04  
Just give me a sense of the outside world we've talked about, you know, the kind of idyllic childhood, etc.

Speaker 1  11:09  
Well, it wasn't that idyllic. It changed somewhat when my mother, when my mother ended up at the Royal Edinburgh hospital, and, you know, suddenly the world started to fall apart, and my parents split up and basically left. My father left, and so my siblings and I were sort of left looking after the household. We did have some support in that we had, we had had a nanny who was with us, who'd sort of grown up with us, and there was also a woman who'd worked as the housekeeper, who was married to the guy who was the gardener, and so they provided for us to a certain extent. But there was, it was really interesting. When my mother went went to Lally again, a lot of the friends, you know, all the posh friends suddenly evaporated. And Lee, you know, So how old were you at this point? Probably 10 or 11. My brothers were sort of away. One of them was away at boarding school. And the youngest, yes, eventually was at boarding school as well, but it was sort of chaotic. But because I think we were, my mom was a great organizer. She was a very she organized, and she was, she was very good at organizing events and parties, and she organized an amazing festival, a sort of Carnival fete in the gardens. She opened up the gardens to the whole town and put on go kart racing in the paddock and dog racing. And she got PC Suite from Z cars to come and open it with and do some beauty spotting. And, you know, there was a fashion show, and every lots of things. My uncle bought a elephant at Harrods to guess the weight of and things like that. When organizing people was in the family, yeah, there is a, there's definitely an organizing gene in the family and and my mom's ability to organize things, pretty, pretty, pretty impressive. And I used to really enjoy assisting her, as I sort of thought it was. And when I was I never went to nursery school, and when I was sort of three and four, I used to, apparently, I used to just trail her around all the time, watching what she was doing. And at the time she was she was rebuilding the house and working with the local trades people, and so I basically saw myself as her assistant, and that's how I got the organizational Gene You mentioned. You've

Mike Dick  13:59  
made a couple of references in TV programs. I'm just interested in, you know, the kind of influences from, you know, from yeah film and yeah

Speaker 1  14:05  
television. Well, interestingly, I we only had BBC One we didn't have and we then got BBC Two when it started. And so the only thing we could watch was BBC. And I got really into at a young age, the Wednesday plays and play for today. And I saw, I saw Kathy come home, going out, when it went out, where I must have been about nine or 10. And I was very, very taken by it. And it was extraordinary that, you know, I would watch, my mom would always let her stay up and watch them. And so, yes, that was a really powerful influence. And those plays on TV certainly influenced my life. And I just, I. I didn't think about it. I just watched it, and I watched and the other thing, I mean, every few months, we might go to see a musical in the cinema or something. We'd go to the annually, we'd go to the theater at the king's theater, as you would know. But the thing I loved most was going to see a big musical on the silver screen.

Mike Dick  15:23  
Do you remember some of those

Speaker 1  15:26  
South Pacific, Oklahoma, Sound of Music, my fair lady. I mean, the list goes on. I just love them. I mean, I would get very over excited about going to the movies.

Mike Dick  15:38  
So after you left university, What? What? What was your first first move?

Speaker 1  15:43  
Well, actually my first, my first move was really before I left university, when I came one of the, one of the extraordinary things that happened at curfield was one of the things my mum did in between episodes of being ill. The thing about manic depression is that you go up and down, and sometimes you're on a level. And I'm not sure whether she was borderline manic, but we she got involved with the Edinburgh art scene. After the divorce, art took its place, and I got involved with her with the art scene as well, and we were regular aficionados of the Ricky DeMarco gallery and and met a lot of people there, and met a character called David Gothard, who was a trainee director at the Travis Travis theater. And my mum would pick up people. We'd adopt people, basically, and bring them down to kerfield, because we had this huge house. We had nothing else, but we had a huge house. And David got involved with Ricky in bringing a Polish theater company called crico Two, run by an extraordinary Polish artist director called thalias cantor. And she to get a long story short, she she invited them. You know, there wasn't it was in the middle of the festival, there was no cheap accommodation in Edinburgh, so she offered to put up the entire theater troupe at kerfield and in surrounding bed and breakfasts. This would have been 76 Cantor had been to Edinburgh before, I think 73 and we'd been involved with the DeMarco enterprise in various ways, volunteering and stuff before, but this was a big event. They came. They in their bus from Poland, and they stayed for three weeks, and we basically got involved in the stage management as well. I was in the middle of running the cafe at the fruit market at the time, but I would bring all the cakes over at the end of the day, and we we basically were instrumental in getting that show on the road. And it was the fringe hit that year. It was huge, and it was a show called the Dead class and and we got to know the theater company very well, and there's some lovely pictures of them lounging around on the lawn. Cantor spoke only French, and my my mother spoke a bit of French, but not very much. But that we all got on so well. And I'm sure my mother had an affair or two with one of the younger, a few of the younger members. But there was, it was, and I didn't, I was, I had, had taken the role of being the family cook. And so we were, we were throwing together all sorts of meals for them. It was, it was amazing. And I think Cantor actually asked me at the end if I would join the troupe and go traveling with them, but I decided to go to university, so I did that instead. But my career could have, could have been in sort of European theater. But after that, after that, we they went on to play their show at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, which was just beginning to change from being a TV studio into being an art center. And David Gothard, who had been part of organizing them, brought them to Riverside, and it was the first show at Riverside, and we came down with them. We were like groupies, and I was just starting, I came down with them, and I was looking for a place to stay because I was going to uni. And so as David then became the assistant or the artistic director at Riverside. Peter Gill was the theater director, and David was running the program. Of all the other things that came out were happening there. And David as a family friend, I was in London, he was a close friend, and so I sort of orientated her. Around Riverside Studios and was a volunteer there quite a lot, and just got involved in all the things. And after university, ended up working there in admin for a couple of years. But even before that, I started to get involved in film, because that was really my passion. And when I was at school in London, when I was at the Queens gate, I used to go to the cinema a lot because I was a lot of the board. It was the borders. The few borders that were there. There were probably about 20 or 30 borders there. The rest were all day girls, the few borders that were there, mostly home counties, young ladies, so they would go away at weekends, so leaving me and maybe one or two people around. So I went to the cinema. I loved the cinema. And I went to the Paris Pullman, I went to the electric, I went to the gate, I went to the cinemas.

Mike Dick  21:00  
Describe some of the films that were on the go at that

Speaker 1  21:04  
time, I saw Scorsese, Fellini, anything I saw film vendors, early, early, sort of 70s, European stuff, Fassbinder. I mean, I'm very Catholic tastes when it comes to film. And I was just interested in anything like Celine and Judy go boating and amakor and sort of amazing foreign films. Yeah, we're probably there and, yeah, so I sort of was inadvertently educating myself in cinema. Somehow, I'd always been a fan when I in fact, in Peebles. I do recall go. We used to go. There was a Saturday Cinema Club, which we used to go to at the Playhouse. And I mean, I remember dressing up when I was 12, dressing up with a head scarf and pretending that I was 16 to go and see Bonnie and Clyde. I took my mum to see Clockwork Orange, and I took my mum with my mum. I went with my mum to see Kess when I was 13, and I remember seeing it at the ABC in Edinburgh and being completely knocked out by it. I knew her. I knew who Ken was before. You know, when I was 13, I knew exactly who Ken was and I and the other thing about Ken as well was when I was at Queen's gate, I watched days of hope on the telly, and that was that had a profound effect on me. I thought this was I just, I just found it. What I think I recall is the unbelievable thing of how real these films were. And I found that absolutely mind blowing, the fact that you could make something feel like just like real life. So even though I was also impressed by all sorts of films, social realism was certainly had a powerful effect on me, and Ken in particular. And the other thing I did when I was at university. I mean, I've always been one for extracurricular activities. And I was the editor of the college magazine when I was there. I was on the union exec, and as typical me, I just got involved in everything. And but I was also and I was volunteering at Riverside, and in this and I had a boyfriend at that point who was working it, was a graphic designer at Riverside, was a good photographer, and he was working as a graphic designer. So Riverside was part of my extracurricular life, and film going continued to be to the extent that during the summer holidays, I wanted to work at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and I wrote Linda Miles was running it at the time, and I remember I wrote to her two years on the trot, and they got turned down the third year, Christopher, my Riverside boyfriend, and I got chucked out of our Flat. The landlord wanted to take it over again. And we got checked out of our flat. We got paid to get out. So remember writing to Linda and saying, You have to employ me. I'm going to come for free, and you're going to you're going to have me on the team. And she relented. She was actually at university with David Gothard, so they I did have a connection. She, she relented and and I joined the staff of the festival for that summer, and I worked on the program the, you know, the edited program with Ellen galford, who was the program editor. And I got to watch films, and I got to watch them with Linda, because she. Would screen stuff after work every day, and we, I remember us discovering David Lynch. He'd sent, he'd sent in this rather dodgy looking tin of Eraserhead, and we were the first people to see it, like outside of his home. I mean, it was the first festival he'd send it to, and we saw it, and we were just sort of amazed by this completely bonkers film. And so during the festival I did, we invented publicity. We hadn't done publicity before, and I did that, and I sort of put together groups of films that could be seen as a sort of program. And I just had a gestatin machine, and I did lots of leaflets and and got people to put them around the place. And we doubled our box office that year. So I got, I got asked back. So I did three summers working at Edinburgh, in doing, doing, just generally doing the program. And then in the final year, I'd actually left uni, and I did, I worked as the press officer, or was sort of one of the two press offices. The other press officer was Simon Perry. And again, I met through by doing that, I met so many filmmakers. I met filmmakers, and I absolutely loved, loved meeting them and introducing them and sort of the whole social side of it was, was great fun. And so that was my real entree into the world of film. I still, at that point, never really thought there was with I never thought about a career in film. I did. I didn't necessarily think there would be a job for me, really, which is a rather naive thought. But you know, it was was before. This was in the late 70s. This was 76 where I was at Edinburgh, 7879 and 1980 at the film festival, and it was just before Channel Four started, and just before there began to be an independent film sector

Mike Dick  27:16  
the next phase. The other thing was quite interesting. You've answered all my questions. There's a film production course you did that was later? That later? Okay, yeah, that was

Speaker 1  27:29  
later, yeah, I did that. I worked after uni. I thought when I was at university, because I was the editor of the college magazine, that maybe I might be a journalist. So I'd, I'd applied for various journalism courses, and I actually got shortlisted for the Edinburgh, the Scotsman news Trainee Scheme, which was my absolute passion and desire to be because my great, my great grandfather, had owned the Scotsman back in the day, Sir John Finley. And he, in fact, his wife, Lady Harriet Finley. My This is my mother's grandparents. She was a grand dame of Edinburgh. She opened Edinburgh Zoo. And I think was quite a formidable woman. And she ran lots of committees and things. So I think, I think she, I suspect that the organizational gene might have come at that route if I was doing sort of ancestry today, or anything like that. So anyway, I was very keen to get on the Scotsman. I got pipped at the post, and I was so demoralized by that I thought, well, maybe I, maybe I'm not going to be a journalist, but I was very proud to have got that far, because that was a great gig. The trainee on Scotsman was a good gig, and they only took like two, one people, a person a year, anyway. So I, I went to the States, actually, for six, six weeks, I went to New York just by myself. I sort of just took a stand by and went to New York and stayed with some filmmakers that I'd met, and then Rome. And just, it was just, sort of my first time really going somewhere by myself. And when I came back, I then, this is in the autumn of 79 I think when I came back, I did a started working on a typing course leading up to Christmas, and then I, you know, just to get some secretarial skills in. And then after Christmas, I got, I managed to get the job working as David's assistant at Riverside Studios. So I worked with David on the on the artistic program at Riverside, and we were bringing in, I mean, it was an extraordinary time. We were bringing in theater. We had, we had theater companies from all over the world coming and performing at Riverside. The. Was laklaka, which was a Catalan group whose designer was Miro. There was Shuji tarayama, who's also a filmmaker from Japan, who did this extraordinary Japanese play called directions to servants, and it involved a whole team, amazing Japanese troupe. We had Le Cirque imaginaire, which was Jean Baptiste, Thierry and Victoria Chaplin. And they, they had, they brought the circus to Riverside, beautiful circus. And we put on a lot of plays. We did this thing. We we commissioned, I think it might have been the first sort of proper commission for black and ethnic minority plays. We did this thing called plays umbrella. And there were five plays commissioned, and we put those all on, and Hanif Qureshi did his first play there, and something called the mother country, and then Mustafa matura did to play there were,

Unknown Speaker  31:11  
there were five and really interesting, really interesting things and

Speaker 1  31:19  
and we also started to run a cinema there, and I got involved in that, and started and did the programming. I mean, we had, we did concerts with Michael Nyman. So I put a sort of, did a season of Peter greenaway's early stuff. And with Michael Nyman concerts, we did a lot of dance. We did a lot of stuff like Merce Cunningham came from New York, the dancer and John Cage came and, I mean, amazing, influential artists all turned up. Samuel Beckett was there. I mean, I met all these people in a sort of two year period, working at Riverside, and after working as David's assistant, which was basically organizing for these people to come. And then I worked in the press office for about nine months as well. So the press office training, I thought was very useful. But then there was something not quite right. I just didn't really want to be in the theater. I loved the theater, and I had been a lot because one of the good things about Queens gate, apart from having a brilliant English teacher, was that they took us to the theater a lot, and we would go every week. And so I saw a lot of shows when I was at school in London. So I had a very, very good cultural education when I got to London, which I just continued with. So not only did I go see films a lot, but I was was very broadly educated in terms of theater and art, and I just saw everything. I was just like a vulture. But there was yes, it wasn't quite right at Riverside for me, just because it was, you know, you were always working at night and and I, you know, wanted to get out. And so I spotted this one week film production course advertised in the observer and a little small ad. And I actually threw in the job to go and do that and and I it was advertised. It was this little company called crosswind films, basically an American guy who had a camera and a Nagra, and he had, like, his little 16 mil camera and inaugural, and he had some a few lights, and he set himself up in whopping in a little studio there with along with a few other mates, and they they'd offered this one week filmmaking course, and I did it, and I did that. Was it? That was just my epiphany. It was like getting my hands on the kit, learning how to operate it, and directing little sequence and editing it and on a steam bag and all of that was just like, This is what I've got to do. And suddenly realized that that my talent was for was wasn't technical at all, but was for organizing it. And they then that company then employed me because they needed somebody to who was sort of production minded, I think, and and Steve, who ran the thing. He had this sort of, he had these 20 lectures that he would give on film production, and basically I ended up doing the teaching. And I ended up, you know, within three months, I was producing a series of shorts for them. They were terrible shorts, but it was like a commission that they got to do. It was a sort of wacky race. With real people thing. And it was like, forget for a gambling company. And like, we had to make these 12 race. Do these 12 races, and different people with different characters would ring, I mean, pile of shit. That was my first producing effort, and but it was great fun. And, you know, you just cobble it together, you organize it, you make it happen. And after that,

Mike Dick  35:30  
these couples, I'm just conscious of, should we just take five? Yeah, you're comfortable there, sure. Yeah, just checking. Yeah, I'm all right, yeah, sorry, where are we? Yeah, we're just, just at this junction, wacky, wacky races. Yeah,

Speaker 1  35:53  
I think it was Laura malvi or Peter Wallen. Laura malvi were a pair of quite well respected semiological filmmakers who I'd met at Edinburgh. Had heard, I don't know they were friends. I kept in touch with them, and they were sort of friends, and I they'd heard that I was getting into production, and very kindly asked if I would get involved in this film that they were doing called Crystal gazing, and it was 100% funded by the BFI. And so I left crosswind and I went and worked for them officially as production manager, weirdly, but it was sort of more like being the location manager. Every shot was in a different location. So I just, I just sort of fell headlong into doing that. I did that for few months in a snowy Labrador Grove. And it really, it really introduced me to that area of London where I then ended up living. And, yes, we filmed all around their horns. It wasn't a particularly good film, but I met a lot of people. I worked with a proper crew. I was finding locations. I mean, it was a low budget British film, and I was working on it. And then after that, the most important bit, really in terms of training happened, which was, I knew Barry Hanson, who was a producer, who was a trustee at Riverside Studios. And Barry and his wife, Susanna, set up Barry produced longer Friday, amongst other things. But and Susanna, his wife was, had been a had been, as we'll

Mike Dick  37:46  
just cut there by this guy's reverse becoming quite intrusive. It's quite an interesting nugget.

Unknown Speaker  37:53  
Yeah, he'll get there in the end. Yeah, yes. Go on

Mike Dick  38:04  
impressively, very steady, yes,

Unknown Speaker  38:07  
it's very zen mastery.

Mike Dick  38:11  
The microphones, they used to have a really kind of big, heavy thing,

Unknown Speaker  38:15  
yeah. And doing them like, wow.

Unknown Speaker  38:22  
Oh, stop.

Mike Dick  38:30  
Up liability, stuff.

Speaker 1  38:37  
Okay, yeah, okay, so, yeah. Basically, I knew this filmmaker, producer, Barry Hanson, because he'd been a trustee at Riverside Studios. Barry had made the long Good Friday. I'd actually met him at Edinburgh, where they premiered the long Good Friday, and his wife, Susanna capon, was had been a PA at the BBC, and she'd also been a radio producer, and they had decided to to cash in on the launch of Channel Four and and have A an independent company that did educational programs for Channel Four, and they had been given commission number three at Channel Four, which was for a multicultural magazine program for children, and a sort of antidote Blue Peter, something that would be would feature real kids in their own environments, playing making things, doing different games. And the person, the other person behind it, was Michael Rosen, the children's poet. So Susanna and Mike had got this commission from Naomi McIntyre, who was the education. Mission commissioner at Channel Four. And it was really, really early days, as I say, commission number three, and they had nothing organized, they sent a check for a quarter of a million pounds round on a bike. But so telecation opened, and Susanna needed somebody to sort of be an all purpose factotum and PA and everything. So she hired me, and that was just brilliant. I did two years on that kids series, and we made 30 programs, 30 half hour programs, and we filmed all over the country. We were we filmed in Toxteth with kids there. We filmed in Belfast, in Catholic school and a Protestant school. And during during the travels, we filmed, although we did, we did stuff in Newcastle. We We and my job was basically production, putting it together, finding props, clearing stuff, organizing the shoots, finding crew, and I'm putting it together, and that I consider my apprenticeship. Two years of that was brilliant. Was really good.

Mike Dick  41:10  
And, yeah, very we must have been bumping into each other, because I was going through the roughly, yeah, probably. But it was an interesting time to be kind of working in Britain, you know, you say, you mentioned, you know, working in the troubles. I mean, logistically, how, you know, how difficult was that sort of, see

Speaker 1  41:27  
working, for example. I mean, my attitude was always, just do it. You just go it, try and try and organize it. It's not, you know, it. Don't let what's going on put you off because there were still people going to school. There's still planes flying backwards and forwards. It didn't bother me. I just, it's always been, my approach is you just get on with it. And you know, what you're doing is a good idea. And so let's and you know, there's Why would anybody want to bother people who are making kids programs or making stuff about kids in Belfast. I mean, that's a good idea. Let's do it. And I met different production we worked with different production companies. We pick up crews here and there. So that was great in Belfast, and it was useful because later I went back to do a film with Ken there and but the great thing was, I mean, we worked in Liverpool, Newcastle. It was, it was just a really good experience of finding your way around the country and setting up shoots everywhere, and just finding out what you have to do to make a little story happen. And we did things like we worked. We did stories with actors. We did a little story with Bob Hoskins on on the tube called the giant underground flea. And I remember and and Mike Rosen. We use my we use my flat as a set for this character we invented called Dr smarty pants, who was just completely certain that he was right on everything. And very, very funny character which we filmed, we filmed at Michael with these ridiculous glasses and a white coat and just some very funny stuff and, and we also had schools that we regularly used, but the multiculturalness of it was great. And we put together really mixed crews and, and that was, that was terrific. And I was actually very I just thought that that would was, was the way things were going and how it should be naturally, yeah, could you

Mike Dick  43:43  
describe, I mean, because that was a quite, you know, some important time is of Channel Four setting up and, you know, independent production companies being able to bid for programs. And it was a kind of very creative sort of period. Can you describe for your sort of point of view, you know, how easy that was to work with. Kind of set up a channel for

Speaker 1  44:02  
it. In a way, it was very easy because they hadn't established all the rules. So we were just making programs. We were just, you know, there wasn't a there wasn't this sort of in independent TV company structure. We were just doing programs, and we were just finding our own way, and the channel were very supportive. There weren't many other programs being made yet. I mean, it hadn't. It actually opened in 82 I think

Mike Dick  44:34  
it was evening,

Speaker 1  44:35  
yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah. So it was, it was a sort of, it was really great, in a way, you sort of felt you were pioneering it. And film four was just starting out, and people were going to do that. But there wasn't a freelance, a structure of freelance people doing producing and production this company was one of the first there were. Must be one of the first people to do it, yeah, so we were trailblazing, really. I mean, it was the same jobs, but just doing it yourselves. And, I guess, and I mean, telecation, we had a little office in Chiswick, and we had, we had, like a person who was more of a sort of business affairs person. And Susanna and Barry also started, set up. They did the wine program from there, and they did a couple of other things that that were just, were educational telly and, I mean, I just assumed that that's how things were done. I mean, I'd applied for training jobs at BBC. They rejected me. I tried applied to be a news trainee there, and they rejected me. They asked me if I was a fire engine chaser. I thought, That's a stupid question. And there were these arrogant young men who can't have been there for more than five minutes themselves. I was very just, I just found the whole thing very distasteful.

Mike Dick  46:10  
That was an interesting thing about that time again. You know, how were women perceived within the industry?

Speaker 1  46:16  
I mean, I hadn't. I never, really. It never bothered me that I was a woman. It was never, I never saw it as a constraint. I just, you know, I think partly because my mother was so completely she had no gender stereotype at all. I mean, we were, we weren't brought up in pink and blue. We were brought up in dungarees and sent out the garden. So I didn't, gender wasn't, was never, to me, ever going to be an issue. And I don't think, I mean, it's interesting, because, you know, in those first years with Channel Four, I work quite a lot with women filmmakers, Black and Asian filmmakers in different roles. And I think that that was one of the most exciting things about it, was the fact that, you know, here was a good idea some diversity. I'm sort of slightly horrified that it hadn't, hasn't progressed more than it did, because that was 30 years ago, and it really hasn't progressed much more. It is a bit better now, but it's not, I mean, I think, I think, you know, I didn't experience what it was like to be a PA at the BBC, or I did. I did a couple of I did a bit of PA ing for ITV at some point, but I very quickly after doing the work for telecation, after doing the kids series, I grew up sort of graduated to to being a production manager very quickly, and and this was to, this was all about there not being a pool of labor who had the right skills. And one of the things, and the thing I went on to do was the first thing I did after after the kids series was a film called Sacred Hearts, and Didi glass was the producer and the director was an American woman called Barbara Rennie, and Didi had wanted to make make it, and Barbara wanted to make it like an all women film. And it was a sort of nuns and school girls film, so it was well suited to that. And I had been applying trying to get a union ticket, because in those days, if you wanted to work in the industry, you had to have a union ticket. And because at telecation, my grade wasn't a union grade. I was a PA or I was assistant producer. In fact, I ended up producing the last 10 programs, but the role wasn't a union grade. But I was desperate to get my card so I could do other jobs anywhere. So various trips to see Linda lokes, who was the union membership organizer, and she was, she was the bane of my life. She never let me in. And eventually I got to see her, because I was asked to do this film for Sacred Hearts as production manager and but actually, I wasn't really Production Manager. It was that they had somebody that they wanted to be Production Manager who'd been involved in developing it. She didn't have a ticket. Yeah, she wasn't qualified to get a ticket because she hadn't. She'd been working in accounts, I think, but I had done my two years time, so I went in and I persuaded Linda, look, I've done this two years time. I've been invited to work on this all women project. Please, let me be but production manager was not an entry grade but I said I'd been a PA for two years, and, you know, please, I actually got in as a production manager. And so having got in as a production manager, I sort of was working as a unit manager, Location Manager, they didn't have a location manager on the on Sacred Hearts. So I, I went in at that level, and I location managed the film and sort of unit managed it, and that was my job. And the production manager, I was covering for who was, who was called the production sort of financial controller, or something like that. But she was really the production manager. Was Sarah Gator, who went on to have a very busy career in the industry. And so I was, I was there as the cover for Sarah. I was the official Production Manager. And it was great. I mean, it was, it was crazy doing this all women film, because, of course, you couldn't fill everything we had the, you know, there was only one woman spark at the time, but Diane Tams was the camera woman pregnant with triplets at the time. There's an image of her on a on a dolly like this, being pushed up and down by a grip, who was man, because there weren't any women grips. And but the rest of the roles were pretty, pretty much filled by women.

Mike Dick  51:46  
So just give me the brief description of the kind of contents the

Speaker 1  51:53  
film was. The film was set in a convent, and Anna Massey was the sort of Mother Superior, and Fiona Shaw was the naughty nun. And it was a, sort of, it was a, it was a coming of age drama about these school girls who were under some form of, there was that amount of stress. I can't remember what the story was, but it was very it was good and it was interesting. It was for it was Catherine cartilage was in it, and Cathy Burke, and they were 16 at the time, Jenna Russell, all these people went on to have amazing careers as actors. And we shot it all up in Barnet at a real old convent, beautiful location. And we went to frenton on sea at one point, I think, for the girls to frolic on the seaside. But it was, yes, it was, it was, I think it was a sort of coming of age story about and one of the girls had, I mean, it was a sort of wartime story. So the, you know, I think one of the girls had had a nice experience or something. I really can't remember the story. It's terrible.

Mike Dick  53:15  
So, yeah, I mean, what kind of skills did you develop

Speaker 1  53:20  
working in all of these things have been thrown at a deep end, and you just, sort of, you're just troubleshooting, really. You're sorting out day to day organizational things, making sure the crew get there, and organizing the parking and the catering and the and and just, you know, getting to know the crew making she I mean, the thing about location managing, which was that was certainly more location and that same on Crystal gazing, I was more the location manager, because there wasn't a location manager in either case, and that's about being the interface between the public and the film. And I've always thought that location management is a really good training for a producer, because you are the, absolutely the interface between the film and the public. So you're representing the film. You're trying to persuade people to allow you to film where you're filming. You're trying to you're basically trying to sell the film as well. So it's like a microcosm of being a producer, and I found it and also, unlike production management, you're working with the creative team more. So you're working a lot with the director, because you're driving the director around, finding things with them, ditto the production designer. So you develop a strong rapport. If you're any good, you just develop a strong rapport with the designer and the director and the cinematographer. And you're actually, if you know. You're actually having a creative input into the film, because you're suggesting places, you're finding things, and you're saying, I hereby put my artistic integrity on the table. And I think that that I liked working in that role, because it absolutely meant that I got to have conversations with the creative people on the team, and that stood me in very good stead for when I did the next project which I did, which was My Beautiful Laundrette, which I was hired as location manager. How did they go about you? Well, it came about through a series of things, partly because of Riverside Studios. Hanif Qureshi had worked at Riverside, had done the job I'd done, assisting David at Riverside, and then he went to so he was but he was working in the bookshop and writing when I went to Riverside. So I got to know Hanif then, and Hanif wrote My Beautiful Laundrette. And I think we're roughly the same vintage and but also, so that was one connection. The other connection was, oh yeah. I mean, I don't, I guess, I guess, actually, David Gothard was involved here again, and he pops up all over the place, an amazing catalyst. And he knew Stephen Frears and I had introduced, I didn't know, somehow recommended me to Stephen, and I went to see Steven, and it transpired that the production designer I'd known as a kid when we were both, we both went to the same dancing classes in the borders of Scotland, in these posh dancing classes when we were about four or five extraordinary, and Hugo luccik for hofsky, I knew. And so that was like the other thing. And then working title, which had been Aldabra, had employed this young woman as the production secretary, happened to be my cousin as well, and that was just complete coincidence, nothing to do with was just, I don't know how she'd got the job, but anyway, somehow I went for an interview and working title, and they got me to be the location manager and but Stephen said, when I said, when we realized that there were all these connections, he said, Well, I suppose I have to employ you, and just sent me out to do it. And it's like I'd never done the job officially, but it was something I was quite good at, because I'd studied Geography At university, and I have a very, very good sense of place. I have a very good internal compass in my head. I never get lost. I know where I am. I'd already built up quite a good knowledge of London through working on the kids series, because I'd driven all over the place. So and I also I can read maps. I can make maps, and so, you know, the quest was to find a suitable place to be, the laundrette, and what I did, and but the other thing, the other the key thing, was railways of South London, because the one of the key things in it is that Papa lives on a flat that overlooks a railway. So what i did was i i traveled all the railways on South the South London network, looking out the window and just seeing where the worst were, potential flats which were really close to the railway, and then worked out where they were, where the nearest station was, and then worked out and went and visited people in these in flats. And Battersea had was perfect, because it had this sort of criss cross thing and and I actually went up onto the top of tower blocks to look to see how the network worked and where the trains were coming from, and things. So I actually found, yeah, I found this play this flat, and we, we moved the people out and decorated their house and and got that to be purpose flat, but the laundrette, again, it was, it was about finding something which would almost act as a stage, because the whole a lot of the film happens in front And inside. So we needed to find an empty shop, but that was in a in a context that would work. And I scoured South London. I scoured East London. I really did cover the ground. And I had one in New cross, funnily enough, I was there the other night. I had, I had a potential one in. New cross. But it was a bit logistically, quite complicated. And literally, the last place I thought to look was where we was, where Fox's shoe shop in, I think, in off the Wandsworth Road in Vauxhall. And I just I'd seen this sort of place on the map, looked like a sort of wider Street, and we drove off into it, and I thought, This is amazing. It had like a little mini market in front of it, so it was like an array of low rise shops facing an extended road, whether you could have the market. And it was low rise shops with higher rise blocks behind it. So it was a it was like an arena, and and Hugo and I were driving together at the time, and we thought, This is it, that that's it, that's, that's, that's it. And it was like there was an empty shop called foxes, and his nickname was Fox, the fox. So it was like, that was the moment we thought, that's our laundredge

Mike Dick  1:01:17  
Check. This is good. Excellent. This is good. I don't need to ask any questions. It's wonderful. Interesting. We're talking about the whole issue of misinformation, something on all the websites, Sacred Heart comes before, yeah comes before.

Unknown Speaker  1:01:46  
Noel comes after laundry, but it was made before,

Mike Dick  1:01:51  
yeah, it was just good. It's good to know that, yeah, that's interesting. You spend a good night just changing

Speaker 1  1:02:02  
things good. I know it's not that important still. It's, you know, you want the history to be correct. And with Ken, there's a lot of history.

Mike Dick  1:02:11  
It's interesting doing, you know, having just started, you know, digitizing a lot of these interviews for the project, discovering how much misinformation there is in terms of logs. And also, yeah,

Mike Dick  1:02:27  
yeah, etc, etc, so much misinformation. How many rules are short, etc, yeah, just one. Great. I and film was going through my head.

Speaker 1  1:02:51  
I mean, the talking about laundrette, there was, I mean, there was some pretty horrendous, yeah, talking about laundrette, there were a couple of horrendous moments as well. I mean, it was, it was a real baptism of fire, because it was a very young team. Jane Fraser was the production manager. It was her first film. It was like we were, we were all very green. Tim Bevan and Sarah Radcliffe, who were the producers, were very green as well. I mean, Sarah had produced a film with Derek Jarman, she was more experienced. But really we were, we were all cutting our teeth. The only really experienced person was Stephen Frears and Oliver Stapleton. The cameraman was, was, was pretty experienced. I've worked with Albert Bailey the sound recordings as well. But I mean, oh God, filming in we had to have a posher place for the uncle's house, which I found in Kingston on a sort of private estate. And I tell you, you know, we were filming in Vauxhall. We were filming in quite heavy parts of London in those days. But I got, I got threatened in Kingston by a man with a golf club. How dare you film on our land? You know, you have no permission to be here. Yes, we do. And he was like, literally threatening me with his golf club. I mean, it was ridiculous. And then, you know, there were a lot of young actors and people behaving badly and on the crew. And it was, it was an absolute baptism of fire, and it was tight as hell that budget. But, and I remember things like, you know, you know, in the scene, and early on in the film, there's the trains going by. Well, those trains are basically coordinated by me sitting on, sitting with a walkie talkie on the on, on a council and a high rise Council block, watching them coming out of Victoria and coming over from Waterloo and saying, there's a good train coming. There's a good train over. And it was like so it's when I see that film, I just think of all. Places that I'm hidden, you know, in the scenes and sort of all the catastrophes and palavers that are going on. But it's, as I said before, it's fantastic training to be a producer, really, and to I learned so much from Stephen Frears driving him around, because we both live in Notting Hill and driving, you know. And so I inevitably ended up more or less being Steven's driver. And he would talk about the casting, and he would talk about the crewing and and and say, What do you think Rebecca, you know? And that was incredibly good education. And driving around with Hugo, who was impatient and grumpy and talented and and driving around with Oliver, the cinematographer, and just looking at these locations with their eyes, that was really valuable. And so taught me so much, but it also taught me that I that there was something I could bring to it, and it sort of working in that way, gave me confidence in my own ability to do stuff. And I just always felt, you know, that I was doing the right job.

Mike Dick  1:06:18  
So I was just also interested in Hanif. How involved would he have been then? Well,

Speaker 1  1:06:25  
Hanif was involved more during the shoot, a bit. He was around with Stephen, and Stephen saying, well, that doesn't work, and let's come up with something better. And really like that. And because he'd never written a film before. And Stephen would make him write things there and then, and dialog, bits of extra dialog and stuff, and try things out. And again, I think it was, was really great to learn a bit at Stephen's knee, in a way. But there were, there were some great moments. Like, I was particularly proud of the fact that you could actually crane over the laundrette, and got very excited when we built a crane to do that. And, and there's a sort of, there's a there's a wonderful kiss moment. And I remember doing that with between Daniel and Gordon, and we, we actually had a full moon that night. The whole thing was just all lined up perfectly and and it was, it was just a very beautiful moment. And when we put the neon on the laundrette, it was so exciting. It was just an exciting thing to make something. It was a, was a crazy sort of project, but it had, I think the energy behind the making of that the cruise energy, this young cruise energy, was overpowering and made it work. Interestingly enough, working title, tried to redo it, reboot it for another film called by by Hanif, called Sammy and Rosie get laid, which was pretty much a disaster, because it was done two years later. Everybody was much more. Everybody was arrogant and thought that they were so great because they've done My Beautiful Laundrette. They were so and it, it just fell so flat, and it really didn't. It sort of tried to hit a similar nerve, and it just failed. And it was that was a salutary experience, actually. I mean, I again, I reprised my location management role there, again, I'd been production managing by then, and but I did. I mean, I was always very, very happy to take any job people would give me on a film. Can

Mike Dick  1:08:41  
I just good to know you again? That was some doubt about whether you actually worked on Sam and

Unknown Speaker  1:08:47  
roses. Yeah, I did the location. That's good.

Mike Dick  1:08:51  
I'm just trying to get your opinion on where you would place my beautiful on Brett in terms of the British films, I think

Speaker 1  1:09:00  
it was a very important film, because it was, it was, well, it was the first gay Pakistani laundrette movie. I mean, there have been millions since, but it was, it was very radical. It was a, you know, it was, it was non judgmental. It was very cheeky. The language was cheeky. The language, and Yves language in the film is extraordinary. It's, it's, it's really different. It's really it was a, it was a game changing film, actually, and it was game changing for everybody on it, and a lot of people who worked on that film went on to do have very good careers in the industry, I think because it was inspirational as well. I think the idea that you could be as bold as that, to have these two not just. Gay lovers, but mixed race gay lovers, I think, was superb and and also this. The other thing was, it was a, it was a very early approach into into the the Pakistani community that had, you know, showing people as eccentrics or batty or normal or sexy, and I think that, you know, was the portrayal of the people in it was unusual. And you had, you had this whole array just demonstrated that these people are like, are just just as bad or good or mad as the people you meet every day. So I think that that was a very important moment.

Mike Dick  1:10:49  
What was the reaction to the film.

Speaker 1  1:10:52  
It was, it was, it was very successful. It did very, very well. It I think it even got nominated for an Oscar. I think Kenneth got nominated for an Oscar. And it it was, it was, it did very well at the box office. I mean, it was a very successful British Independent Film. And it was, I think, the first of the film on fours that really made a mark culturally. So it was a badge of honor to have worked on it. And, I mean, I, I've still both that I worked on it. And actually, last year, I did a film, a film which is coming out next week, called city of tiny lights that pays homage to it. And then there's was one shop with it. We we've got in the background, we've got, we've got a laundrette with closing with the same waves on it as we had in My Beautiful Laundrette closing down. It's in the same sort of area in London, and it was definitely one of the directors references. So it was, it's, it's, it's a sort of cultural marker,

Mike Dick  1:11:59  
right? Okay? How did you become a producer?

Speaker 1  1:12:06  
Well, I kept on working. I kept on. By the time I'd done My Beautiful Laundrette, I sort of established myself in the independent sector as somebody that you would might hire to work on your film. And I think I worked on a I mean, I suppose I sort of got known as somebody who worked on odd things. I did a, I production managed, but really produced a series of six documentaries set in the gay community, looking at six different individuals, three men and three women. And it was a sort of musical documentary. This was Channel Four. Was commissioned by Paul Madden, and it was directed by a guy called Paul and conceived by a guy called Paul orum land. I mean, they weren't very good, but we did one film on a guy called Andy, the furniture maker, who had made furniture for Derek Jarman and people like that, and made furniture for me as part of the film, and I still have that furniture. And he was a very talented young fellow. I don't know what happened to him. He started it had. He had a dubious career as a rent boy, but had these extraordinary carpentry skills. So we did the film about Andy, and then I worked as a production manager. Largely I did, I did a couple of TVs. I did a TV series again for Channel Four, a very ambitious and not entirely successful TV series called upline again. It had a lot of young actors. It was a musical set in central London. I got all the I got all the jobs which had a lot of locations in them. I was forever filming in central London or wherever, and never in a studio. But and so anyway, I got quite a lot of production experience on different things through the 80s, and then one day, Peter Wallen got in touch with me and said, I'm making film by myself, and really need a producer. It's 100% funded by the BFI, which you could do then it's a very low budget film, but I think we can make it. Would you like to produce it? And so, you know, I said, Yes, of course, I'd love to. And so it was a very tight script. It's, it's very simple. It's, it's a film called friendships death, and it's set in two hotel rooms. The film is set in Amman in Jordan in during Black September, which was 1974 I think political crisis in Jordan. So the story is that there's a British journalist holed up in the. His hotel in Jordan, covering events. He's walking out and street, he comes across a Western woman wandering the streets who doesn't seem to know where she is. So he takes her, this very elegant, beautiful woman under his wing, dressed in western clothes, brings her back to the hotel. Says, who are you? What the hell are you doing here? This is not the place to wander around. And she engages with him. They have a series of conversations, and she says that she's actually an alien, and she's arrived in the wrong place. She you know, her coordinates were supposed to have been set for MIT in Boston, but actually she ended up on the streets in Amman. So here she was, you know, help. So through a series of conversations that they have, you realize, yes, she is actually an alien. And of course, she's played by Tilda Swinton in an early role the journalist is played by the wonderful bill Patterson, Scottish actor, and they, they make a totally winning combination. And the whole film is set in the two bedrooms, which and what we did to make the film work was we, first of all, we decided to shoot it in a studio. This is my first studio shoot. Really, I'd done a few bits and pieces, but we decided to shoot it the two weeks leading up to Christmas, when the studios would be quiet, and we got Twickenham studios, a studio at Twickenham for really cheap. And what we did was we the week before, we drew the hotel rooms on the floor in a in a rehearsal room, and we, we basically blocked the whole thing. We spent the week before we shot with the with the lighting, camera man, vit old stock, and, and we, and we worked it out and, and the designer was Gemma Jackson. I mean, it was a fantastic team, and they built these two beautiful hotel rooms with a backdrop of a mosque in Amar and and we filmed it in two weeks, and it's basically a two hander. And so that I could actually be useful on set, because it was all contained within Studio, I decided to be the first assistant director as well, and I production managed it and produced it and first aided it. But that was because it made sense, because it was such a tight production. I had a good PA and a good second to help, but I wanted to be able to be there to control it effectively as and so being the first was the way to do that, and and it was, it was, it was great. I'm very proud of the film, and it's available now on the BFI player, and it's, it stands the test of time, Tilda rang me up about five years ago, out of the blue, and said, you ll never guess they are showing friendships death at the Curzon I ll been asked to do a Q, a, would you come and do it with me? So the two of us sat and watched it with a full house, because everybody comes to see Tilda, and we were really amazed at how good the film was, and Peter was a very interesting director, and sadly contracted Alzheimer's, and I think he's still going, actually, somewhere in the pearly way in Croydon. But very interesting script. And in the end friendship, who's the name of the tilde character, the alien. She basically, she basically identifies, in the end, with the Palestinians. And you, you follow her, her mind, her mind going through this. It's a series of conversations, but it's a beautiful story. And she gives the journalist a gift at the end. And as time goes on. A few years later, we have this sort of flashback at the we have this flash forward at the end, where, where, at last, you can actually break into friendships. Gift. It's a bit tacky that what we did with it, because it because, because you couldn't really we were doing it in prehistoric times. This is 1987 but it really works as a film, and I'm very proud of it and and gave me my first producing credit, which is fantastic. And I really like working with Peter, and we, we just got it made

Mike Dick  1:19:37  
you better my appetite, I guess I'm quite, you know, intrigued by, you know, becoming a producer. You talk about working with the type budget, how did you, how did you deal with the kind of financial constraints, and what you know, terms

Speaker 1  1:19:53  
of, well, I think, I think you can, you can make any film for the money that you've got. It's just, and it's just. Deciding what that money is, or knowing what that money is, and then trying to fit it in. And I think, you know, that's why we chose to really rehearse it well before we shot it, and that's why we chose to shoot it in the studio. That seemed to be, actually a very sensible idea, because everything was really controlled and quiet and concentrated. So it was, I guess, and also working as a production manager, I'd learned how to operate with budgets, and I've got quite, I mean, I'm I'm quite numerate. I've got, I did maths and then I did a level, and I did economics as a subsidiary subject at university, along with the geography. And it's like, those things make you confident in terms of managing practical things like money. So I've not been afraid of money. And I just, it's, I have a instinct for what things might cost. And it just because you've seen, the more experience you get, the more you know what things cost. And it's, it's just filling in a form. Doing a budget is filling in a form. And and if you can't have the whole thing, you have to cut something back. So you you work out what's the optimum amount of stuff you can have. It's, it's just that. And I mean, I always break down my script myself. So whenever I get a script that I'm going to produce or production manage, I literally do. I do my own little form. I just break down each scene into its component parts. Who's in it? Where is it? What's the scene number? How many extras are the any special props, required music, so I have this sheet that I fill in, and it really gets you to know the script. So that is the thing that's fundamentally important to the budget, the schedule and then and scheduling, it is just seeing what you can do on each day and working out what the logical and I'm a puzzler as well. I love doing puzzles, and so a schedule is a puzzle, except then I go meet Ken, who shoots everything in sequence.

Mike Dick  1:22:14  
That was the pm under 87

Speaker 1  1:22:18  
That's right, yes. And then what happened then was I got a call from Tim Bevan at working title because I'd done a bit with them, obviously working in the lawn on the laundrette and working on Sammy and Rosie. And Tim called me in because he had this project that one of the other people at working title had brought to him, which was a big fat beach book by Maeve bent. She called Echoes. Irish writer just cut it there for a second. Yeah. Anyway, so echoes was a, yeah, a big fat book. And Tim asked me in and said, You're the only person of our age that produces that we know that produce, that can produce, because you've done friendships death. So would you like to do this? And I said, Of course, I'd like to do anything. And I thought this would be an ideal project for Barbara Rennie, who made Sacred Hearts and and so it was. And so we took the book, and Barbara wrote, turned it, turned it, working with Granny Marmion, who was the associate producer, who'd developed the project, brought them together and suggested that they work together on it. And they came up with the script, and it turned into a four part TV series, which I then produced, and I hadn't been to Ireland, so I had to go to Ireland and work out how you work there, and work out earth, to work with the Irish unions. And I know it was just an adventure. And it was, it was, again, as a It was another slightly nonsense schoolgirl story. I mean, it was a story about a young girl growing up in a rural a bright girl growing up in a rural community in Ireland. And it's a sort of saga, and Geraldine James plays the teacher, and it's sort of the young love. It's a sort of, it's a sort of coming of age, another coming of age story. We ended up, we ended up shooting in Ireland, in Waterford, all on location again. The last three weeks were in Dublin, which we did some in the studio, but lot on location in this idyllic fishing village in Waterford, Dunmore, East and so went spent six months there again. I was young enough and free enough to be able to do up sticks and go there. And we put together a terrific bunch. We used Hildegard Beckler, who had been the designer on Sacred Hearts. Designed it. And. A vital stock who'd shot friendships death, got him and his camera operator to shoot it, and we put together this young team, really and, and it was, was very female oriented. And Hildegard and Geraldine both had two year old sons, so we had two year old kids, so we had them. We had some crash going on and things and but we were staying in the most lovely place. It was, it was heaven, in a way. It was also crazy, because, I mean, I don't know, the Irish sparks were still drinking binge from the beginning. You know, as soon as they go on location. This was in the olden days, but they would just drink from as soon as they wrapped until the following morning. And so it was a bit crazy. I mean, we didn't we, I didn't hire all the right people, and some heads had to roll. And there was about three weeks into the shoot, there were problems with the costume department and problems with various locations department, it was going tits up, and so I had this sort of Night of the Long Knives, when I sacked a lot of people and got other people in. And the one the hilarious thing was that the next day, the sparks had put a blackboard up with people's odds on it, how long they were going to last, and I was at the bottom. It was great. But I think, you know, you learn on every project, you learn about nightmares and and wonderful things. But it was a lovely shoot as well. It was great. I mean, it was a huge challenge. It was a big job and but, you know, got through it. We did three a week in Italy, where we spent almost all the contingency. I mean, filming in Italy is bonkers, but, you know, I got my first foreign shoot out of it, and different things like that.

Mike Dick  1:26:52  
So you mentioned the Irish humanism.

Speaker 1  1:26:57  
Well, they're very they're very militant, basically, and and also, contrary inventing rules that unless you're very careful, and I had a useless Production Manager, I'd hired this bloke who just kept on going into a shell all the time and so crying. So he was pretty hopeless. So I don't know we, but we just sort of managed it. I mean, I think, you know, I think one of the things about managing a production is that you can't be afraid. You have to stand up to what you've laid out. You have to be bold enough to speak out if you think it's wrong, and speak your own truth, and then people trust you, and they build confidence in you, and they like you, and I think that, but you means that you always have confrontations. If you're doing a, if you're doing a, if you're doing a 1415, week shoot, you're, you know, you with 50 people on a day to day basis, that's a lot of lifetimes. If you, if you look at that, that's, that's probably, you know, it's about 12 years of a lifetime. So you're going to have birth, deaths and marriages, you're going to have all sorts of things. So you're going to have the people crashing their cars and people getting pissed and people, you know, running away with somebody or other, and all sorts of emotional crises that people go through. And you have to bear that mark in mind and build it in, factor it in, and expect all sorts of things to go horribly wrong.

Mike Dick  1:28:58  
It's a nice balance between the individual films. Just gonna return a little text message. It

Unknown Speaker  1:29:16  
was funny because I just identified with the produce you.

Mike Dick  1:29:22  
Producer thing. History Project is dealing with about getting in for about 100 people. Somebody think this is going to be quite small, and you just have to put your foot down. Sometimes what you think the direction of it should be, you.

Mike Dick  1:30:00  
Assumption, how you doing the back row? Okay, so we're gonna this is, this is this is coming up to Ken now,

Speaker 1  1:30:20  
just enough time to do the beginning of playing. Yes, exactly

Mike Dick  1:30:26  
20 minutes. Yeah, okay, I will.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Mike Dick  0:00  
There. Okay, right. The copyright of this recording is vested in the British entertainment history project. The name of the interviewee is Rebecca O'Brien, film producer. The date is the 12th of May 2017 this is row two, and the interviewer is Mike dick, okay, Rebecca. We were chatting about hidden agenda when we finished up part one of the interview, you went to the Cannes Film Festival. What was, what was that experience like?

Speaker 1  0:28  
It was very weird. It was my first visit to Cannes, and to have a filming competition for your first visit. There was something else. I mean, I think, you know, I was pretty green and uninitiated, and I didn't, I thought, I thought, had I had a vague idea that, that being there, you know, that that people might want to talk to me. Or, know, you know, as a producer of a filming competition, I thought that people might be interested in what I had to say and, and that was quickly demolished any view I discovered, I mean, it was a real baptism of fire, because there I was in a I was given a very nice hotel Room, and, you know, had to sort of good, because I shall do that. Switch it up. Switch it off all together. It's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna come off and

Speaker 2  1:34  
on to handle. Yeah, so I think I'll switch up. I actually look very good with just the shadow on the other side. Yeah. We have to start again. Unfortunately. Yeah, all right, cool. Let's start again.

Mike Dick  1:48  
Okay, okay, we're talking about hidden agenda and the impact of can

Speaker 1  1:54  
Yeah. Well, it was my first ever visit to Cannes, and I had, you know, pretty green, and I had no real experience of film festival. I mean, I had film I'd been to the Edinburgh Film Festival. I think that was probably about it. So I hadn't, I hadn't, didn't know what to expect, but I thought that, I thought that, that people might be interested in what I might have to say as producer of a filming competition. And I was, you know, very rapidly disabused of that fact. And, and I, you know, found myself in a very glamorous hotel room and, but actually found myself with almost nothing to do. It was really weird. But what you do have to do, it can is it's a bit, it is a bit like organizing a wedding, you have to organize where everybody sits, you have to organize a party, and all of that in a way I can't really remember, but it was sort of out of my orbit, so I didn't know any of the protocol and stuff. So it was fascinating the day, if you have a film in competition, that day is sort of special, because they do the whole can machinery have a wonderful way of of making that film important. And and the day starts off, you have a the first thing is, you have a photo call. And then, and it's a big photo call. It's like there's 100 photographers or something, and then there's a TV call that is followed by a full press conference. And the amazing thing about the hidden agenda press conference, we had Francis McDormand was there. I think Brad Dourif came as well, Brian Cox, they were certainly there. And myself, Ken, think even I think we forced Eric Fellner, who was the other producer, to sit at the table. And the extraordinary thing that happened, though, was that, you know, as we were talking about the film, a couple of journalists from the British press stood up and started basically tearing off us off a strip, or tearing Ken off a strip, for making the film, for being Ira supporters and and All of that. I mean, it was quite shocking. Actually, it was Alexander Walker, who was the critic for the Evening Standard at the time. And we discovered later that he had been a B special in in the north of Ireland. So he, you know, he was from there. He strongly disagreed with the politics of the film. And what was interesting? What was interesting was that, and there was another journalist as well, I think, the telegraph guy, I can't remember, but it was extraordinary that the foreign press, the other press, could not understand what it was all about. But it. Made for a very, very lively conference, and it put the spotlight on the film. And it was almost a sort of stand up row. It was Jim Allen was there as well. And, you know, was putting good answers. And it was an extraordinary moment. And to me, that was the moment that put Ken back on the map. He'd had, you know, a decade in the wilderness, and it had taken us three years to get this film off the ground. You know, we'd been doing commercials and trying to do other bits and pieces, but it took that long to get an agenda onto the screen after a few false starts. So to have this sort of moment where, where suddenly it was up for discussion, big time. That was exciting. And it was really that was an amazing sort of baptism of fire for my first can. And then, and then, the thing, the other thing about can is later on in the day that said that Ken and Jim did interviews. I wandered around knowing not a job what to do, but, you know, ending up you basically become a sort of ticket salesman. And you, you know, or a ticket un salesman. You sort of your tickets for the big evening screening are a premium thing, and it's there's people battling it out to get seats anyway. So at the evening screening, where you that they, they, you assemble in your finery wherever the allotted places. And even if it's only two minutes walk from the Palais, you still have to get in cars and drive very, very slowly in a sort of Convoy down the Croisette, and then you get disgorged onto this enormous red carpet and steps where crowds are gathered and the press and the photographers all have to wear evening suits as well as you and and, I mean, it is like being treated like royalty. I mean, it's extraordinary. You are feted for that moment. You know your film is the film of the day, or there are usually two films each day, or sometimes three, but you have this moment, and you know, you walk up the red carpet, you you do the photos and stuff, and then you go up the steps, and you're greeted by the festival runners, and it's really exciting. And then you get led into the cinema, and you have to sit in these sort of middle seats where, you know, it's like the front row in the middle of the cinema, this 2000 seat cinema. It's, you know, great palace of cinema. And you you're there, completely exposed for all to see your work. But it's, it's the most beautiful cinema. And it's, you know, you have to also go to do a technical check in the middle of the night beforehand as well. And that's quite fun. That's, that's sort of a special moment in can when you've got all these sort of the people from the the sound people, the the picture people, all, all the technicians gathering to put to make sure that your film is shown as beautifully as possible. The only problem is it's usually at two o'clock in the morning, which is difficult, but it's good you have that moment you check the subtitles and all of that anyway. So then you show the film, and then at the end, you know you are either applauded or booed or given a standing ovation. And I recall hidden agenda went down very well with the with the French audience and and so it was, it was a great screening. And, and then you, then you don't, you know, Ken and Jim, the writer and the director, do interviews for like, two more days. And again, I was sort of like, after that, all I had to do was to find the reviews and read about it. And I mean, in those days, you didn't have electronic reviews coming in. You get went and bought the papers. But the reaction to the film was pretty good. I mean, it was hostile. It was it was hostile in the right wing papers, but internationally, the film was well received. And anyway, so we all went back after a couple of days, and Ken was prepping Riff Raff. I wasn't working on Riff Raff because I was pregnant at the time, and and at the lunch lunchtime on Monday, I think it was, we got a phone call saying, could we come back to can and there was only one way to get back. It was by private shet. I called Eric and said, Look, there's no flights. We can't get back. There's no way. We can get back. And he organized, I don't know, he organized a somebody had a private jet somewhere that we could we, if we ran fast enough, we could get to and it was so ironic, because there was Ken, you know, prepping for riffraff, any sort of work clothes and and, you know, we just had to make a dive to Luton. I think I can't remember where it was, or maybe he throws some private jet place and got my first experience. Anyway, we went and and and then, and then we, then they, when we arrived in nice they then there was, then a helicopter to take us to Cannes. But we missed, we missed the ceremony. We were too late. And then, and then we had to sit through some terrible film, because we sort of arrived and we didn't know, you know, we were just too late and, and so we got stuck watching the final film of the festival. And but it was, it was great fun. It was, it was just a great moment, really. And we won, we had won a Jury Prize, and, and that was great. And the thing is, you, if you win something, it does enhance the potential for the film. So it's important to go and pick it up, especially in can. So anyway, I'd learned from that, though, that that to sort of organize something in future if that was going to happen. So it was good. It was good because the film, the film then got a good release in the States. Actually, in fact, it's the best film we've had ever had in the States, and but weirdly,

Speaker 1  11:45  
the company here who released it here went bust. And there was a series of different companies going bust all around us, which meant that it didn't really get much of an airing here, but we sold it everywhere, and it did play. It did play everywhere. So, but the, but the British press were pretty hostile because of the politics, not the craft,

Mike Dick  12:12  
sure, I'm just interested in, you know, obviously, you know you talked about the Philip it did for Ken, Ken's career at that sort of point. Can you talk about your sort of relationship and how you know that working relationship, really, you know, I guess, sort of caught fire at that moment.

Speaker 1  12:27  
Well, I think, I think we'd, we'd actually really enjoyed making the film together and and it was a very difficult film to get off the ground. You know, there were all sorts of forces working against us, and I think, but the fact of the matter was, we pulled it off and and then the sort of seal of the prize in Ken, you know, endorsed the fact that that we were a good team. And so, yeah, I mean, Ken was definitely keen that we should work together again. And I can't remember whether it was before or after we he'd shown me this sort of potential script for what was then called the May days, which was a script that Jim had written about Jim Allen had written about the Spanish Civil War, and it was a big production, and the idea was that that we would do, that Ken would do. And what happened was Ken ended up doing a couple of smaller films with Sally Ibn at parallax pictures. And then so he Sally had, Sally had introduced Ken to this writer, Bill Jesse, who wrote riffraff, and Ken was doing that. So he went on to do that straight after hidden agenda. And I wasn't my project, so I didn't do it, but Ken asked me if I would do the May days and which I think it originally started off with Putnam or something like that, or, I can't remember who originally commissioned it might have Been, it might even have been working title, actually. Anyway, we got the rights back from it and and the idea was to do it through parallax pictures, but we recognized it would take some time to do it, and in the meantime, I was actually pregnant and had the baby six months after, can and or a bit less than that, in October that year, and I'd been working as a location manager in the meantime for various commercial companies, and then, and then, after I had Jack, I then. Actually, Ken got me another bit of work, which was to work on a dispatches after he finished doing riffraff, he got me to production manage. He was keen to see that I kept on working. I think he got me to be Production Manager on a dispatches that he was doing about Arthur Scargill. And so I did that. And just like part time, which was, which was ideal, because I was just starting to get back to work, that was the sort of beginning of the following

Mike Dick  15:34  
year. Yes, I was gonna ask you, how you balance that, you know, working working lives.

Speaker 1  15:38  
Well, I didn't have much choice. As the primary breadwinner in the family, I didn't have much choice but to go back to work. So it was definitely great that Ken managed to cobble together some work for me. And the dispatches kept me going. And then then the people who were doing dispatches asked me to do another one for them, which was, which was good, which Ken didn't direct Ken, I think, and then, then I got asked to do again. There's a company called wall to wall. Who would was sort of, I stretching out into drama, and they hadn't done it before, and so they say they asked me if I would co produce a TV series for them because they didn't have the experience. And I said, Yeah, I'll do it if it's if I can do it part part time. It's not that easy to do things like that part time. But I did. I did like, four days a week or something, so I sort of had done half days, and then I went on to that and built it up gradually, so that was more of a full time job, but it wasn't completely and I was a, it was their first TV series, and it was for Carlton TV thing called a statement of affairs. So I did that over, yeah, that was, I guess it must have been 9192 something like that. Anyway, it was, it was great because it really fitted the gap. And the interesting thing was, the producer from wall to wall thought that you could divide a film between the creative and the and the sort of practical and the financial. You cannot do that. And I think she sort of had the imagination, the idea that she would get all the sort of script and juicy bits, and that I would get to just organize it, but you can't quite do it like that. It's producing is a holistic affair. And you know, you have to be involved with the creative elements, because it's the, it's the choices of what creative elements you deploy that that actually,

Mike Dick  18:08  
can we use you came back, you know, obviously came back and started working on land and freedom. Can you describe, you know, using the, you know, that as an example, you know, the kind of producer role in there? How you would tackle that one?

Speaker 1  18:22  
Yeah, I mean, after, well, after I did statement of affairs, then Ken and I got back together again. And in fact, what happened was Sally Hibben, who was running the filmmakers cooperative that was parallax pictures invited me to John and Ken to join the company, because she knew that I was developing land and what became land and freedom. And she had another producer and director, Sarah Curtis and Les Blair, who joined as well. So yes, i i I started using parallax as an office, and we started doing proper preparation, or pre prep, for land and freedom. And at first it was basically research, a couple of recce to Spain to find out how we would do it. And the key, the key to making it was to make it a CO production, and that was the fundamental part of how you make land and freedom. So we, we went to, in fact, what happened was Sally and Sarah went to a film festival in Spain into Valladolid, where Ken's film, Lady Bird. Lady Bird was going to show, or riff or raining stones, one of the films was going to show. And they went there with a view to finding a potential co producer, which indeed they did and they didn't. They came home not only with a Spanish co producer, but also. Also a German co producer. They met Uli felsberg, who was a who was vim vendors producer in Germany. And vim introduced them to Gerardo Herrera, was a very good Spanish producer. And the what was good about them and what was right about them was that they were similar sized companies. They were small, independent companies in their countries, and that was a good way to start co producing. So Sally came back with these contacts and messed or Well, messed or was a Barcelona based company that gerado. Gerado was tournisol films, and messidor was a was based in Barcelona, because we needed to base ourselves in Barcelona, because that was going to be a better location for the film. So a friend of his run his company called messidor. But there was another problem there, which was that Marta Esteban, who ran methador, didn't quite understand the way a CO production worked, and so she thought, understandably at first, that as CO producer, She was going to be taking creative decisions and and be involved in the casting and the crewing and and it wasn't to be like that. The whole point is you can only have one creative producer and one director. So quite early on, I went back to gerado and said, Look, this isn't working. Marta keeps wanting to make decisions, and we can't do it that way, because Ken and I have to make the film. And He came over and sorted it out and asked Marta kindly to take a back seat, but to give us support, give us ideas of people, introduce us to people who we think then could choose. And it, it was very important that moment in terms of defining how you do a CO production, and and I, and it, it did make it make much more sense.

Mike Dick  22:12  
What, what role did the Germans do? Road movies. Road

Speaker 1  22:16  
movies. Yes, road movies. Again, the whole point of CO production is that if you are an official CO production, then you can raise money in the relevant countries to put into the film. So Uli and road movies were able to raise money through a German film fund. And then the idea there was to if we spent a certain amount of money in North Rhine Westphalia. Then that was money that they you know, that was a discount for the film. So we basically got our electricians and our lights and our camera from North Rhine Westphalia. We spent a certain amount there, and that made it an official and we made it an official CO production. We did a pre sale in Germany. So that was the German element, and it was, you know, it was about 10% of the budget. So Spain, we spent a certain amount of money, and I think it was like maybe 3040, 50% the budget, and then the rest was British, because we were going to post produce, do the sound and the composing and all that in Britain. So there was an archetypal CO production, but just the CO production elements didn't wasn't enough for the film. So as a group of CO producers doing a CO production, you could then, and Britain was still a member of it, you could then apply to your image, which was a Pan European fund, which would give you 15% of the final budget. And we qualified. I mean, unbelievably bureaucratic process, but really worth doing. And so we call it. We managed to get your image money. We also pre sold the film to France, to to distributor who had had been doing Ken's films. Had been doing Riff Raff, raining stones and Lady Bird, the films that he had done with with Sally, and they came on board and bought the film. And then also Italian company called BIM, we pre sold to them. So we sort of, this was the first time I done a CO production. It was the first patchwork of financing. So in each of the CO producing countries, you had, like, we had equity from British screen. We had, I think a BBC films pre sale, I think we might have had a distributor on board, and then the Spanish did the same thing. And the thing is, with a CO production, you could, you could access public money as equity. So that was, that was how we put it together. It was. Complicated, and Sally was an exec producer and and basically helped cobble together the finance for me. But it was, it was a very difficult production because we were, I mean, I remember standing on the Ramblas with Ken at some point, neither of us speaking Spanish. I mean, I had a little bit and, and we Yes, well, we got to, we got there and discovered that that it was Catalan and not Spanish that we needed to know anyway. I'd learned, I'd been learning Spanish for a year, only to get to Barcelona, and nobody spoke it. And so we were sort of, you know, really out of our depth, and we sort of looked at each other and thought, can we actually do this?

Mike Dick  25:46  
But we act as a kind of template? It

Speaker 1  25:49  
did that CO production structure absolutely became the template for the next X number of films that we made. And that was so valuable and and it was great, because it was a true CO production in every way, and because it was, you know, the film was in English, and Spanish was absolutely necessary to shoot in Spain. And yet it was a British perspective. You know, the film is told through the eyes of an Englishman. And so

Mike Dick  26:21  
it could you describe a wee bit more about the background. So they started the film,

Speaker 1  26:25  
yeah, yeah. So the film is, is about, it's sort of about the implosion of the left during the Spanish Civil War, and, in a way, what led to the right wing victory, ultimate right wing victory. And it was, it's about the collapse of the left. And it it's, I mean, the the the wonderful thing about the Spanish Civil War, which was it we started with a revolution, was the idea that a lot of people from different countries wanted to go and support the Spanish in their fight, their righteous fight, against this dictator who had overthrown a correctly elected government. Democratically elected government in Spain was overthrown by the right wing, and people from all over Europe, even all over the world, came as international fighters, or just on spec, to come and fight, to support the Spanish workers. And so that was the core background of the film. And we thought, I mean, one of the there was a lot of it built up in Barcelona, but we couldn't really show that. It was difficult to show that, because Barcelona is a modern city, it was would be very difficult to also put together a big crowd was very expensive to do that. So what Ken and Jim Allen did was they, they, they simmered it down. They distilled the film into demonstrating, putting together a militia, a sort of multicultural militia on the Spanish front, and on the Aragon front to demonstrate all the different elements that would be fighting internally and fighting against the fascists, but also fighting amongst themselves. So the film, what the film does is it tells us that story in microcosm. It puts together. We put together, we cast a militia who we then took to the Aragon front, which we built, and we found this beautiful medieval village called mirambel in the maestrasgo area of Spain. It's about it was, it was in the middle of nowhere. It's about four hours drive from Barcelona, three hours from Valencia, five hours from Madrid. It was absolutely in interior Spain, the Aragon and on the border between Aragon and Castellon. Anyway, we that's where we found this wonderful village. So we decided to set it there, but it was really in the middle of nowhere. And, you know, there were very, very few hotel rooms. So we were spread over three different villages. We had cast in one place, crew in another, Art Department in another, and I was in the middle with my three year old child in miram Bell, but the village was stunning, and we got so much fantastic support from the local people. And, you know, there were buildings which were ancient, and we didn't need to do anything to it. But the wonderful thing was, they were restoring. Miram bell to its medieval structure. They had to, they were doing a big project to actually make it, you know, to restore the village. So we benefited from that. There were no TV aerials or things. So we, we were able to shoot there. And it was fantastic. And people have written books about it. It's, it's a was a wonderful experience, and we basically went to relive that period in Spanish history. And because Ken shoots in sequence and doesn't tell people what's coming up, you know, we basically, the cast and crew, lived the story of the Spanish Civil War, and we lived the battles between the different factions. And Ken has a very clever way of if he's got an army or something coming in to attack or to he ll keep the two different factions apart. So they really are surprised factions, and there is a genuine feeling that that those people shouldn't be here. Who are those fighters? And so, I mean, it was, we were doing it on a very tight budget as well. So we were all living this sort of battle. And we had, we had some difficult moments because we didn't speak Spanish. We had a we'd employed a first assistant director who who was a bit shouty and so, and he had no respect for me as a woman, which didn't help. So he had to go and that caused us all sorts of problems. He was misinterpreting Ken. He spoke English, but he shouted English, rather than the gentle way that Ken likes to do it. So we were doing everything in two languages, which was complicated. It was a multicultural cast and crew from all over the place. We had two Frenchmen, we had a German, we had an American, we had a Scot we had people from all over Spain, women, and it was just, it was a wonderful band of brothers that we put together, and we the first part of the I mean, the problem for the producer always is that you're trying to close the money deals at the same time as you're in the middle of pre production. And we had a boot camp for the militia for a couple of weeks. We got them to bond to with each other. We had a lot of singing, a lot of history lessons. We found people, you know, there were, we met people who had actually been in the Civil War. I mean, it was at the point, because it was in the early 90s, there was some of these people were still alive. So there were people who could come and talk to us about what it was like we we had a terrific, a couple of terrific researchers who helped with the history and finding out all those people. There was a man called Juan rocker bear who came and stood on the place where we were going to do it and said, this is this. Is exactly it. And tears were pouring from his eyes as he remembered being there in that, you know, fighting the war himself. And so it was. It was a very, very passionate film, very passionate process. We had a lot of young people. There were a lot of people falling in and out of love. There were, it was a really special film, and through the making of it, throughout the making of it, we bonded so well, and by the time we left, we had to go back to Barcelona halfway through, because there's a scene in Barcelona, and there's a couple of scenes in Barcelona, which was, again, really difficult, because very difficult to get it organized for four hours drive. You didn't have the internet. It was communications. Was difficult, but we did it. And but by the end of the whole thing, you know, it was a very, very passionately bonded group, and it was very difficult to go home after it, actually,

Mike Dick  34:13  
there was amazing climax to the film, yeah,

Speaker 1  34:17  
there is, I mean, at the end of the film. I mean, there's, there's a couple of amazing scenes in the film. Well, one, I mean, a very important scene before we get to the climax, there's a very, very important moment in the film where, where the militia and the villagers get together to discuss land reform and to discuss how the land you know, given that there's a victory, how do you divide up the land? What do you do with the land and and we spent two days solid filming this sequence. We had two cameras churning film through, I think we shot seven miles of film in two days in this room with packed with about 40 people, very. Smokey room, and it was in a, I think, more or less sort of Town Hall room. And it was a very old room. It was 13th century or something, and the shutters on the windows were so thick you could put your hand in through the wood grain, which had, and it's the atmosphere was incredible. And we just went through the debates solidly for two days, and it was an amazing atmosphere in there, everybody discussing and shouting and crying and laughing, and it was an amazing debate. And it's a wonderful piece of cinema. You'd think how dry a debate on land reform, but it's absolutely a powerful piece and and then the climax of the film, where basically the the socialist socialists are confronted. The Socialist militia are confronted by the Communists who arrive over the hill. They think that they're being they're coming to save them, and they are actually coming to arrest them. And we didn't tell the militia that they were going to be arrested. We told them that they were going to that that, you know, to react when the communists arrive. So the communists arrive, and they, they line up and they, they point their guns at the militia, and in the first take, the militia didn't know what to do. They just ran away, which ruined our entire setup. So we had to stop filming for the day. Like, you know, this isn't the right reaction, guys, let's just rethink this. What would you do? So we went back the next day and we did it, but we didn't tell them that we were going to kill one of the main people, and she didn't know either. And everybody, she was very upset when we told her, and then, and then, when, when she did, when she did collapse in the film, everybody was so shocked. It was very, very powerful. It's an amazingly powerful sequence.

Mike Dick  37:09  
Good, your satisfaction

Speaker 1  37:11  
I felt having made that film. I mean, it took us a while to get it right. You know, we had a lot of footage. We poured film through the camera, and somehow there were still elements in the story which weren't quite working. But Roger Smith, our script editor, had really done some good work on the script with Jim and helped, helped structure it. We topped and tailed it, or we had, we had, the way we brought it up to date was we had a young woman in Manchester or Liverpool. I think it was reading through the letters of her grandfather that she discovered when her granddad dies and she's going through his papers and she discovers his his own personal journey. And it's through her eyes that you then see it through her grandfather's eyes and his experiences. And that's that's it. And so that's the way the story works, and it and that structure really made it, really helped the film, and, and, and in the end, we it took us a while to get the cut right, but with George Fenton's amazing score and with the songs that are in it, and somehow, somehow we got it. We got there in the end, and we felt, I mean, it was, it was just such a passionate project. And I felt having made it, I felt and I thought it, I thought it was a great I think it's, I still think it's a great film, and certainly one of the best we've made. And I felt after making it, if I never make another film in my life, I will die a happy woman having made that film, and I still feel that I didn't know I was going to go on and have a very long career making more films with Ken, but that was the one that sealed our working relationship and, and, you know, after that, it was no quick there was no question that we would keep making films together, because

Mike Dick  39:12  
impression I get, you know, watching, watching the film was, I guess, in the end, it gave you that sort of creative freedom, you know, to kind of really develop and tell the stories that you both wanted to

Speaker 1  39:23  
tell. Yeah, is that true? I think absolutely. I mean it we we, in a way by being in the back of beyond, we were free to do what we wanted, and we were free to establish our practices, our filmmaking practices, so that nobody could dispute. I mean, I think you know before that, when we were doing an agenda, we were subject to the completion guarantors wanting us to shoot in sequence, not not shooting sequence. And we had nobody to trouble us in a way, and we were able to. I mean, all I had to do was try and get the film made for the money, which wasn't an easy task. And all Ken had to do was find inventive ways to tell the story. And I think, I mean, we just, we discovered that the best way for us to work, really, was to be on each other's side and to, you know, Ken's always well aware of the budgetary limited limitations. And if you say, Look, you can't do that. We've got to come up with another way of doing it. And then, if you know, rather than just saying, No, you just, you're saying, well, we can't do that, but what if we come up with this. And so that's creative producing, and that's, you know, and we discovered that that was our sort of modus operandi and and we really enjoyed the way that worked. And it sort of definitely land and freedom sealed that. I mean, it was all we already worked well on hidden agenda, because hidden agenda was a ridiculous challenge that we rose to. But land and freedom was another ridiculous challenge, and it was, but it was a bigger film altogether. And I just think, you know, you get through something like that, and you're you're stuck, really, that's the way it's going to

Mike Dick  41:21  
be because, because you didn't work in Ken's next film, which I think

Speaker 1  41:25  
I didn't work on Carlos song, because that had been developed by Sally. So Ken and that was Paul's first Paul lavity, his first film. But Paul lavity had been in land and freedom. We cast Paul in land of freedom. He's in it as this as the questioning Scott called Jimmy. He looks very different. He's got hair and a beard and mustache.

Mike Dick  41:52  
Paul, come on the scene. Then Paul had written

Speaker 1  41:54  
to Ken at some point, saying, I'm a human rights lawyer. I've just spent X number of years in Nicaragua. I've got a story to tell. Ken wrote back to him, saying, well, let's meet. But you know, I'm not a writer. You go and write your story. And Paul managed to get himself a writing scholarship in LA at a film school. And or no, it was a, it was one of those prizes that you get to go and write. And he was, and he was actually in LA on that course, when we asked him to come back and be in land and freedom. And I think in a way, because he was in land and freedom, he that bonded us with him as well. He became part of Ken and my landscape. Somehow, Paul became closer and closer because, because he'd been through the land of freedom experience and quite deliberate on your part. It was deliberative. It was deliberate to get Paul into it, just because we couldn't find another political British person who was political enough to be in the film. And Ken thought, well, actually, Paul, I've met Paul. He's, he's political. He, let's get him. He's questioning. He's, he's got the chops for this. And so we got him in and and he delivered, you know, I think, and that, you know. And I think then Ken and Paul went on to do Carlos song without me, and that was the last film Ken did with Sally. I don't think that they were really gelling in the same way as Ken and I were. I think Sally was always a bit adversarial in her approach, and more more of a financing, strategic type of producer than a sort of more hands on. I mean, I've come from production, I'm came from line producing, I I'm production savvy. And I think, I think that that's that's sort of stood me in good stead with Ken, because he wanted somebody who was creative about getting yourself out of situations and and I think Carlos song, I think, was difficult for both Ken and Sally in that respect. I mean, another difficult film to do. I, in the meantime, went to do bean in in the States, because I need to earn some money.

Mike Dick  44:35  
That was a different

Unknown Speaker  44:40  
kettle of fish altogether. Yeah, after after land. I mean land and freedom again. Went to can

Speaker 1  44:52  
and was, it was certainly one of the best screenings I've ever been to in can. I was a bit more. Abbey there, the whole militia from the film came in a bus from Barcelona, and seeing them all in their dinner jackets, and was a wonderful thing. And everybody was in floods of tears at the end of the film was a very sort of emotional film, and it did get an absolutely rousing reception. And it actually didn't win. It didn't win any of the official prizes. And in fact, Ken and I were told to go and stand by to get on a plane, to come back, and then we got on the plane, and then we were told by the pilot to get off the plane, because they I think we heard later that there was a Stalinist on the jury who didn't agree with the film's politics and said, No, this film must not win. Apparently, we had been front runners and we didn't win anything, but it was so you know, that was the one that got away, because it certainly the response in can was, was amazing, and it was, you know, it was a well loved film, and it did terribly well in France, that film, and very, very well in Spain, interestingly. But then, so then we all moved on. So obviously, that sealed Ken and my plan to complete working but while he did Carla's song, I needed to do something, and a working title. Got in touch with me, because I done a few things with them before, and said, would I be interested in in doing this Mr. Bean film, which sounded very sort of lightweight, but I needed to earn some money. And they said, Well, the problem is, it's partly going to be shot in the States. I said, Oh, well, that's going to be tricky. I've got a kid and all the rest of it. But they said, well, we'll pay all your expenses, and we'll make sure that you're well looked after. And we just need you. We need somebody to represent the film. You know to be the British producer of the film, make it a British film. And the interview board for the job was very daunting. It was, I think it was Tim Bevan, who was head of working title, and Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis and Mel Smith, who was to direct it. I mean, that's some terrifying board. Anyway, they asked me to do it, and I was slightly amazed at that. But, I mean, again, I guess just because I managed to make a couple of working title films that had worked and and they trusted me, and but it was an It was an extraordinary experience. And now the other thing I wanted to do, I knew that Ken was talking about doing a film in LA, which was another idea that Paul had for doing a film about about the office cleaners that he wanted to do anon. So I thought, well, if I go to LA at least, I ll find out how it works over there by doing bean. But yes, we didn t know that Bean was going to be the phenomenon that it became. And I was there basically, sort of, I hate to say this, but sort of flying the flag. I mean, I was there to make a British film in Los Angeles, rather than an American film. And and also to sort of keep everything work, all the, all the sort of everything oiled between Mel and Rowan and Richard and all these, you know, big comic egos, basically. I mean, you know, the history of comedy in the 90s would have all of those elements in it. And there they were and I was wrangling them. But it was, it was, it was difficult from a just an organizing my own life perspective, because in the end, much more, most of the film was made in to be made in the States. And that was really difficult, because I had a six year old, five year old child, and I was going backwards and forwards, and it was really hard. And in the end, Jack came with me, and we spent something like four months out there. He ended up going to school there, which was paid for by working title, and they paid for me to have a house and a car and a nanny, and I, you know, all these things I got and and I got the same treatment, really, as the the starry people, so I couldn't complain. And it was interesting. It was interesting. And doing, going there, going to Hollywood, and making what was to their minds, a very low budget film. And it was, you know, we, I had to put together the cast and crew around it, and just get the casting done and doing all the things that you do, and find us find a place to shoot it. It was really funny. We we found this big warehouse in Marina Del Rey. It was like huge empty warehouse, which was where Howard Hughes built his Spruce Goose. And it had a smaller warehouse at the end. And in the big warehouse, they were shooting George of the jungle. So they had, like, live animals running around and things, lions and tigers and things. And I remember going to see the line producer of that and rather meekly saying, you know, you've got an empty warehouse there. Could we use it for our little film? And he was so arrogant, this guy. And I thought, Oh yeah, you really think you're important, you know? He said, Well, you know, our film is really big, and if we need that space back, we're just going to walk all over you, you know. And I thought, yeah, okay, Curse of O'Brien. Here, I'm going to deploy the curse of O'Brien. I just as I left, I thought, I bet our film is bigger than yours. Sure, hell was. I think bean took something like and in the mid 90s, it was pretty big. It was like half a million at the box office, which was half $1,000,500,000 at the box office. It was huge, absolute huge. Unfortunately, I didn't even get my on budget bonus. And I was, I was supposed to get 1% of net profits of the film. Never saw a bit, never saw a beam. I made more money on my name is Joe, funnily enough. But that was, it was good. It was a good it was a good learning experience. It was first time in Hollywood, yeah, yeah, I hadn't been there at all.

Mike Dick  52:09  
Excuse me. Yes, please. Hi there. Look.

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