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at the helm
Writer director Amma Asante on her youth-packed feature film debut. Matthew Sweet reports from Wales
Amma Asante doesn’t seem remotely fazed by the bangs and screams and giggles that are emanating through the wall of her caravan.
A series of tremendous thumps is causing the wallpapered parti- tion to buckle visibly and the whole vehicle to dance about on its moorings, but it doesn’t break her benign smile. “That’s just the kids,” she breezes. “I’m used to it now.”
Asante is hours away from canning the last shot of her first feature, A Way Of Life, a tough drama played out on the housing estates of South Wales, in which the UK Film Council has invested £422,000.
Brenda Blethyn is the big name on the poster, and the rest of the cast are young Welsh unknowns recruited from local television and amateur drama classes.
Asante has spent the morning in a night club near Cardiff Central station, gazing at the monitor and sipping on a cup of hot Ribena as her young cast completed the last of the film’s many ensemble scenes.
In the coming afternoon, she’s scheduled to film in an empty office block which her crew has cunningly redressed as a hospital waiting room.
Then the director will fulfil her last duty of the day and the shoot: taking her gaggle of ado- lescent discoveries to the wrap party at a local hotel. A Jacuzzi, she says with a little trepidation, will be involved. “I’ve begged them to be good,” she admits. “I’m sure they will be.”
Twenty years ago, Asante was on the other side of the fence: in the mid 1980s, she started her career in television as a teenage actor, spending several terms at Grange Hill before graduating to guest roles on Desmonds and Birds of a Feather. Those experi- ences, she says, helped her to recruit the cast of A Way of Life.
“As a child actor you can end up being a factory product. A lot
of the kids that we saw were all going to the same dance classes and the same acting classes. I was aware of that myself, having gone to stage school, so I was looking for everything that was opposite to myself.”
So far, she has denied their requests to let them view tapes of her own TV appearances. “They’re much better actors than I am, and I don’t ever want them to know. Why show them bad acting when all they know is good?”
In her twenties, Asante decid- ed that she was happier on the other side of the camera, and a development deal from Chrysalis Productions allowed her to make the switch.
The brightest line on her writ- ing CV so far is Brothers And Sisters, a well-regarded but poor- ly-scheduled BBC2 drama series which centred upon the mem- bers of a Baptist congregational choir in Liverpool. Asante scripted and produced the series for two years, which – amazingly – made her the first black woman to take both the writer’s and producer’s credit on a British TV drama.
Racism is one of the subjects of A Way Of Life, but Asante has chosen to explore the problem in a context far removed from her own experiences growing up in Streatham, south London.
“As a writer it was really inter- esting for me to try and explore a world which was very different to mine,” she explains. “I’m a black writer but I don’t only want to write about black people. I want to write about people, and sometimes they’ll be black and sometimes they won’t.”
Her story, which opens with a murderous assault upon a Turkish Cypriot man, takes the unusual step of telling its story from the point of view of the attackers, not the victims.
“I did think, as I was writing it, will I be accused of giving a voice to racists? And my decision was to take that on the chin,
if that was the accusation; because I think it’s a worthwhile story to be told. If we gag people we’ll never get to the bottom of our problems.”
Unlike most recent British films that have tackled similar themes – East Is East, Anita & Me, Wondrous Oblivion – Asante’s film will, she says, decline to flatter its audience by treating racism as a problem from history. “I’d be pleased,” she confesses, “if it made people feel uncomfortable.”
Her train of thought is sudden- ly derailed as another almighty
crash rocks the caravan. Its wheels give an ominous wobble. “Actually,” she concedes, “per- haps I better go and shut them up.” She disappears through the door. But she’s still smiling.
Photos from top: Amma Asante (right) with crew on location and a scene from A Way Of Life with Brenda Blethyn and Stephanie James
arts and crafts
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