From EastEnders to Hollywood: Antonia Bird

This programme contains some violent scenes, some strong language

and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

TRAINS RUMBLE

TENSE MUSIC

TRAIN RUMBLES

SYNTH MUSIC

I don't think... that we embrace

female directors in the way that we embrace male directors.

And, when you think about what Antonia did...

..she should be a household name.

Really, she should.

Antonia's career is extraordinary for people to know about.

It's really extraordinary. And, you know, yeah,

the statistics are terrible for women in film,

so if there is a woman who worked as hard as she did,

did as much as she did...

actually, had as many successes as she did -

her awards list is ridiculous -

then people should know. And they don't.

PEOPLE CHATTER

We started this event about ten months ago, because I...

I had worked with Antonia quite a lot.

I worked with Antonia about six times over my career.

When Antonia died, sadly, as you will see...

this is such a fantastic image of her.

And when she died, it really struck me.

I was with her and talking to her quite a lot just before she died.

But there is something, whatever we say,

about women's careers in this world, in this industry.

Perhaps they don't get quite the recognition they should get.

And it was really bothering me.

So they were brilliant here and I said,

"Can we try doing something monthly?"

And that is what we've done.

But it was really started because of Antonia.

I really knew that I wanted to do something to honour Antonia.

There's a lot of people who do not have a voice, culturally.

A lot of people.

Right away, my first impression

of Antonia was as the kind of street-fighter.

You know, trying to fight for what she believed in.

They're ordinary people and that to me

as a film-maker is what I'm interested in dealing with.

She was never...

you know, a lady director.

Never any sort of fine writing. She was always gutsy and juicy.

You know, people were afraid of her political convictions.

And her anger and her passion for social justice.

Those are the issues that I'm interested in.

And so we have to actually go and get the money...

which is where the censorship comes in.

Because the people who control the money,

even if they are on your side with the subject matter...

Basically, the word I just wrote down,

when I was thinking about it, is "fear".

There's a big fear about supporting stuff that is not...

toeing the line.

But actually, there was nothing Antonia liked more

than a good belly laugh.

She was one hell of a woman.

MUSIC: Jerusalem by Billy Bragg

# And did those feet

# In ancient time... #

Spare some change?

I sat in my flat and watched a VHS of a film

that had been submitted to me, called Safe.

And hearing music by Billy Bragg and seeing Kate Hardie and...

crying.

It was about young homeless people

and it didn't sugar the pill of their lives.

And I was ill-formed. And my taste wasn't...

I haven't necessarily great taste,

but even I could see that this was remarkable.

And this was

more honest about the pain that

most human beings have in some way in their lives.

And there it was...

hurled up on the screen, like a volcano hurls lava up into the air.

SHOUTING AND CLATTERING

Oh, that's right, mate. Call them.

Here, look. Just put 'em on and we won't have to use 'em.

-Slut!

-Hey!

You can either walk or we'll cuff you and drag you.

-ALL:

-Oh!

-All right?

I haven't got any clothes.

Well, put them on downstairs. Let's just go, eh, Gypo?

At the moment, I'm just helping you off the premises.

LAUGHTER But, if you like, I'll nick ya.

-ALL:

-Ooh!

-Up to you, sir.

JEERING

Gypo, this is a shithole!

Come on!

'And I just thought, here is something'

so much more detailed with greater acuity

and insight and care that I'm seeing.

And I was running a film festival in those days.

And when you run a film festival, you see loads and loads of films.

And you can get their worldview quite quickly. And...

this one just seemed far more...

I would say, like, essential, or necessary, or useful.

They sound sort of boring words, you know?

But, back then, they weren't boring words, you know?

And we were all sort of slightly lost

in that kind of weird puddle of postmodernism in the '90s.

And Antonia Bird was like a kind of thing you could grip onto.

The films that she was making

was stuff that gave you a kind of bearing.

MUSIC: Jerusalem by Billy Bragg

A lot of it was shot at night in quite a lot of central London,

which we think of as touristy. But it was in that same place

and it was like looking into the undergrowth.

It felt like it was showing you the famous streets in London

in the truth of what was happening in those streets.

HE MUMBLES

LAUGHTER

You know...

..I knew I could rely on you.

-Thanks.

-I haven't got any money, Nost.

We just want a bit of something to keep us going, you know?

Aye, well...

you could always pay in kind.

Well, with two of us looking, we might find it.

HE SNIGGERS

I remember us getting together,

talking about this thing.

Actually sitting round a table,

but not reading it. Just talking about it, which, again,

was different for me. Because generally, it was always about

the words, the words, the words.

Suddenly, it was the words that are maybe not that important.

The words will become important,

but you need to understand what this thing is about first.

Then she brought in

not so much actors, necessarily,

but people who were interested in acting.

And what was important for Antonia

was people who understood homelessness.

And what was even better for Antonia was if they actually were,

or had been, in fact, homeless.

So suddenly, we went to this rehearsal room somewhere in London.

I can't remember where it was. And it was suddenly filled with kids,

basically, that had been through

some pretty bad stuff in their life, you know?

So we set up these improvisations. She would say,

"This is Robert. He is playing Nosty, he's this guy.

"And this is what he's like. And this is how you feel about him.

"Off you go". And, of course, these kids would just go...

Just run all over me, you know?

So I'm trying to kind of shout at them

and be angry and swearing and stuff like that.

But they don't care, they don't care.

They've seen a lot tougher than me, you know?

So it wisnae working.

I don't blame the kids,

but they're not listening to a word I'm saying here. There was nothing.

We were not able to structure any kind of scene at all,

unless they were going to listen, you know?

And, so... Again, typical of Antonia, she said,

"Well, what do you want to do?"

I was like...I don't know.

And I said, "Well, you know, I've never been homeless, you know?

"I've been close to it, but I've never been homeless, so...

"maybe I should try that."

And I knew, roughly, about where homeless people gathered.

It was just a grim, grim, grim existence.

There was a couple of really dodgy moments that happened during it.

And...

And terrible stuff. I remember...

I only did the begging thing a couple of times,

because I hated it. And I hated the thought.

And that was interesting,

the issue about how horrible it is for anybody who has to do that.

Because I'm sure my thoughts

and their thoughts about it are exactly the same.

I've got to get one of those machines.

A credit card machine?

What you need is contactless payment.

Aye.

HE MUTTERS

I remember sitting on Hungerford Bridge, Charing Cross,

the end of it.

And I had a wee piece of card saying, "homeless and hungry".

And I would sit there.

And a whole day went by, just about.

And I think there was about 50 pence or something that had been thrown.

Along with lots of spit as well.

And two or three people went by and I'm sitting there and just went...

spat on me. And it hit me, you know what I mean?

I was like, not again. You know what I mean?

That was harsh, that was harsh.

And so it gives you an indication of what it was about.

So it helped, and Antonia, she obviously loved this.

She lapped this up. She thought this was great, you know?

Telling her my stories.

MUSIC: Piccadilly Rambler by Billy Bragg

# I'm the Piccadilly rambler

# The streets are my pillow

# Up Shaftesbury Avenue

# Down Leicester Square... #

Is there any music on?

KEYS JANGLE # I roam and I rove

# Over London's fair city

# Till some jolly policeman says

# "Hey, piss off out of there!" #

Prep with Antonia is like an amorphous, weird thing

that you cannot put your finger on.

Where she's not sending you out to do loads of stuff,

but somehow you're completely involved

in her thing, and you are doing it.

So, with me and Safe, I was quite unhappy at the time...

And she said, "Oh, come and live with me".

So I went and lived in her flat. So I lived in her flat...

through quite a bit of the rehearsal and the filming.

Really clever, you know?

I was under her roof. Exhausting for her, though.

And Aidan was like an enormous part.

But, really, what she needed for Safe from me and Aidan -

you know, Bobby is sleeping on the streets -

she needed me and Aidan to just be inseparable.

And somehow, me and Aidan became completely inseparable.

I just remember relentlessly wandering around with Aidan.

But not as homeless people. Just as two...

..slightly narcissistic mad actors.

Just wandering around Soho.

Becoming sort of inseparable.

And I think she was much cleverer about that than I know.

It would be easy to put Safe in a category

of kind of Thatcherite protest films.

And there are clearly elements of protest,

of awareness of the negative effects of government policies.

They weren't called austerity, at that point,

they were called monetarist policy.

But you can see that the limited resources

that are poured into social care

or hostels are inadequate.

The number of homeless young people in London has increased

suddenly and dramatically, according to the charity Centrepoint Soho.

And the charity says new Social Security rules

introduced by the government two months ago are to blame.

Will the Prime Minister accept that ten years ago, in 1979,

there were 2,750 households in temporary accommodation in London.

The current figure is over 25,000,

and a further 2,000 people are sleeping on the streets.

Does she not agree that people

sleeping on the streets of our capital city,

being charged exorbitant rents

and children being brought up in bed and breakfast hotels

is a disgrace to a civilised country?

-ALL:

-Yeah.

-CHEERING

But alongside that political institutional critique

is a willingness to engage with more profound questions

of psychological distress, social breakdown,

of abuse within the family,

and which are not resolved for us

within the form of the narrative.

The script was written by Al Hunter.

And Antonia seemed like a really obvious choice

for someone to talk to about this,

because of her great commitment

and because of her incredible passion

and enthusiasm about these kinds of subjects.

She was not judgmental, but she cared passionately,

obviously, about what she saw as grotesque injustice in society.

On the other hand, it's quite a complex film,

because one of the most interesting things is that

when Aidan's character is given a flat,

he didn't want to go and live in it, cos he's got so desocialised

and so incapable of living within four walls.

And so it's quite complex, the message of the film.

Although at the heart of it is a very strong message

about the injustice of homelessness and about these damaged people.

Although the actors were kind of free around the margins

to work and develop on it, I think it was quite true to the script.

The characteristic of Antonia's work was its intensity,

it's kind of rawness and its authenticity.

And her trying to strip away any kind of accoutrements of acting.

There were no inhibitions to be had.

They just really kind of went for it.

And the last images of the film

are certainly not particularly hopeful.

They are like an animalistic howling

of rage and pain and grief.

But somehow she managed to make this film in such a way

that it was very accessible. It didn't put people off.

And I think a great skill is bringing home to audiences

stories and ideas and challenges and injustices

which people have heard of, but not really thought of.

They haven't connected in the same way.

She was quite radical in her approach to film-making,

in the sense that she wasn't interested in very formal things.

She wanted to create this very live, highly charged set, where the actors

were free to do what they wanted to do, to let the emotions emerge.

To let the raw energy come out.

And the camera had to kind of capture that,

so it was different from the more kind of formal film set.

And in that sense, she was quite radical and quite experimental.

That's my memory of it.

It's all of the cast running with her,

with the camera,

grabbing what we can.

Trying whatever we could get away with...

Just, you know, pushing it everywhere we could.

And that felt incredibly special. It made you feel that you were...

And that collaborative thing - she was very good at

making you feel that everybody's point was valid.

"If you've got something to say about it, just say it.

"I mean it. Even if we are about to go.

"If you've got a point to make,

"if you don't like what's happening, just say it."

And that was incredible as well.

The best, best bit about being a director is working with actors.

The only bit I genuinely enjoy.

I believe that the actor is supreme on a film set

and must be treated with all respect possible.

And that's my biggest...

I suppose my biggest thing, with a crew.

I think people who do understand actors are often people that

have dabbled in acting themselves.

Because obviously, if you've done something,

you understand how to tell other people about it.

And I often thought, you know,

that she would have been a really good actress, very good.

Because she was very expressive.

I think she saw a lot of stuff

to do with theatre when she was very young.

And she started work, I think, when she was 17.

And at the time, she was working as a stage manager.

Ian, her partner, often says that being a stage manager in those days

meant you could be pushed on set and told to be in the chorus,

or you could end up being a small part in a play,

which she absolutely hated.

She gave it a go, but didn't like it.

She got really bad stage fright, apparently.

She'd had a very, erm...

..quite a difficult upbringing.

Her dad was an actor, so there was no money.

He was also... He drank a lot.

And he died young.

So then there was really no money.

Antonia grew up with a not successful dad.

I think you then see someone working really, really hard

and getting rejected.

And so I think there is something about her protectiveness

towards actors that I think came from there.

She was quite a sensitive person and felt things really acutely,

which I think is why she was able to...

do such sensitive and extraordinary work.

Her mum had a place, which Antonia had bought for her,

on the Suffolk coast in Thorpeness.

And so they were two women thrown together

and having to support each other and...

..and they had a very strong bond.

And I talked to Rosemary about it.

Obviously, when it's Antonia's mum,

I'm not going to go into it in any great detail,

but I got the impression that it had been pretty hard.

PIGEONS COO

But there were aspects of Antonia that...

You know, just when you thought she was...

like most people in that kind of Royal Court environment,

pretty kind of switched on and connected.

But she had this wonderful thing...

You must know about the thumb-sucking,

where she would just sort of go into a foetal position

-and suck her thumb.

-HE LAUGHS

You know, in rehearsals, in crisis meetings, you know,

there'd be Antonia, in the corner.

I kind of rose through assistant director of the Royal Court

to running the theatre upstairs.

And I was lucky enough to work with

some fantastic writers. I mean...

A big turning point in my life was working with Trevor Griffiths.

And one of the things that he talked to me about

was reaching a wider audience.

We were talking to the converted.

That, in theatre, you are very much really playing to

middle-class, liberal, intelligentsia audiences.

And the subject that we were dealing with...

I was doing plays by Hanif Kureishi, by Jim Cartwright.

Fantastic, new writing, issue-based stuff.

And I thought, I'd much rather be doing this to a wider audience.

And the only way I knew how to do that was television.

So then I heard about this new innovatory series

that was going to be made.

A working-class soap, BBC, called EastEnders.

And I also heard that the producer was a woman called Julia Smith.

And I thought, "It's a woman. Right, OK, I'm going for this.

"I'm going to write to her. If anybody should give me a chance,

"it should be another woman."

So I wrote to her, and she came up with the goods, God bless her.

She actually took me on.

She gave me a sort of informal training,

which is very unusual at the BBC.

She hired me about six or eight weeks before she needed me

to actually start directing.

And what I did was trail other directors.

And I think it's important to say in the circumstances

that two of those other directors I trailed were women,

right back then as well. So, you know, that was great.

And it was a progressive, confidence-building

trust thing for me. And by the end of the process,

they entrusted this very special episode to me,

which was a two-hander between Den and Angie,

which I think was a kind of innovative thing.

DOOR SHUTS

Is that you, Den?

I became Head of Series and Serials, as it was called then,

in the BBC, in the early '80s.

And I was appointed to the job with two very specific briefs.

The BBC was suffering yet another crisis.

And the crisis was on two fronts.

The main channel, BBC One,

had taken a terrible dip in the ratings.

And we had to fight back with some popular programming.

The camera was still on the move, I think.

-Oh, I see. Yes, yes, yes.

-ALL TALK

'It actually turned out to be a very fruitful period,

'because EastEnders was a success.'

It wasn't an immediate success when it started.

It took six months to get going.

But when the big relationship between Den and Angie happened,

the ratings went through the roof.

And we suddenly had a monumental hit on our hands.

It was great. I loved the scene.

'And so it was decided, because they were doing so well,'

to do one episode with just the two of them.

With one of their very famous fights.

And so there was the two of them at home.

Angie in her dressing gown most of the time.

And we had one other character, which was the window cleaner,

who just looked through the window

and then slowly cleaned the windows and saw what was going on.

I don't know whether he heard everything,

but he certainly saw what was going on.

And Antonia, because she was doing so well

and everybody loved her, was asked to direct it.

And it's almost unthinkable that you're just going to show

two actors talking to each other for half an hour, you know?

In a high-rated programme.

And handling that. And, of course...

there is nothing else but the performance.

You know? There aren't...landscapes to shoot.

You have to, as a director, be brave enough

to allow the actors to speak for themselves,

to allow the script to speak, too.

In a sense, withdraw yourself.

And that is hard for a director.

And I think it takes

real ingenuity, real maturity

and real talent to disappear in the way that is required.

Oh, I've been waiting for this. I've been waiting for the backlash.

Oh, so you're ill, are ya? Well, what's wrong with you, eh?

What you got? Got an 'eadache? Do you want to go and lie down?

Do you want me to bring you breakfast in bed? Hot-water bottle?

Eh? Some aspirin? Alka-Seltzer?

Don't try that one on me, Ange, because it won't wash.

No way you're ever going to get me back.

-SHE SHOUTS:

-I'm scared!

You stupid, idiotic, little man! I'm scared!

Do know what it's like since they told me?

I feel like I'm locked inside a cell

with the walls closing in, the ceiling pressing down,

the floor coming up to meet me. I'm getting smaller and smaller,

and it's crushing me and crushing me. I'm shrinking and I can't cope!

Ah, shut up!

She loved keeping the camera where it had to be.

She knew where to put the focus.

And I think, in that scene -

it was only the two of us, it wasn't a huge room -

she needed to see me, because I was the one that was delivering

the bombshell in that particular scene.

But she also needed to see Leslie's reaction -

whether he believed her, or whether he didn't.

And so it was a very clever thing to do,

to have both of us in shot, I think.

That's another mark of a really good director.

Keeping the camera lens where it needs to be,

so you, the viewer, you are getting the story right at you.

Oh!

What are you telling me, eh?

I got six months to live.

-SHE LAUGHS

-What?

I've got six months to live!

Not long, is it, Den? Six little months.

'You can see her hand in stuff that she's done.'

If you look at her work, you can see her hand in it.

And the kind of work she likes to do tells you a lot about the woman.

Tells you that she is an emotional woman,

that she does have a welter,

a depth to her, of emotion.

One of the gifts Bird gives us is she's a film-maker

living and working in London,

over a period where London becomes a stage set

for all kinds of rapid social and economic change.

London has become the bubble that ate Britain.

It's a global city, it's a world city, it's a space unto itself.

It's Londonistan.

Its economic boom has overshadowed everything else in Britain.

And Bird...

is the poet of that transformation.

Bird is the film-maker who's situated in a London

which on the one hand is gentrifying rapidly

and being filled with external money,

the growth of finance,

this huge, inflating house price and economic bubble.

And, on the other hand, with equal rapidity,

it's chucking out the individuals that can't survive.

-You all right?

-HE LAUGHS

She wasn't...

what I would call a churchgoing lady.

Right? She wasn't worshipping with us.

But, lots of years ago, Antonia stood with me

here on the tower of Shoreditch Church

and, although we are in Hackney,

the back wall of the churchyard, that is Tower Hamlets.

And she used to live in Virginia Road -

which we can see from up here, it's not very far away at all.

Tending to think that someone could throw a cricket ball

from here and land on her roof, it's very close.

And the area where she lived,

part of the old boundary has stayed overlapping there.

One side was designated the most deprived place

in the whole of London.

It was as bad a slum as you could find anywhere.

And even now, Tower Hamlets is always in the top seven

of the most deprived boroughs and the whole nation.

And behind me, over my left shoulder,

you can see the towers growing in the City of London.

And the United Nations say that the City of London

is the wealthiest place on the planet.

So you have...

..a wealth that you can't begin to count

and a poverty that you dare not believe still exists.

And the two are side by side.

SIREN WAILS

She lived where she was very aware of the poverty.

But more than just the bland fact that,

oh, someone hasn't got much money,

she was very much aware of what poverty does to people

as an individual.

And she could see there's an inherent injustice in that

and she was trying to get behind people's exteriors.

How are you a human being...

..when that is happening to you?

This is the thing about Antonia all the way throughout her career.

She absolutely... It sounds pretty obvious to say she cared.

Of course everybody cares. But there's levels of caring.

And she absolutely...

Whatever happened to her, in terms of, you know,

problems with producers or finances or whatever it might be,

she was always able to kind of retain her shape and...

..and her belief in the project.

And her belief in the piece and her belief in the actors.

So she was starting... She's taught me so much about that.

So everything I've really done since my relationship with Antonia

has been kind of based on that premise -

that you've got to know everything about this thing.

You've got to absolutely love it.

You've got to absolutely believe in it.

If you can tick all those boxes, you've got a chance.

That's for sure.

She was not a narrow,

politically motivated, tub-thumping...

political film-maker.

She was a political film-maker

and she had profound beliefs and passions.

But she knew what would make people laugh,

as well as what would make people cry, and she went there.

And that's the key, I think, to the accessibility

and the success of her work.

MUSIC: Casualty Theme

The other thing that is fascinating about her career

is that she really oversaw a huge change

in television drama.

I mean, the time when she first started

on EastEnders and Casualty, those shows...

We were only just coming out of a period

where things were all shot in studios with slightly wobbly sets.

And I think she brought a sort of fresh air

and a sense of realism to what she was doing,

which has lasted right through to the dramas we see today.

If you look at the first two episodes of Casualty,

which I think were well-directed,

they are staged.

Um...

If you look at the second pair, Antonia's,

where before she fully got her wings,

they are emotional, they're cluttered,

they're noisier.

There's a feeling of human chaos going on here.

That's Lindsay!

-No, I don't think it is.

-Vi!

-Can I just see her?

'But there is a purpose in where she puts the camera.'

I'm sure that's Lindsay.

'So that, for example, there's a scene'

in which a woman is told that her daughter

has been killed in a road-traffic accident.

And that the daughter was carrying a donor card.

And in some ways, it's the archetypal Casualty scene.

I r... And I always remember it as one.

Antonia shot it and edited it

that we were on the mother's face so long

that watching it - even 29 years later,

yesterday at home on my TV - I had tears in my eyes.

And it was... You could sense that

her ability on the set had made everyone

just know what they had to do and deliver it.

-I saw a doctor.

-In the corridor.

-Are they taking her for an operation?

-No.

-Cos, as I was telling the nurse here, she's pregnant.

-I thought you should know that.

-Only just.

Ten weeks!

They...they told us about Derek.

-Dead on arrival, that's what they call it, innit?

-Yes.

Look, I'm afraid I have some extremely bad news for you.

Your daughter is dead too.

But, er, I just saw her.

She had extensive head injuries, Mrs Brown.

We tried, but there was nothing we could do for her.

Er, how...

how did she actually go?

Her heart stopped.

She was in a coma from the time of the accident.

I don't think she suffered.

In the past, you have been a critic,

are known to be a critic of the programme Casualty.

What did you think about Friday night's programme?

I thought it was very good.

It was very, very moving.

And it was...sad.

I felt very sad at the end of it, for the family being portrayed.

-I thought was very accurate.

-Yeah.

I think that's probably, in fact,

what happens, what really happens in a casualty department,

when there's been an accident.

I think people forget,

when they look at it on the screen now

and they see this kind of hospital soap,

they forget that when it was first on,

it was actually quite a kind of radical project.

Apart from anything else, it was very much a kind of response

to Margaret Thatcher and that whole kind of era.

We felt, as young socialists,

this is our moment to create a television revolution.

And it would be feminist and it would be anti-racist

and it would be pro-NHS and it would be distinctly anti-Tory.

So we were looking for someone who had those attributes.

I guess the amazing thing was

that you had two very young writers,

you had a brand-new show,

and you had a very, very feisty,

pretty powerful, opinionated, uncontrollable director.

Now, that is such a credit to the BBC of the time.

I think Antonia was certainly

very responsible for the...

..a lot of the energy and the complexion,

if you like, of Casualty.

Then, she directed...

Well, a serial and then a series that I produced,

and that didn't go quite so well.

It was a five-part thriller set in Docklands

and the budget was a million pounds,

and we ended up spending £2 million

and being investigated by the BBC police

in case we'd actually been pocketing some of that money,

so it was all a little bit fraught.

One of the reasons for the disastrous overspend

was the fact that the medium that we were using

was a mixture of film and video, if you can imagine,

so the outdoor stuff was shot on film

and the inside stuff was shot...

studio lighting, multi-camera set-up,

and the mishmash, quite understandably,

Antonia found absolutely abhorrent.

I should guess it's the difference

between using crayons and oil paint, you know?

On film, you do work with better crews.

You work with people who are making drama all the time.

On video, you quite often get the guys... And they're good guys,

but they've just been doing the horse racing

or Songs of Praise, you know, and it's just another job.

She cared passionately, passionately,

about what she did

and, looking back with hindsight,

which is difficult to do,

there were very, very few women directors then

and she was emphatically a trailblazer,

and I think it's fair to say

that, as a producer...

There wasn't really major prejudice against women producers

but I think there probably was against female directors.

There's no question the film industry is full of women

and it's very heavily sustained by women working in key roles -

producers, production managers,

roles where they work all hours,

give their heart and soul to the films they're working on,

hours that make it very clear that the issue for women film-makers

is not necessarily one of the pragmatics,

of managing hours and managing family life and a career.

The particular challenges

that I think may attach to women film-makers

are to do with what we might call a kind of unconscious bias

or an unconscious stereotyping of the kinds of roles

we think women should be playing socially.

I think the crucial problem at the heart of this

is the notion of whether or not it is legitimate

for women to be creative,

to be egotistical, creative forces

and I think, within the culture, in a very subtle way,

there is a huge amount of resistance to that.

Increasingly, it's looking as if we're comfortable with women...

..using their creativity and labour and imagination...

..to work hard supporting other people's creative vision,

to produce a kind of environment

in which genius creators can fly.

But we may, as a society, at this point in its evolution,

have more difficulty

allowing women to have the kind of vision,

the single-mindedness, the determination

to drive through a vision

that is inevitably going to mean they bug people,

they rub people up the wrong way, they make demands,

they ask for things, they don't always come in on time.

Those are all aspects that are maybe

more challenging for a woman director

and require a woman with enormous amounts, as Antonia Bird did,

of determination, of guile, of intelligence,

of willingness to kind of work around the edges

and, where necessary, of willingness to run into some of those obstacles

and drive them through before her.

There was an occasion when we were making Priest when...

Which was shot on a television schedule,

but she was making a movie.

I'm not sure I realised that at the time, but she was.

And so we were several days behind on the shoot

and I was rung...

I was in the production office and I was rung up by the first assistant,

who said, "Antonia is refusing to wrap

"and move on to the next location. Can you come down and sort it out?"

So I went down to the location, which was just a block of flats,

and the whole crew was outside this block of flats

and they parted like the Red Sea to let me...

And I went up the stairs and there in the flat,

sitting in the middle of the floor with her thumb in her mouth...

She hadn't got the shot she wanted,

and, you know, what do you do as a producer in that situation?

You give her another hour and then she moves on.

And that was great, you know?

You know, that's good directing as far as I'm concerned.

But she was making a movie and I didn't know she was making a movie

and it sort of gradually became clear.

She was always so ambitious for her work.

But for all the right reasons, you know?

Not because there was some raging ego there,

just because there was something she wanted to say.

Priest is about two priests in an inner-city parish in...

Two Catholic priests.

You know, one of whom sleeps with the housekeeper

and the other one's gay. And it was a fabulous piece,.

It was originally going to be a four-part television piece,

that was what Jimmy wrote,

and then, for various kind of budgetary reasons,

it got cut down and cut down,

so he rewrote it as a single drama.

You know, partly why, when you see the film of Priest,

it has a lot of different strands to it,

that's because it began life as a much longer piece

that then got distilled.

Antonia had just finished making Safe

and there was absolutely no-one else I would go to in the first instance,

and I knew she wouldn't be very up for the Catholicism

and probably wouldn't have much time for the Catholicism.

And it wasn't that Jimmy McGovern was anti-Catholic,

he was not anti-Catholic, he was anti the church,

and the film is very clear about that, actually.

It's not an anti-faith movie,

it's an anti-church hierarchy movie,

and that was grist to Antonia's mill

because it was a structure and a hierarchy

that was misguided,

in Jimmy's view and in Antonia's view,

and was squeezing the life

and the, you know, strength and the hope out of parishioners

and the priests who worked in it.

So a classic opportunity for Antonia.

She had an instinctive sympathy

for people who were at the rough edge of the world we live in.

I suppose, also, just, you know, thinking of Priest,

an institution that was hypocritical,

cruel, insensitive.

She took... Here was an injustice.

You know, this was wrong

and she was using film drama

to say that.

PRIEST SHOUTS

Now, you can say that in a documentary, in a non-fiction book,

in a newspaper article or magazine article, whatever,

but I believe, and I think Antonia did too,

that there's nothing like fiction, drama, to reach people,

to get into their hearts and make them feel angry about it

and that something should change or something should be done.

That, to me, was the way Antonia was a political film-maker.

I think she wanted to... She wanted discourse and debate.

She wanted the discussion around the film.

She didn't want them just to work as pure entertainment,

she wanted people to walk out the cinema or to switch off the TV

and just have this kind of whole

kind of sort of discourse about it, you know?

"What are we actually talking about here?", you know?

And, I mean, like Priest just kind of...

When you look at what unravelled after Priest, you know,

it's like it kind of... It's now, you know?

It's something you could kind of show at any time since then

and it would just have this amazingly powerful contemporary feel

so I think she wanted that kind of reach and impact

and, in some ways, it was ahead of its time.

I have dedicated my life to this study of incest...

..and there's nothing anyone can tell me about it.

Least of all you.

I can tell you it's a sin.

It's one of the gravest sins of all.

Can I have your permission to talk to someone about this?

There's help available,

and therapy.

I don't need help.

I don't need therapy.

I'm not your textbook case.

I'm no sexual inadequate.

I've just seen through all the bullshit, that's all.

Inhuman, is it?

Unthinkable?

So why go to all the trouble of making laws against it?

Why does every society in the world put a taboo around it?

I'll tell you why.

It's the one thing we'd all like to do.

Deep down.

In here.

And what does Lisa think?

Antonia actually was always very careful with scripts.

She knew the script inside-out.

She wasn't a director who threw away the script,

workshopped it with the actors

and then created something new.

She always worked from the script,

took a lot of trouble to get to know it intricately

and then, with the actors, would build from that,

but there wasn't a lot of improvisation or anything like that.

She would be looking for the essential truth in the project

and would then try and find a comparable truth in the actors

and in their performances to realise that.

The body of Christ.

She was fierce in the casting.

She had to feel that the stars would find the truth of the part.

Body of Christ.

Every character was given their space to really power through.

All big close-ups.

Look at all of them at their moments of crisis in the film,

they're all big close-ups in that film.

You know, unlike a lot of directors

who came to television or film from the theatre

and thought that the way to direct film

was to sit back

and, you know, allow the action to happen within the frame,

Antonia was never afraid of close-ups.

And I think, you know, what distinguishes

some of her most cinematic work are those huge close-ups

where you're penetrating and getting closer and closer

to the heart of the performance.

You know, what makes a good director

is actually someone who doesn't cover everything

and doesn't give us a shot of the table

and the three people sat round it

but says, "This is where the story beat is

"and this is the person we're focused on,"

and that was Antonia's, to my mind, great strength.

It's astonishing how many film directors

are more interested in the camera than they are in the actors,

and that was never Antonia.

And, you know, that's aesthetics, politics, craft all put together.

Priest was a movie that had Hollywood calling

and I think it was just like that ability

to deal with difficult material is something that, you know...

And to do it really kind of stylishly and cool

is something that Hollywood think they want.

They don't actually want it when you get there.

There's a kind of deceptive thing.

You know, they want the kind of talent to do stuff

in a way that's kind... That they understand, that they get, you know,

and I think it... Particularly at that time,

I think it would be quite hard for them to get Antonia, but she did...

She was successful out there,

which was kind of quite an amazing story in itself, I think.

We nominally share a common language,

the English and the Americans.

That's a nominal distinction.

The cultural differences between Hollywood and London are gigantic

and so it takes a really brave soul to do that

and, if you're a woman, brave times five.

I mean, it's heroic, really, just what she attempted to do

and I think succeeded at more than not

and to the extent that she might have been a little disappointed

in what happened in certain cases,

she's lucky to have come out, you know, with her head still on.

It's just these places can really wreck you.

I think the bigger issue in Hollywood

is that there is this desire for a certain aesthetic and a certain tone

and a certain willingness to cut out all the rough edges

or hone them down,

and that's not Antonia at all.

And finally tonight, we have Mad Love, which is a genuine curiosity

in that it appears to have no discernible point whatsoever.

Largely and crucially

because there's no sign of the mad love promised by the title.

O'Donnell and Barrymore are both pretty people

but they're neither experienced nor skilled enough

to suggest the sensuality, sexuality or wild passion

that might just have carried the story through.

The British director Antonia Bird chose Mad Love

to follow her very successful Priest.

I think it was a mistake.

Mad Love was a film that ended up as a Disney film

and was intended to be

quite a mature, tough, grown-up portrait

of a really difficult relationship,

but during the course of the film, for whatever reason,

maybe it was because it had big stars in it

like Drew Barrymore, etc,

it...became softened

and some of the intensity was removed from the film,

some of that reality-seeking missile stuff that Antonia had

was removed from the film.

And Antonia, I think, was in the middle of this thing,

and it was only dawning on her during the course of it

how much it was shifting around her, you know.

It's like this light, she was in the heat

and the light of making this film, and in the penumbra, the film

was changing and she was the last to know - that's my understanding.

She was such a good director that she could attract

a Drew Barrymore, for example, as an actor.

But when you do that, suddenly,

you're having to appeal to very, very, very large populations,

and the commercial film world doesn't want to offend

all those populations, or even tell them truths

that we all know in the secrets of our hearts,

but a lot of people don't want to acknowledge

when they are going to a cinema on a Friday night.

And that's why Mad Love was so compromised.

And I think probably she felt singed, burnt, by that experience,

and therefore probably resolved not to make the same mistakes.

Although you could argue, did she make any mistakes?

She just went in and made a film and the mistakes were made around her.

# Here is a tune I've been writing... #

In the early draft of Face, it was, on the surface,

a story of armed robbers in London - in some ways, a heist movie.

But there was a political point to it.

I had written, um,

the protagonist, who was played by, eventually,

Bobby Carlyle, I had written a whole kind of backstory for him,

that involved a political commitment gone wrong,

he had become disillusioned and so on.

And it was really important to me that that be in it.

But Antonia then was in the States, she was in Hollywood

and she was shooting Mad Love.

And no director that I met understood this backstory,

they just thought it was bizarre.

None of them could see it.

And then, fortuitously, I think Antonia just threw up her hands

in Hollywood and had had enough and wanted to come home.

She knew about this script.

It was, I suppose, saying, um, you know,

armed robbery is a form of the kind of naked capitalism,

the most naked form of capitalism - smash and grab and take what

you want for yourself, and forget, you know, screw everybody else.

And there was one guy with a conscience in there,

who was kind of remembering what he had done in the past

and how this didn't square with the life he was now living -

she got that completely.

We made the film, and it's a good film, I'm very proud of it.

She did a great technical job, apart from anything else.

ALARMS BLARING

I think Antonia's brilliant at altering perceptions,

you know what I mean? She was fantastic at that.

And I think that in a small kind of way,

she was attempting to do that with Face as well -

it was this heist thing and it was, you know, bang-bang,

robbery and all the rest of it.

Phil Davis's character with the baby -

I just thought that was brilliant.

You should smell this.

-HE SNIFFS

-I can't get enough of it.

It's like sort of sour but milky, you know?

'So, that is just beautiful.

'It's just not what you expect from a heist, bang-bang film.'

And that's kind of smattered all the way through Face.

The thing that actually made me feel really good was when somebody said

it's like a cross between EastEnders and Reservoir Dogs!

I just thought that was really cool.

Hi, I'm Antonia Bird and I directed Ravenous.

The movie starts during the Mexican-American

War of Independence,

and is set round about 1847.

And just imagine, we were shooting this scene in 120 degrees.

Yeah. Did they actually eat the meat?

-Yeah, the meat was being...

-Was it nice?

-It was disgusting!

-Really?

And it was being cooked fresh for each shot, round the corner.

And the guy that was sitting next to Guy Pearce on his right

actually had an epileptic fit halfway through

shooting the scene - it was really, really upsetting.

HE BREATHES HEAVILY

THUNDER RUMBLING, RAIN POURING

HE BREATHES HEAVILY

Ravenous was also a difficult project - it had one director,

Milcho Manchevski, and that went wrong,

because his work was seen as, I think, not commercial enough.

This was a story set in, like, the 1840s, about cannibalism,

and it was supposed to be a comedy.

A cannibalism comedy in the 1840s,

from somebody who had made the British films

that Antonia Bird had made - that shouldn't have worked.

And yet it was her best film.

It brought everything together.

By this stage in her career, she had been building

a sense of modern life,

postmodernism, sort of...

..eating us, being a kind of gnawing away at us,

taking away our spirit, our common humanity.

And so, what does she do?

She makes a big, splashy, almost horror movie,

where the central metaphor is that we eat each other.

How fantastic - not totally planned, of course.

When the film went wrong, Robert Carlyle said,

"Why doesn't my friend Antonia Bird direct it?"

But this film came along in her career and became, for me,

her central film. The biggest metaphor, the juiciest...

..gutsiest film that she made.

Antonia has...

..one week prep.

A week - a week to prep this thing.

And, um, then she shot what you saw.

-A week?

-It's incredible. Incredible. Oh, it's absolutely incredible.

I mean, for people who don't realise, prep can range...

anything up to years, people prep films, you know what I mean?

And certainly when you get the money through,

then you are at least talking a good few months, you know,

of locations, etc, etc, scouting around,

finding out where you want to shoot the thing and casting, etc.

There is loads of stuff that goes into it, masses of stuff.

I look at that with Antonia now

and go, "How you did that, I do not know."

I don't know how she managed to do it.

Who are you?

Reich! Reich!

She'd had a bit of experience with America,

she had made Mad Love a couple of years prior to that,

so she had been in that world, so she didn't like it, you know,

she didn't have a good time.

Um, but she went in again for me.

The first scene that we shot was

when Colqhoun arrived at the ranch sort of place, and they had

pulled him out of the snow and tried to put him in the bath.

And so we were getting ready to do that,

and in typical Antonia fashion, she's got a script

and stuff like that, so we were all sitting and she says,

"OK, guys, on you go," you know?

So, I'm up and like, all the Americans is sitting there,

and Antonia's looking at them and going, "What...

"Do you not want to do it?"

And they said, "Well, what do you want us to do?"

Now that, for Antonia, was like, "What is that?!"

Because she's been used to working in that kind of very British way

that we do, you just get up on your feet and you find it, you know?

You don't get told what to do.

She's looking at me, going, "What am I going to do here?"

I said, "I don't know, darling, but it's over to you now!"

That was the hardest thing for her, she suddenly realised,

wait a minute, she's not working with, you know,

the people she knows.

She's got me, of course, but other than that,

there's nobody else in there that she's ever worked with before.

They don't work the way we normally work,

she'll have to actually put them on the mark, tell them

to stand, walk over there, pick up that cup, say the line and go back.

And that's not Antonia Bird.

So she really had to try and get these eight, nine actors

that were there onside and get them to understand

that, you know, it's OK to make a mistake,

to get up, just make an idiot of yourself if you want,

it doesn't matter, it's going to be OK,

because I'm going to protect you.

And very quickly,

the actors began to understand that they were working,

dealing with somebody here that they'd never met before,

this is a special person that they had here, this was Antonia Bird.

Get away from me!

'This is my favourite sequence coming up now.'

Whoa!

Just one of her great scenes,

it shows how great she was at technique.

It just seems to stretch time, shot after shot,

the way Sergio Leone would do in one of his Westerns.

Real, pure cinema, and there was a scene rather similar to it

in the recent film The Revenant.

'We shot all this first unit -

'there's a few shots in there that were shot by the second unit,

'but fundamentally, I fought very hard to shoot it,

'sort of schedule it and shoot it myself.

'And it's...

'I'm proud of it, it's a good sequence,

'considering it took us four hours to shoot.

'It's pretty good stuff!'

HE WINCES AND GRUNTS

There's certain pieces in that film,

moments in that film that stand with anything that she's done.

You know, again, getting Nyman

and Damon Albarn to do the music as well, I thought was just genius.

Because she got the visuals, she got the performances,

she got the music, she got everything, you know,

and there are moments in that, there is a point, I think, when

Guy Pearce is kind of walking through the snow or coming through

the snow, with his footsteps going into this big, big, deep snow,

when the music sort of kicks in, you just go, "Wow!

"That's beautiful."

And she managed to make a thing of beauty out of something that

could have been pretty grotesque.

And then, the sort of homoeroticism in the end...

-Oh, yeah, a lot of that!

-HE CHUCKLES

Was that... Were you ever talking about that, or...

I certainly did, aye, I was...

I was looking at that from the very beginning and I thought,

"Oh, he doesnae just want to eat Guy Pearce,

"he's gonnae HAVE Guy Pearce at the same time!"

-You die.

-No!

It's all right, it's not fatal.

Not if you take the necessary precautions.

Quite a lot of the films we've talked about,

-they are very sort of male in their...

-Yeah.

-..in their focus...

Yeah, I'd not thought, that's true.

Do you think this was conscious, or just, like...?

I don't know, that's a really good point, actually.

I'd never honestly ever really thought about that before.

Obviously because I'm in it, in the middle of it, you know,

you don't really see it so much, but I guess that is true.

I can't think why that was the case, you know, and...

I'm going to think about that tonight now!

It can be said, you know, "Oh, Antonia didn't want to

"tell women's stories, or she was less interested in women."

I didn't really know what I thought of that at the time.

I've heard it said a few times.

But if you say, "Oh, Antonia focused on the men,"

you're setting up an image of Antonia having choice.

I think she was making the work that she was asked to make,

and unfortunately,

she had a production company for a very long time and yet,

she didn't make that many things that she initiated, that she chose.

4Way came about, you know, myself, Antonia,

our good friend Mark Cousins, and Irvine Welsh, and of course,

when there is big money out there being spoken about,

that's very hard, because the people who are then given that cash

are going to want to have something to say.

And I think that she went through meeting after meeting after meeting,

and I'm talking about years' worth,

it ground us all down, you know what I mean?

She just didn't want to go back into being a jobbing director

or working for someone.

Not that she wanted to be in charge or in control,

it wasn't like that, she was never that type of person.

But she just wanted to make sure that the project

was what she wanted it to be from beginning to end.

And sadly, I don't think we ever managed to achieve that.

There is a part of me that thinks,

but did Antonia just go where the work was?

She has supported her and Ian a lot of the time -

Ian completely supported her emotionally, but financially...

So, is there something about actually,

the industry isn't providing her with loads of stories about women?

I think it's dangerous to say, especially when someone's dead,

it is dangerous to say that a woman

who makes films about men had choice,

in an industry where statistics prove the stories about women are

not that often being produced, being developed, being given money to.

She liked photographing strong women and weak men, I would say.

Or not weak, but men who have disappointed themselves in some way.

And the paradox - and this is why it makes great drama -

in disappointing yourself, you come alive,

you blossom into something richer and more humane.

And that's what she captures again and again in these men.

CLOCK TICKING

Pauline, I'm sorry.

I'm so, so sorry.

The film, ultimately, is about the abuse of power.

It's about a boys' home where

young boys are systematically abused, sexually abused,

by the owner of the care home

and by the cronies that he brings in,

um, and how the boy tries to escape this.

And he's not an orphan -

he has a mother, he tries to tell people what's happening,

but no-one wants to listen.

Oh, er, something I want to show you.

Come on through.

So, by the time we then go on to him as a young man,

he's psychologically very damaged

and he's in a relationship and has children,

um, but the immense damage that's done to him, um...

..means that he will never, ever find any solace.

Reading the script, it was a hard read, it was not a page-turner.

It was a script that was obviously going to be hard to make, um...

It was gritty, it dealt with a really horrible subject,

it dealt with raw emotion.

And then, when I started to get the rushes,

I suddenly realised that Care was going to be, and was, turned out

to be, one of the best experiences I've ever had in the cutting room.

It was a film that was so personal, but so deeply emotive,

and for the life of me I can't understand how,

I think it was four million people watched it on a Sunday night...

starting at the beginning, going right through to the end,

I do not understand how four million people could actually watch it.

The horrors of it are still with me,

even though I haven't seen it for such a long time.

We had, um, thousands of phone calls afterwards,

and people contacting the helplines that went up after the show,

so it really did have a huge impact.

I mean, it is always difficult to quantify these things,

but it felt to me, during the period that

I was working at the BBC, as one of the most important films we'd made.

And certainly the one that had the biggest impact

in terms of audience response,

responding directly to what they'd seen on the screen.

And it wasn't phoning up with complaints, was it?

No, I don't remember us getting any complaints, actually.

They were almost all people phoning up who had been affected,

either themselves directly or whose partners had been abused,

and who all felt the need to talk about what had happened to them.

And the BAFTA goes to...

..Kieran Prendiville, Antonia Bird and the producers for Care.

APPLAUSE

'Everybody who worked on this story about the long-term effects

'of sexual abuse in children's homes found it

'a difficult and emotional project.

'Antonia said that turning away from the project

'would have been like joining the litany of neglect.'

And I think, and it was a credit to Antonia's film-making skills,

that she took such a raw subject

and turned it into a film that was true to the emotion,

but made it...but palatable.

She didn't pull her punches, but you still watched it,

you cared about the child enough to stay with it,

you could cope with the horror that he was going through.

MUSIC: Exit Music (For a Film) by Radiohead

# Breathe

# Keep breathing

# I can't do this alone

# Sing us a song

# A song to keep us warm... #

It was the most fantastic performance, I think,

I have ever, ever had to edit.

You know, I think it was a combination of the fact that

Antonia and Steve... but it was absolutely fantastic.

# You can laugh... #

Well, in simple terms, I always find

just the really, really great directors put you in a place

where they make you feel full of confidence

to do things that you hadn't dreamed of.

They sort of...

And she could do that, she'd be like, "You're going to go,

"you can do whatever with this."

I remember sitting, thinking, "Well, I hope... I don't know.

"I don't know what... I don't know what I can do,

"but you seem to think I can!"

And she would be, "No, no, you can really take off with this."

So, it's that wonderful kind of... giving you the confidence

to fly with it. And encouraging, without constantly having to say,

"Oh, wonderful, darling!" Also, what was lovely was, you would see her...

You'd kind of watch her face, maybe watching a rehearsal,

and you would see the kind of thrill that she was getting from

just watching the scene flow. "This is the best audience

"in the world here!" And that was it.

# Cocaine, kill my community

# Heroin... #

One service that's open 24/7 is the local dealer.

You'll never be told you'll have to wait three weeks for an appointment.

Miss Battle, would you please stand?

'Rehab was looking at the effects of drug and alcohol abuse on people.'

It was something she felt personally drawn to.

I think it was something that she felt

was not being, necessarily, given the airtime that it deserved.

-A bit of powder, aye? What else?

-A bit of brown.

-A bit of brown, aye.

Good, good. Guy's got a bit of brown. Want a bit of brown, pal, eh?

Hey, mate, you want a bit of brown?! These guys have the whole shebang!

You've got everything, aye?! Good for you! Good for fuckin' you!

Aye! Good! Set up a fuckin' stall, ya bastard!

Whatever your conditions at the time,

we cannot overlook the seriousness of this offence.

'It was a much more freeform, semi-improvised process,

'so it felt a more experimental piece.'

I'll fuckin' go ahead with you, ya cunt!

'Possibly not as successful,'

because of that. It certainly didn't have the same level of impact

that Care had. But then, I don't think Antonia saw them as being

a pair of films that one should compare and contrast.

They just were two films that she had made.

I think Rehab, erm...

..was an extraordinary drama.

And it didn't fit neatly into a time.

And television junctions are important for a channel.

So our brief was BBC Two, 9.00 to 10.30.

Newsnight, which is unalterable, starts at 10.30.

And in the making of Rehab,