Page 16 - Fujifilm Exposure_34 Curse Of The Were-Rabbit_ok

in production
A HISTORY
OF VIOLENCE
Rape, revenge and redemption...
At first glance, award-nominated documentaries about a Moscow siege and the Kosovan conflict might seem to have
little in common with a claus- trophobic tale of rape and revenge in the West Midlands.
But, as carefully explained by British writer-director Dan Reed, his first feature, the intriguingly-titled Straightheads, co-starring Gillian Anderson and Danny Dyer, clearly owes a great deal to a solid grounding in violent reality.
“My first documentary, Cape Of Fear, a 60-minuter for the BBC, involved spending a year ‘embed- ded’ with one of Cape Town’s most notorious gangs. The level of access I had was astonishing and I filmed everything – drug deals, weapons smuggling, police corruption, brutal gang justice, confessions to murder and so on.
“I was astonished by how complex the truths of gang life were, compared to how they’d been portrayed to me in the cinema and in fiction. And I acquired a taste for telling what I see as difficult truths about men who live
with violence: in many ways, they are just like us but happen to have been born into a different way of life.”
He added: “I was amazed by the talent, ingenuity, discipline and energy these men devote to their bad deeds, but I could see that somehow it actual- ly made a dreadful kind of sense, in their world and on their terms.
“Being part of that world, if only temporarily and as a ‘privileged’ out- sider, has given me experiences and insights as a documentary-maker which no ‘ordinary’ person, perhaps fortunately, will have, and I consider myself very lucky indeed to have had these opportunities.”
After South Africa, Reed made films in Bosnia and Kosovo, the latter involving three or four months of close contact with the war day-in, day-out, resulting in The Valley, a 70-minute documentary for Channel Four – “and many experiences that still mark me profoundly as a film-maker and a human being.”
Returning to the UK after Kosovo, he “immersed” himself in the gang underworld of Liverpool, “using a cast of real gangsters in an improvised docu-dramatic portrayal about
the rise of gun-culture on the streets of the inner-city.” This was Shooters, again for C4.
“The experience,” said Reed, “of working with my cast of non-actors was intensely rewarding and a few of them went on to act in other films.
“Much of my interest in violence stems from those experiences as a documentary film-maker which brought me very close to men and communities afflicted by violence over long periods of my life.” This theme continued with C4’s Terror In Moscow, the story of the hostages in the 57- hour siege of a musical theatre by Chechen suicide bombers.”
Both The Valley and Terror In Moscow were nominated for BAFTAs – The Flaherty and Current Affairs - and also won a total of 16 other awards.
And so to The Wyre Forest for Straightheads, described as “a shock- ing and provocative thriller”.
Said Reed: “It is, in many ways, just a continuation of the above. It’s a fable, or a cautionary tale, about violent revenge and the problematic nature of violence and its uses. But I use a very different method of story-telling, this time not involving documentary observation or non- actors improvising, but instead pro- fessional actors and a tightly con- structed script.”
Straightheads began in 1999 as a treatment for the bfi Production Fund and Film Four Lab. When the film is finally released later this year in the UK via Verve Pictures, it will, sighed Reed, have taken seven years “to bring this story to the screen.”
Reed approached producers Damian Jones and Kevin Loader – who have also just produced The History Boys together - with his proj- ect and they put together a £1.8 mil- lion budget including backing from, among others, FilmFour, the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund and Screen West Midlands.
It’s down to The Wyre in Straightheads
Photo main: On location with cast and crew; above: Straightheads star Gillian Anderson;
inset above right: DP Chris Seager (seated) and Writer-Director Dan Reed (second from right); inset below right: a scene from Straightheads
14 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture