Sarah Gavron: interview

Sarah Gavron, director of ’Brick Lane‘, writes about the difficulties of bringing Monica Ali‘s novel to the screen and dealing with local protests during her film‘s shoot

From the moment I was approached to direct ‘Brick Lane’, I wanted to do it. Not only did it carry the excitement of being my first feature film, but the story was irresistible. I knew it was going to be both a privilege and a challenge. How do you turn a much-loved, best-selling – and politically sensitive – novel into a film?

The novel is 500 pages long and covers more than two decades. It was clear to me and the screenwriter, Abi Morgan, that distilling it into a film that would satisfy its myriad fans was never going to be easy. What is left after many drafts is, I hope, what first drew us to the novel: Nazneen’s unique and blossoming view of a world changing as she changes. We enter her landscapes: a haunting childhood in Bangladesh, a claustrophobic marriage in a council flat, set against the backdrop of the city. We follow the love stories: the love between Karim and Nazneen that doesn’t last and the love that grows between Chanu and Nazneen, as well as the love between parents and children, and sister and sister. And all through the prism of the fateful year 2001 and 9/11.

Once we had a script, the next challenge was casting. Since the characters of the novel were so particularly described, we decided to do a worldwide search. We found Nazneen, the Bengali Tannishtha Chatterjee, early on as we toured south Asia, but it was much harder to find her husband, Chanu. No one looked right. And time was running out. Three weeks before shooting, Satish Kaushik’s name came up and I Googled him. He looked perfect – rotund, the right age – but could he act? Now he directs in Bollywood, but in the past he had played comedy and recently Willy Loman in an Indian theatre production of ‘Death of a Salesman’. We flew to Delhi and he took us out to his restaurant, called Food Unlimited. Problem solved. To his delight, Monica Ali said we had found the real-life Chanu.

Back in London we cast, among others, Christopher Simpson as Nazneen’s lover, Karim, and the irrepressible Naema Begum as her daughter Shahana. While Christopher hung out with Brick Lane’s young men to learn about being Bangladeshi, Naema taught us. ‘Sorry, Sarah, I just wouldn’t say that to my father,’ was a typical remark.

So to filming, and the much talked-about protests. We wanted to show the world through one woman’s eyes but still it was obvious from the start that a white English director would need a lot of help. We spent months working with the community. We had lots of Bangladeshi crew and cast, including our fantastic associate director, Ruhul Amin, and Abed Hakim who did local casting. Nonetheless, just when we were about to start shooting on Brick Lane itself I got a phone call at midnight reporting threats against us if we went ahead.

It was a lesson in how the person who shouts the loudest gets the most attention. Some of the protesters hadn’t even read the book, and none of them had seen the script. They spoke of leeches falling into cooking pots. What? Not in the book, nor the film. But it soon became clear that the protesters did not represent a local majority in Brick Lane. Still, the threat was implicitly violent and we had children on set, so we rescheduled and shot elsewhere. We didn’t stop or change anything in the film. In fact, a few weeks later, we came back and got the shots we needed on Brick Lane.

For us, ‘Brick Lane’ as a title symbolises a sanctuary to successive waves of immigrants searching for home. That search, rather than the bricks and mortar of the street, is at the heart of the story which plays out mostly in Nazneen’s home, in the interior pattern of her life. We visually wanted to capture that pattern and to show the surprising beauty as well as the ugliness of her world.

I don’t know whether viewers will be affected by the political turmoil, but I can say that we set out from the start to open up the lives of one fictional Bangladeshi family in east London, to show their struggles, conflicts, fears, hopes and loves, set against the political and social backdrop of recent times. A human story with no easy answers on radicalism or arranged marriages; focusing on complex characters and quietly political.

Nazneen, a child sent away to an arranged marriage, becomes a woman only to find that her own daughter in turn faces being sent back to a country not her home. This story tells how life circles. And so we can find opportunity to make better choices, to change, not simply to ‘endure’. In an uncertain world, Nazneen decides to stay with her daughters. I hope that ‘Brick Lane’ pays tribute to Monica Ali’s novel, that it’s a hopeful film: of integration, of a woman who finds her place in a country for so long alien and realises that she is actually home.

‘Brick Lane’ opens on November 16.