A Night at the London Film Festival The Culture Show

The London Film Festival. For 12 days, London is under siege from

some of the world's very best film-makers and their latest

celluloid offerings. Unlike Cannes or Venice, this festival isn't an

industry-only shindig, but a pure celebration of film - and everyone's

invited. Now in its 57th year, the festival

will show a staggering 235 feature films and documentaries, plus 134

shorts from 57 countries from around the world.

But tonight we focus on the wealth of British talent and real-life

stories. From Captain Philips starring Tom

Hanks. We have two skiffs approaching with armed intruders.

To home-grown tales of friendship in The Selfish Giant. Probably about

500 quid! Don't think about it. And an Oscar-tipped drama with

Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Benedict Cumberbatch that

reveals the terrible chapters of our past.

Before travelling into the future with Alfonso Cuaron's jaw-droppingly

beautiful sci-fi fantasy Gravity. A truly diverse slice of this year's

festival moments. The festival opened with Captain

Philips by one of the biggest British directors working in

Hollywood right now, Paul Greengrass.

This former documentary maker often deals with gritty, real-life subject

matter - from the Bloody Sunday Killings, to 9/11 in the

Oscar-nominated United 93 - as well as two of the high-octane Bourne

films. Captain Philips is the true-life

tale of a cargo ship, hijacked by Somali pirates. Everything OK? I

don't like the look of that. One of the ways that we know it's a

Paul Greengrass film is that we begin very early on meeting the

Somalians before they're pirates. You're very at pains to do their

back-story. That actually they are as much victims of the situation as

the people they are about to hijack. Tell me about casting those

characters because you went to great lengths to make sure you cast them

properly? Well, one of those important issues was to cast

Somalians to play those four parts. Because it's a part of the world

that's got a story to tell but I can't tell it. Only people who've

grown up there, you know, and who understand what would lead young men

to do that. Francine Maisler, who is the casting director, she phoned me

up one day and she said, "You've got to see these four young men" - and I

didn't know that they were all friends. And you could just see

immediately that they had a chemistry, that there was good

definition between them. And that central character playing Muse - he

just had real charisma. What is it that you get from casting in certain

roles non-professional actors? You've done it before. You know

there are characters in United 93 who are the genuine professionals.

You get an interesting dynamic because there is nothing comfortable

about the encounter. You can't quite predict what the less-experienced

person on the other side is going to do. And that makes them all

together, live more dangerously, you know, and, on the other side, you

look at Barkat's performance there. That's acting of a high quality.

Yeah, he's good. I remember, very clearly, I decided to keep them

apart, Tom Hanks and those four guys, so they'd never actually met,

they'd never even seen each other - they knew about each other - until

that moment when they come on the bridge. GUNFIRE Don't move! You

could see from the energy, straight away there was something good

happening. They were hollering and throwing people down on the floor

and all that stuff, but I just remember very early on Barkat turned

to Tom and said, "Look at me, I'm the captain now" - and it's in the

film - and it's a great moment - and I remember thinking, "We're going to

be good here." So Look at me. I'm the captain now. So

what is it in the end about real stories that constantly draws you

back? That is your forte? Well, I think it's where you come from, you

know, if that's where you start, it's your - it's deep inside you.

When they said, "Come and make a film about a band of Somali pirates

attacking a modern container ship" you go, "I love that idea, there's

something so simple about that that's so simple and characterful,

so intensely dramatic, but yet it has the power to illuminate a larger

landscape. Captain Philips, can you hear me? Captain Philips, can you

hear me? In cinema, reality is of course rather fluid. When you see

the words "based on real events" flashed up at the beginning of a

film, it can either mean "Hey, we made a lot of this stuff up to make

it more dramatic" or "the facts are so alarming it's hard to believe

they're true." So where do you draw the line

between invention and reality? They said you had abandoned him as a

baby. I did not abandon my child. Stephen Frears' film Philomena is

the story of an Irish woman's search to find the long-lost son that

Catholic nuns forced her to give up for adoption.

Philomena is played by Judi Dench. The screenplay is by Steve Coogan,

who also stars in this as former BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith, on whose

book the story is based. I know this woman, she had a baby when she was a

teenager and she's kept it secret for 50 years. You are talking about

a human interest story. I don't do those. Why not?

The search to find Philomena's son took Sixsmith to America but the

road trip they take in the movie is a pure dramatic invention. I was

inspired more by seeing a photograph of Martin and Philomena sat next to

each other. That inspired the story more than Martin's book because I

just saw the opportunity to tell a story about two very different

people. We needed to manufacture circumstances where they would spend

a lot of time with each other. Because that would inevitably lead

to a clash of cultures and a clash of ideas. God feels a need to wipe

out hundreds of thousands of people, that escapes me. You should ask him

about that when you are in there. There's one thing I don't like it's

crude language but when that came out, I just burst out laughing when

I saw that in the film. And the first time I saw it I didn't think

it was me at all, I just kept thinking it was Judi Dench. The

third time it hit home, you know, that it was my story. I think if

there's one thing that is actually absolutely accurate in the film,

it's the relationship between Steve and Judi, there's that sort of

bantering friendship, they're very different characters and we're very

different characters. Fortunately, because I'm writing about a writer,

so he understands the creative process, in fact in his book on

Philomena and Philomena's son, at times by his own admission he used

creative license, so he understands the principles so, of course, it was

very easy with him. So I'd say, "I want to do this with your

characters, I want to make it more like this..." In, fact there is

quite a bit of myself that I put into Martin's character on the

screen so it's some of Martin, some of me, and some invention. I'd feel

more comfortable if I can speak to Philomena in private... I was very

clear about the ethics of what is and what isn't permissible. I think

when you're using creative license to tell a story and you're playing

with chronology and all the rest of it, to me that's entirely

legitimate. If you're saying things that are - if you're making

accusations about a person or an institution that are, or making

statements that are quite derogatory, then you need to, I

think they need to be based on fact. I met him at the White House. Do you

remember anything he said? Hello. They were the times, weren't they,

in the 1940s, '50s, that was the era where all this went on. When people

have watched the film I obviously want them to say that was a very

good film, I want them to say I laughed at the right places, I cried

at the right places and I felt that they did the emotion properly. But I

also want people to think about it, that things were done in those days,

and very wrong things were done, and actually the wrongs that were done

in those days haven't all been righted. People today would never

believe the story. They would not believe all this went on.

British film has a strong tradition of exploring truth and reality.

Directors such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are synonymous with social

realism. This tough, documentary-like approach is also

shared by director Clio Barnard, in her feature film The Selfish Giant.

About time, what have you been doing? What have you been doing?

Trying to climb that, waiting for you. It's really about a loving

friendship between two teenage boys and how that unravels when they get

involved with a dodgy scrap metal dealer.

Her film is in part inspired by an Oscar Wilde short story but also a

true-life friendship between two boys that she met whilst filming her

critically acclaimed film The Arbor. The Selfish Giant is the acting

debut for Sean Thomas and Connor Chapman. What you doing sat here? Go

out and make some money. Got that bridle too tight on the horse. Let

me come and sort it out for you. You are a bad influence! In some ways,

what I had to do was put the Oscar Wilde story at a certain point to

one side and then write the story of the sort of emotional lives really

of these two boys and then I suppose what I realised when I finished that

was I had written a script with was about the wounds of love.

Set in a deprived Yorkshire town, The Selfish Giant draws from

real-life experiences of kids who turn to scrap metal to supplement

their family's incomes. The kids are really scavenging through this

post-industrial landscape and that ideology of greed I guess it's a

Thatcherite ideology and when Thatcher died, Glenda Jackson made

this speech and said, you know, under Thatcher, selfishness and

greed became virtues rather than vices. I think thematically that's

at the heart of it, what happens if selfishness becomes adopted as an

ideology and about children being pushed out to the margins.

Director Richard Ayoade has also adapted fiction for his second

feature. His film The Double is based on a Dostoevsky novella. I'll

have a coke and a bagel. We are out of bagels. I'll just... Come on.

Sorry. I'll just - I will have the coke then. A coke? Ou? Coffee and

scrambled eggs. We don't serve breakfast in the evening. Do you

have eggs here? Yes. Then make me some scrambled eggs! So Richard the

film is inspired by a Dostoevsky novella. Tell me how close it is to

that literary source. The central idea is the same I'd say in that

it's about a lowly person whose life is slowly overtaken by a double.

It's just that no-one else notices and also when he points out that

this person looks just like him no-one else is bothered. But there

is something very funny about the double's reaction to the main

character. He's always laughing at him, he's always winking. There is

brazenness to the taunting that I found very interesting. One of the

most impressive things about the film is the look of it now, it's got

a specifically non-dated feel, they're using very arcane technology

and yet you're not sure if its future, past. It's got a very

retrofitted future. What were you thinking of in the design for that.

It felt that it needed to be an unplaceable nature that it didn't'

feel that it was culturally specific because what we're doing wasn't

satirical of a certain kind of culture or milieu in anyway. And if

felt like the world should be quite unresponsive to human need. You

don't exist anymore. Put me back in the system. I can't. You don't

exist. I used to be in the system. One of the things that the film does

achieve really well is it has a dream quality, not a woolly dream,

but it's like it has a dream logic to it. Well, first off, let me say

that dream logic always spells box office. But whenever I think of

directors who do dreams very well I think of Fellini or Polanski and in

those films because you know at that time a lot of them were dubbed, you

don't have sync sound. The sound and image have a dissociation which is

what it feels like in a dream. Also just the timing of dreams, you go

from one place to another you don't take time out to go we are here, you

just go oh, now the boat is full of geese, there is no sense of seeing

the geese fly in. I think, putting things there with a kind of

inevitability in some ways that they're not questioned.

Cinema has always been feted for its creation of fantasy or parallel

worlds, where the constraints of reality are stretched to the limit

and the impossible is made possible. To explore themes of loneliness,

adversity and responsibility, Alfonso Cuaron has set his latest

feature in space. With the some of the most

sophisticated special effects to date, it's the first realistic

portrayal of zero gravity. It was created in Britain and took

four-and-a-half years to make. In Gravity, Sandra Bullock and

George Clooney are astronauts stranded in space after a

cataclysmic accident. Will they survive and make it back to earth?

You always wanted to do a story set in space since you were a child and

you've written this with your son, so it's been a lifelong project for

you? I'm sure that you saw Neil Armstrong on live TV, stepping on

the moon, if you're a kid of that generation 95% of kids wanted to be

an astronaut, I wanted to be an astronaut but also I wanted to make

movies, since I was a kid I wanted to be a movie director, so when I

decided I was going to be a director I said, ok one day, I'll do a film

about space. Mission abort. Can you tell us about the look of

Gravity, it's an astonishing visual experience. Describe for us how you

went about creating that look? Well, the thing is that I collaborated

with Emmanuel Lubeski, we called him Chico, and with Tim Webber the

visual effects supervisor. And the whole goal was to create an

experience where you feel that you're actually in space, so in

order to do that there was a lot of exploration about the physics and

dynamics of zero-G and as important, the behaviour of light, light is in

space unlike any light in earth because there is no atmosphere and

Chico was really obsessed about dealing that sense of light and

space to create this photoreal look. The joke we had is that we wanted to

be sued by NASA and try to figure out where we sneak the cameras when

we went up there. The biggest challenge here, with all this

technology, I think the biggest thing is Sandra Bullock's

performance It was she was insulated inside a cube, it was a box, a

perfect cube 9X9, all of the walls were LED lights and she was in a rig

that was like a torture chamber, it was like very uncomfortable and she

was there for like 8-10 hours a day. Completely insulated because no

other crew member could be inside. But I think also, for me, it's not

only something which tries to be reality based, and by the way it's a

movie, it's not a documentary, so I know that there is still stuff that

could never happen, but I think the most aspect is that attempt of

truthfulness and that truthfulness comes from experience- I mean the

film is about adversity and in many ways I was trying to through the

film channel my own understanding of my own adversities and hoping that

there is a good outcome of them. While Alfonso spent $80 million

creating HIS sci-fi truth - a more low budget version of our everyday

existence can be found in the festival's line up of 40 odd

documentaries. What do the festival's cinema

ushers, projectionists and box office staff think is worth a

ticket? A film I really urge you to go and

see is The Sarnos, a life in dirty movies which is a documentary about

a couple who in the early '60s were making porn films, or they called

them sex films. I'm awake. Very much awake.

I wouldn't usually be interested in going to see a porn film but his

films just seem actually really interesting. Actually it's really

touching because it's about this couple's struggle to keep going cos

they're both quite elderly now and they don't have much money. The one

film I would recommend would be 20 Feet From Stardom. It is a fantastic

musical documentary from Morgan Neville. It follows a fabulous group

of backing singers who have worked on some of the most iconic pop tunes

of the 20th Century. The Unsung Heroes of so many pop tunes that you

have never known about before and suddenly, it is their turn in the

limelight. It is heart-warming, heart-breaking, goose-bump

endeucing, it's got a fabulous soundtrack and I dare anyone to

watch it to try and sit still in their seat for the whole screening.

I am exciting about Teenage. It is a documentary about the emergence of

the teenager as a cultural phenomenon. Are you pregnant? Yes, I

am! Before watching the film I thought that the concept of a

teenager was a purely 1950s construction, but there's this whole

journey that led up to that point that's full of teenage oppression

and rebellion. Can't something be done? I would recommend Frederick

Wiseman's At Berkley. He is a veteran film-maker of 83-year-old

and is still making films. At Berkley is quite lengthy - four

hours - but don't let that put you off. It makes you feel like you are

there on campus with the faculty and the students. Highly recommended. To

complete this pick of the Festival, we end with the extraordinary 12

Years A Slave, a real-life story of a free black man who was kidnapped

and sold into slavery in the mid-19th Century. This story is told

by British director Steve McQueen and boasts a brace of powerhouse

performances. I was born a free man, I lived with my family in New York.

Till the day I was deceived. Kidnapped. Sold into slavery. How

you feel now, boy? My name is Solomon. I'm a free man. You have no

right to detain me. You are not a free man. I always wanted to make a

movie about slavery, always. It was always about how one got into the

material, what was my in as such? I had this idea of a free man in the

North, who basically gets kidnapped into slavery and through his journey

we, the audience, sort of follow him. I was sort of trying to write

this idea and then what happened was that my wife said, "Why don't you

look into true accounts of slavery?" She came across this book called 12

Years A Slave. As soon as it was in my hands, I opened the book, opened

the page and I didn't let it go. For me, living in the Netherlands, it

was like looking at Anne Frank's diary. It was this first-hand

account of slavery. Tell me about working with Chiwetel. Tell me about

him, how you cast him and how you discussed the role with him? I rang

him up and he said, no!" I said, "I just offered you this..." And he

said no. Because? It was like having the role that you had been waiting

for all your life and this thing landing on your lap and him being

paralysed and him saying to himself, "I can't do this." Tell no-one who I

am, that's the way to survive. I don't want to survive. I want to

live. I was just very aware of, like, the responsibility of it, you

know, the responsibility of telling Solomon's story. Because it is a

real story and an important story? Yes, it is this man's life and

experience. It was not until I looked at the book properly that I

could connect to him. Then I was deeply struck by his own

personality, that it is a story about this man going through this

and the way that he is able to survive it and the way that he is

able to get through it with his mind in tact is because of his own

individual approach to life. Clearly, one of the things that's

played a large part in this is the location, you know, to breathe the

air in those places. Tell me about how that affected you? Yes, I mean,

you feel that you're connected to something. The place is rich and

alive with that history. We shot scenes by actual lynching trees and

it's impossible not to feel that, to feel, to know that you are really

dancing with spirits. The film is a portrayal of the brutality that the

slaves experienced. Michael Fassbender plays a sadistic

plantation owner and Brad Pitt also co-stars. Don't obey his Lord. Shall

be beaten with many strikes. The condition of your labourers, it is

all wrong. Say that with pride. I said that as fact! I said come here!

Do you have a non-censorious approach to your vision? No. How

could I make a movie about slavery and not show certain aspects of it?

Yeah. I cannot. It would be for my ancestors, you know, and for other

people's, a travesty. You can't do that. What is slavery? Slavery is,

you know, making people work in servitude. How do you get them to do

that? Well, you punish them. How am I sitting here? Because certain

people survived that. So there was not a choice. It was not a question.

Welcome, Sir. My regrets for the intrusion, Sir. No intrusion. Good

day, Sir. Good day. Many of the films shown here aren't yet on

release but there are still four days and over 150 films to go here

at the Festival. In the closing film, Saving Mr Banks, Tom Hanks

plays Walt Disney who perhaps sums up the ambition of all film-makers

when he says, "The world is restored through imagination and the

film-maker can provide us with new hope." Good night. She has a lot of

ideas. What kind of ideas? No, no - that is not a word. We made it up.

Unmake it up. The house doesn't look like that. It is all wrong. Stop!

Mary Poppins is not for sale. I won't have her turned into one of

your funny cartoons.