EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Sarah Gavron

Lets start at the beginning: How did you get involved with the project?

Well I'd read the book when everyone else read the book, and I really loved it then but hadn't thought about it as a film, and I was already talking to Tessa Ross at FilmFour who'd seen the television feature-length film I did called This Little Life and we were talking about doing something. She then mentioned that they'd optioned Brick Lane with an independent production company and I said I'd loved the novel so they sent me for the project and it was daunting, but also irresistible. I approached it with trepidation but I knew it was something I really wanted to do.

I gather Monica Ali, authoress of the novel, worked on the adaptation - did you have a close working relationship?

It was interesting because in the beginning of the process I met her for lunch and she was really hands off, she sort of said 'I've written the novel, you're making the film, just make the film you want to make', which in some ways is great, really liberating, although on the other hand I just kept wanting to ring her up and ask, you know, 'which estate did you base this on?'. So we sent her copies of the script, an we invited her to castings, but she didn't come. She was always very friendly but she just didn't want that much bother. But then we got to the rough-cut stage and held a screening for her so I was terrified, but she was really really supportive of it. She really appreciated it and thought it captured the spirit of the novel, she felt that people like Chanu, it was a bit unnerving that he had just walked off the page. She had a couple of suggestions which we incorporated where it was felt best but she was just really helpful.

A lot of the novel centres on Nazneen's inner world, how did you go about capturing this?

Well that was the big challenge, as is often the case with novels, but it also spanned two decades so it was about how to boil it down. We didn't feel we needed to follow it to the letter but felt that we should be loyal to the spirit of it, there were probably at least forty drafts of the script and one point we decided just to cut the first forty pages because the first part of the novel in film terms was just set-up so we decided to focus on that the third part of the novel. The other decision was to make it very much seen through the eyes of Nazneen, using cinematic language instead of literary language to put her emotions on screen, we focussed on that through the lighting, the music, the sound sides so if the world was forbidding it would seem forbidding to her.

Coming from a very different background, how did you personally find a way to identify with Nazneen?

Your job as a director is to go into different worlds and find ways to connect with different people; I think if you only told your own story you'd make the same film over and over again. You just find ways into it, it's sort of the same process actors go through, it's partly through research, partly through drawing on experiences that somehow connect and I did a combination of those things. But the book was our source so we had this whole font of knowledge about this character. I had routes in through my experiences growing up in London and I have a family, I have a sister, but nevertheless I was largely an outsider so it was about researching and finding my way into a culture that wasn't my own and pulling universal human aspects out of it.

Did you learn any Bengali?

I did have to learn a little for when I went on a British-based Bengali TV show and they coached me in how to say 'come and watch the film' (laughs) so I didn't really learn that much.

I heard you had some trouble with the residents, how much did this hinder the production?

It was interesting because when we started I was an outsider of the community, I knew the area but not the way I now know it. We had eight months of preparation in which people were very supportive and welcoming in many ways, they opened their doors to us and so on, and Tannishta Chatterjee (who plays Nazneen) spent lots of time with women in the community, I went into many many homes, we did open auditions and thousands turned up, and we took on board many people from the community as cast and crew. However, we were three weeks into the shoot and we got this call at about midnight the night before we were due to film in Brick Lane itself saying, well there was this threat saying that we might be hurt, it was implicitly violent, but we very quickly established that it was from this tiny if vocal minority who got the ear of the press. It was a lesson in who shouts loudest and it was quite shocking in a way. But lots of their beefs with the film were so particular and based on speculation and scenes that weren't in the film and weren't in the book, like a leech falling into a curry pot in a Brick Lane restaurant or something, things that might damage business. For the people who'd read the book there wasn't that level of fear or trepidation so we didn't change anything and we didn't actually stop filming because filming is a machine that carries on, but we did sort of relocate and it put pressure on us in some ways, just emotionally, and particularly on the cast and crew who were from that area who felt rather angry about it. But then we came back and shot what we needed on Brick Lane when the media coverage had died down.

You said Monica Ali approved of Chanu's depiction in the film, I'm interested to know how you felt Satish Kaushik transferred from his usual language and his usual, more comedic, roles?

Although he's been typecast as this comedic actor he also played very successfully, in India, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman and he's had a really successful theatre career there and he's a really serious actor with a lot of technique, he's brilliant to work with and brings a lot to the role. He understood the layers and the complexities. In terms of his Bengali we went to Bangladesh and he learnt the language, dialect and accent but in the end you have to cast the actor you think best expresses the character.

When the film was completed, what impact did you hope this film would have?

What was so fantastic and original about the book was that it was set in that community but was a universal story, and it was about a passionate portrayal of a family set against a shifting cultural landscape of London, but I think in this particular point in time where we're so inundated with depictions of extreme muslims it's important to show the family that everybody can relate to, I really wanted to hold onto that, and to something that would resonate across cultures and across generations. But it works on many levels, I hope, was my ambition for it.

What was your favourite scene in the completed film? You always notice when you watch it that you're happier with certain moments than with others, but I liked the scene when Chanu, at the end, tells his daughters that he's returning home because he's still the Chanu that says it was my decision not my wife's decision and I just think it's touching.

Brick Lane is out on DVD in the UK on 10th of March and is available to pre-order from retailers such as Play.com for £10.99 Specs below... 1.78:1 Anamorphic Widescreen English DD5.1 Surround A Conversation with Monica Ali and Hanif Kureishi at the ICA Exploring Brick Lane Interview with Sarah Gavron Interview with Tannistha Chatterjee and Christopher Simpson Interview with Satish Kaushik Theatrical Trailer Commentary by Sarah Gavron (Director) and Chris Collins (Producer) Scene Specific commentaries