Bill Anderson, director
Bill Anderson, who directed Last Rights, describes the elements that went into creating a thriller that is designed to spur young people into action
What attracted you to the Last Rights project?
There was something really believable and quite cool about it. It seemed to develop from the way things are going, with governments just getting away with murder – the whole Iraq war thing. Ages ago Tony Benn said that we've stopped being represented and become managed by politicians. I've got kids myself, and I liked the idea of involving them in politics, not by saying, 'Do this,' but, 'This is what happens if you don't get involved or if we take the opportunity away from you.’Showing how far politicians are prepared to go with their own children also appealed to me.
So it is about young people shaping their own lives?
The central characters start off as observers. Ashley Walters' character, Max, doesn't nick the laptop. His friend Tariq does – a friend he cares about and tries to protect. That’s what citizenship is about. Keira Malik's character, Melissa, is a partygoer, to begin with. It’s about their journey towards taking responsibility, to empowering themselves, to getting involved. It's difficult and dangerous and you have to commit yourself, have an opinion about what's right and what's wrong, and then do something about it. But they're people like us. In the end it's not a situation where they can live happily ever after, but they are better people in their own eyes.
You've got a kid on an estate. Against all the stereotypes he's got a single parent dad, who is so there for him, so concerned, so measured. He's a loving, caring man. Max is very much like Ashley: very responsible, mature, considerate, intelligent, compassionate and moral. He isn't some sort of stereotypical problem child, but somebody who you'd like your kids to be. That's also part of the observer idea. You're not actually dramatising the issues in the character; they're looking at it and deciding how they want the society that they're going to fit themselves into to be.
How did the plot change as you were working on it?
One of the big things that changed was the journey of the Enabling Act – when we would hear about it, how they were planning to reveal it, when we would reveal it in our drama. Without the Enabling Act you have a nicked laptop. So what? The Enabling Act sounds perfectly reasonable. You're guaranteed to win votes for saying: 'Let's cut out bureaucracy.'
We also made changes because we had to do it on a low budget. So the whole of politics is represented by two people, the Prime Minister and his Press Secretary. We have no scenes in the House of Commons – we couldn't afford that. A few scenes outside a faked up number 10 Downing Street was a whole political world. Having Jon Snow helped. What was missing was any sense of an opposition. We made a conscious decision to suggest that, because the difference between the parties seems to be half a cigarette paper thickness now, perhaps the only real opposition in 2009 might be people like AlterNet. So we hugely beefed up the role of Sol and the collective and turned it into something more of a movement, a kind of subculture.
The collective raises the question of access to information.
The issue is not information any more, but attention. We all have access to all the information on the planet now – but because of that we can't actually be selective. What grabs your attention? The internet is an interesting area where the truth lies, where the truth is and can be circulated. That seemed to be a very cost-effective way of setting up an idea of an opposition rather than just more politicians in suits.
The generational difference worked really well. Young people like Sol are really comfortable with very complex technological issues like hacking.
I had the idea that he should go round and see Melissa and all he knows is that the laptop's been nicked by Tariq. He just chances his arm and bluffs it. I liked the idea that that character who's not experienced in politics at all finds out whose computer it is by being quite bold and being outside the whole money/power thing.
In the casting there are some complex issues about ethnic/racial representation. What was the background to those decisions?
The Prime Minister's daughter was white – that was all part of the script. We end with a kiss between a black boy and a white girl and we have an Asian boy, Tariq – it's all interracial. Everything is. That wasn't an issue. It was normal. The world that we created felt completely normal to all the people in it.
I found the women more problematic. The strong women were white and the one Asian woman was a helpless wreck.
Tariq's mum, unable to cope and a bit hysterical, gave a background to Max's relationship with Tariq and maybe explained why Tariq was not as mature and grounded and connected as Max. They both needed a bit of looking after. And Max had the stability to do that.
Keira's character is strong and becomes stronger and she grows up, gets real and suffers a bit, and is forced to make choices. Tariq's mum is a mum, and she became a counterpoint to Max's dad – but it's Max and Tariq’s story.
How do you go from an idea to a film?
First, the idea would be pitched. There would be a treatment containing the kernel of the story, and then it would be developed. Channel 4 would put some money in to develop the script, and then the script would be worked up and there would come a point where they would start to spend real money on actually making it.
What was the budget?
Not enough! It's never enough, but you make a virtue out of necessity. We decided that we would shoot hand-held for the story of Max and the world of the estates and clubs, and shoot on a dolly – on a track – for the Downing Street world. On a 30-day shoot they could only afford a grip for five days, which is a bit like a journalist being told: we're hiring you for 30 days but we've only got enough electricity to power your laptop for five, so you can write by hand. Normally on a drama you would have a grip on board throughout the whole shoot. Because it was being funded by 4Learning, for them it was an astronomically high budget. For Channel 4 grown-ups it would have been a very modest budget indeed.
That disparity between the outside and the inside that you get from it being filmed in a different way, technically, worked very well.
In a political world where slickness is everything, you can use your grip to reinforce that. Contextually everything else looks less slick. But it’s important not to become slavish to it. There's a scene at the very end between the Prime Minister and his Press Secretary where they're saying goodbye and the Prime Minister forces him to resign. I just said: ‘Stand there like Jesus and make him come, then embrace him,' and we shot that hand-held. I wanted to feel that it was really raw and out of place in Downing Street. So once you've got a situation where you've set up a little sub-genre in what you're doing, you can then displace it. If you have a wobbly camera in Downing Street, you think: that's odd! It's not making sense in terms of the world I'm in. We were very lucky on the hand-held because we had a fantastic camera operator who has great narrative use of the frame and a very good eye for composition.
How did you approach setting it in the future?
We had to create a world that's believably 2009, so you think, well it's not quite now but it's only five years away, not 50. In the opening sequence, the writer was very concerned about us knowing that Max wasn't yet 18, so I had the idea of giving the bouncer a retina scanner which I think is just about believable for five years' time. The police have them and the bouncer has them. It's code for ‘it's slightly more difficult to get into clubs’. In the opening stages, on election night, when all the politicians are concerned about is who gets into the door of Number 10, our two protagonists are concerned about getting into the door of this club, and they're barred by modern technology.
That's also a powerful message about civil rights.
These things are not that far away and certainly there is the technology.
Why was it filmed in three hour-long episodes? Doesn't this demand a long attention span?
It is quite a long attention span but you could slice it up differently. After you've shot something with all your best laid plans, you come to look at it all together and the story doesn't work the way you think it's going to work so you change stuff around. We have to decide, for example, where commercial breaks come. We're given guidelines, so you have chapter breaks and you try to turn them into act breaks. Some writers write them in. Sometimes those breaks survive in the right place and sometimes they don't.
There's a difference in language between the generations, which reflects real life. Last Rights is aimed at young people but what will a mainstream adult audience make of it?
We remixed the opening five minutes because we were concerned that the dialogue between Max and Tariq was not clear. Initially we had a political story and we had two young kids going to a club and I wanted the excitement of the club. So in terms of the various levels of music, dialogue, sound effects and atmosphere, I whacked up anything that was exciting. What the kids are saying at that point is not hugely important. They’re going out for a night, talking about trainers, about this, about that. You get an idea, but as a director you very often hope that someone who's watching it in China with no understanding of English would understand: here's two lads going out. They can look at the body language and get it. But people could see they were saying something, so we had to remix it. But if you start having Max and Tariq speaking in a way that for them would be untrue, you risk the story and lose your audience. If the drama's working, then it's ok. The idea is that the audience will feel: ‘I don't quite get all of this but it will fall into place.' What's important is to give people enough things they can recognise so they don't lose interest. It's always about the first 10 minutes. In our opening you've got the interchange between newscasters and politics, which people do understand. We're saying, these are two very separate worlds.
It's fundamental to thrillers, as a genre, that you don't know what's going on at first.
There's got to be an element of reaching. We spend a huge amount of our time making decisions about what the audience will and won't have understood. We know the scripts backwards, and we know what our intentions are and try to forget all that and just look at what they're doing and ask: is that delivering anything to me at all? Do I understand it? Do I care?
The music score is very interesting.
Nick Bicât is an enormously emotional and versatile composer. He tries to give sounds ‘fingerprints’, so, for instance, he take a line of dialogue and then plays it backwards 50 times slower and it sounds really weird, then he'll slice a bit away from that and play it in a rhythm. We would try stuff, a bit of score on a piece of picture. It was much more improvisational than when we've worked together before and we were playful and quite free. There's a moment where Melissa, appearing on television, spills the beans and they’re searching Max's flat looking for the CD. Nick played this bass guitar when it was clear that Melissa was doing the right thing and there's a real warmth between her and Max watching her on TV. The last note ends with the TV being switched off. Then Speer is watching Ashley Walters and he chucks the CD and says: 'You gave it to her,' then leaves. At that point Nick let his hands just run down the frets and the strings and it's actually really funny. The score he did around the mugging of Max is really good and the bits for the tenderness between Max and his dad are fantastic.
Where was it filmed?
It was a combination of two estates in north London. These places are always much nicer than you want them to be but you need to make them all horrible and grey!
A lot of that was done with lighting.
Yes, Keiran McGuigan was the director of photography. His stuff is very energetic and raw, and he uses blues and golds and cyans. People walk through a room with the lighting on and you change mood, so it has the effect of being very dynamic on a very low budget. What Keiran was doing with the lighting and what Nick was doing with the music really helped to define a world in subtle ways.
