Brick Lane: Sarah Gavron interview

Director Sarah Gavron makes her theatrical feature debut with Brick Lane, a sensitive and moving adaptation of the bestselling novel by Monica Ali. Set in London's East End, the film stars Tannishtha Chatterjee as a Bangladeshi woman stuck in a loveless marriage and pining for the homeland of her childhood. Sarah previously directed the BBC Films-funded full-length drama This Little Life, for which she won a TV BAFTA for Best New Director. She talks here about her interests, filmmaking style and the challenges of making Brick Lane...

What are the themes you're interested in exploring as a director?

I suppose This Little Life and Brick Lane both have things in common in that they have a female protagonist very much at the centre of the story, and they're subjectively told. I'm very interested in cinema that explores emotional journeys and where you can use everything at your disposal cinematically to locate you inside someone's head and their emotional landscape.

What were the main challenges bringing Brick Lane to the big screen?

A lot of the internal world of Nazneen is richly captured in prose form in the novel, so the challenge was bringing that to the screen. We used various methods to capture this: one was to create a visual language for Bangladesh haunting Nazneen's waking dreams, to show her sense of loss for the country she's left behind. In a way, our approach to each scene was that the camera and sound design and the music was very much reflecting her emotional state, so through the love scenes there's a heightened sense of her view of the world, and the opening images of Bangladesh are very idealised as a memory.

Both This Little Life and Brick Lane have a female protagonist. The films also have a delicate sensibility. How difficult is it to get films like this made?

Well, with Brick Lane it was different because it was a bestselling novel. Nevertheless it didn't have a well-known cast so it wasn't the easiest film in the world to get off the ground. We had a team who were passionately committed to bring it to the screen, but I think it was at every turn a challenge and rather daunting.

What were the biggest challenges in terms of the production itself?

Casting was really a challenge, because you couldn't go down any of the well-trodden routes to find actors. No film had been made set in the Bangladeshi community, so we went on this worldwide search that got us to South Asia. We met many, many people, and because the characters are so beautifully and particularly described in the novel, you wanted to deliver them to the screen like that. What's really satisfying is that Monica Ali has talked about Satish Kaushik, who plays Chanu, as being unnervingly like her character has walked off the page, which you're delighted by.

What benefits did it bring casting two Indian actors - Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik - and transplanting them to London for the shoot?

Tannishtha Chatterjee is Bengali, her grandparents moved over from what is now Bangladesh during Partition, and so she had a cultural connection with the character, and also coming to London as someone who doesn't know London well, obviously she had a sense of displacement that I'm sure she tapped into for her performance. She then also went and met many women in the community as her research, but the book really was our source.

How did you yourself deal with the cultural leap you had to make, because I'm assuming it wasn't a world you knew much about beforehand...

It was interesting. There's a great precedent in filmmaking for directors making films about cultures that aren't their own, like Ang Lee with Sense And Sensibility, and Shekhar Kapur [Elizabeth] and Pawel Pawlikowski [Last Resort, My Summer Of Love]. And in a way perhaps there's an advantage of being on the edge of something and looking in as the observer, because as the filmmaker you're the storyteller and you're pulling out this universal story. But all of the detail is what makes the world live, so we needed the input of that community. So I worked very closely with a Bangladeshi Muslim film director called Ruhul Amin, who came on board to work alongside me, and he was there all the time and filled in the detail of that world. But at the same time we weren't creating a representation of the community, we were creating a subjective version of events.

Many of the creative people working on the film were female - from the writers Laura Jones and Abi Morgan and composer Jocelyn Pook through to your editor Melanie Oliver. What did this bring to the production?

I don't know, it was more an instinctive response to the material that it's so much a story about a woman and it's perhaps a story that women connect with more than men - although there are some wonderful male characters in the film that men can find a way into the movie through. It was also commissioned by women - Tessa Ross at FilmFour and her team.

One similarity I found between This Little Life and Brick Lane was your depiction of the mainmale characters - played by David Morrissey and Satish Kaushik, respectively. They are marginalised and rather unsympathetic for a lot of the film, until redeeming themselves in the third act. I wasn't sure how deliberate that was...

I hadn't made that parallel but you're right... maybe that's an ingrained pattern in my filmmaking! I suppose I do have an interest in stories that show complexity. I think one of the really attractive things about Monica Ali's novel is that it didn't deliver stereotypes and offer answers on arranged marriage and radicalism. And Chanu [played by Satish Kaushik] wasn't a bully, he was actually a complex man who was at times a bully, at other times compassionate.

You shot in India rather than Bangladesh for the scenes of Nazneen's childhood. Why was that?

We shot in West Bengal, just across the border, so it was the same land essentially. I went to Bangladesh a lot and I had a fantastic experience, recced and went to villages and met potential crew. But the reality is that India is a place that's had a lot of international crews working there and logistically a very accessible place to film, whereas Bangladesh is very different.

One of my favourite shots in the film is when a Bangladeshi fisherman casts his net onto a river, causing the water to ripple...

What I did was scour the book for images, and there was an image in the book of a fisherman, and it's so much an image of that part of the world, which is made up of rivers. I was very keen to preserve that kind of detail, which is so evocative. You know, you're always fighting time and fighting the light on any shoot, and I was saying, "Where's the fisherman?" And that man was a fisherman. I remember saying, "Come on, let's quickly do it." I'm glad you responded to it; I like it too.

Both of your films have a strong visual eye, which, as a rule, isn't usually that strong in British filmmaking. Where does that come from?

It's just part of my make-up, I suppose, and also the team contribute a huge amount to the whole feel of it. But I'm very interested in filmmaking where you use the camera and the image in a way that does express an emotional journey, and perhaps that is more typical of European filmmaking. I've always found that that's what attracts me to cinema, and that's what I'm excited by.

Can you clarify what exactly happened when you shot in London? Did you have to stop shooting in Brick Lane itself?

Brick Lane is very much a symbolic title and very evocative of the fact that Brick Lane as an area has been a sanctuary for successive waves of immigrants searching for a home - and home, rather than the bricks and mortar of Brick Lane, is at the centre of this story. What we wanted to do was preserve that title and set it in that area. Obviously the pattern of Nazneen's life is that she doesn't go out that much, so much of the film was going to be shot in interiors and there wasn't that much shooting to do on Brick Lane itself.

We were three weeks into the shoot and were about to shoot on Brick Lane for a few days, and then we got this call saying there was this threat, and it emerged that it came from this very tiny, if vocal, minority. And what was clear very quickly was that they didn't represent the local majority, and that many people were supportive and many came on board as cast and crew. We didn't for a minute stop filming, and we didn't for a minute change the content of the film, but what we did was reschedule so we came back to shoot in Brick Lane once the media coverage of the protests had died down.

How did you strike the balance between the personal and the political within the film?

It's obviously set against this social and political backdrop, and that gives a very important texture to the story. And what I thought was interesting is that here, for once, we were seeing that world through the eyes of a woman. One thing that's political about this story is that we're giving a marginalised section of the community a voice. And if you look at what the protesters were objecting to, it certainly wasn't depictions of extremism or social unrest on the street. What's unique about this novel is that it's a depiction of the journey of a woman, so I was very keen that we preserved that.

How did you find the transition directing a theatrical feature? Because This Little Life didn't receive a theatrical release...

It didn't have a theatrical life, but in a way I think that was probably right for it. It had a festival life and then it was shown on TV and did well in its own terms. It won me a BAFTA and was terribly helpful in terms of my career. So Brick Lane was my first theatrical film, and obviously that brings with it certain pressures, and adapting a well known novel with a political dimension brings other pressures. All of that made it a very different experience, but from a practical filmmaking view it wasn't very different.

You made shorts before This Little Life. How much have they informed you as a filmmaker, and were they your training ground?

I began in documentaries and in my very early 20s I went to Edinburgh College of Art and did a one year course in filmmaking, where I made a couple of shorts. Then I went off and worked in documentaries for five years. All that time, while I was having the most fulfilling and interesting experiences and travelling the world, I knew that what I wanted to do was fiction, so I applied to the National Film and Television School, not really expecting to get in but delighted when I did.

It was a huge learning curve for me there; I think I made eight shorts over the period of being there. Then I came out and one of them, the final one [The Girl In The Lay-By], was the one that broke through and got me noticed in the industry, got me an agent, and that opened some doors in terms of meeting people - BBC Films, FilmFour. I was developing my own project and it was at that moment that BBC Films approached me with This Little Life, so I took that opportunity. Again I was developing my own project directly after that for a couple of years, which never came about, and then Brick Lane came along, which was exploring very similar ideas thematically, so it was a very obvious project for me to pick up.

Do you find that you're always just getting offered female protagonist films now?

Yeah, but that's no bad thing!

Technically, what are you happiest about with Brick Lane?

On a technical level I'm attached to the imagery that I think speaks to the story most effectively. I'll always question every decision that we made, and we poured a lot of energy into it - it took three years of my life - but when I feel that an image is saying something cinematically, then I'm pleased.

Brick Lane is released in UK cinemas on Friday 16th November 2007.

Adrian Hennigan | Published 15 November 07