Rufus Norris: there is no blueprint for London Road

Rufus Norris is best known as a theatre director and as the new artistic director of the National Theatre. He first came to prominence after being named the Evening Standard’s most promising newcomer with Afore Night Come at the Young Vic and has since gone on to direct a string of award-winning stage productions including Festen, the Broadway production of Les Liaisons dangereuses, and London Road which won the Critics’ Circle award for best musical.

In 2012 he arrived in the film world with his debut feature, Broken, an adaptation of Daniel Clay’s much-praised novel. The BFI Film Fund and BBC Films backed Norris’s directorial feature debut, which premiered in the critics’ week at Cannes and went on to be nominated for numerous awards including nine BIFAs. It won the BIFA for best British independent film.

In 2014, Norris embarked on his second film, London Road, a feature adaptation of Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s play, which opened at the Cottesloe Theatre under the direction of Norris when he was an associate director at the National. A daring project, the story is based on the 2006 Ipswich murders, where five women, who worked as prostitutes, were tragically killed. Unique to this production was that the script was taken verbatim from a series of interviews conducted by Blythe with people who were in the area at the time of the events. It is also a musical.

Ben Roberts, director of the BFI Film Fund, met Rufus to reflect on translating the play to the cinema screen.

The first conversation that we had about turning it into a film was with David Sabel, who is the brain behind NT Live. He has really driven the idea of this as a film and it has been an incredible journey. Usually, NT Live is planned well in advance, but when London Road opened at the National Theatre, I think we knew what we had got. David and I sat down and asked whether we wanted to do an NT Live, and I said that I didn’t think so, and he was in agreement. Instead, we wanted to start knocking about ideas of exploring whether this piece could have a further evolution.

We hadn’t started shooting Broken. Initially, I thought that the way to do London Road was almost to do it in-house, and do it very simply. However, because we had the cast here, we thought we would try it out, grab a camera, do a couple of days and get a few locations. It was a very tight company, not just the actors, but everyone who was involved. We took everyone out on performing afternoons and just did it. That raised as many questions as it answered. Some things worked; other things didn’t. But the idea wouldn’t go away, and it felt like the beginning of the process.

I have probably done 60-70 shows, and there isn’t a stage in the world that I would be afraid of – there is the notion that once you’ve worked in a profession for 10,000 hours, you have learned your craft. But while I have my 10,000 hours in theatre, I haven’t done that in film. So, any hours that I can spend in film are only just the beginning of understanding how what I do in theatre relates to what I do in film.

I am very glad that I had a go at something that was less complex. I loved what I did with Broken, but in many ways it is a straightforward drama. It is nowhere near as complex as London Road, for which there is no blueprint. Yes, it is a musical, and there is a challenge of recording the audio live, and dealing with choreography, and while it isn’t a massive scale film, it needed organising in a very different way.

Part of the deal with London Road being at the National Theatre was that they would have a hand in deciding who would direct the play. I wanted to take everyone who was involved in the theatre production including the choreographer and production designer, but we needed to support this with people who really know what they are doing in film, and we would need very experienced heads of department.

I worked with Alecky and Adam, who had cooked up the idea long before I got involved, and we reshaped it. I said to Adam and Alecky that I was going to push them this way and that, but the deal was that they would be able to veto certain decisions – I knew that if I saw both of them walking towards me, I was for the high jump. Once we started on the film, this dynamic changed.

The first thing that we had to do was to make the script work for cinema. That meant either that we would have had to get someone in to do it, or we do it with Alecky and she turned around immediately and said that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn how these things are done. From my point of view that was the perfect scenario because it is hers and when you are dealing with subject matter like that of London Road it is important. There are 90 minutes of interviews used in the film taken from probably around 80 hours of material that Alecky collected, so she knew where to look for specific pieces and she could go and chat again with the subjects.

Also, all the material is direct address, it is one person turning to another person asking them how they are feeling, or observing someone witnessing something else. I was worried that it would be very restrictive, so we had to find clever ways to construct the scenes and to work as a film.

We knew that the chorus stuff couldn’t be in situ, but around almost all of the solo material is from set. Our sound engineer, John Midgley, is absolutely fantastic. There were vetoes on the set, where John, and David [Shrubsole, musical director], could say to me that we were going to have to shoot it again, and they didn’t have to tell me why. We knew that if we didn’t work that way we wouldn’t have a film and it was great to empower everyone. If we were doing it on stage, this would be normal practice. I am fortunate enough to have some excellent relationships with one or two superb sound designers in theatre, and it is a case of ‘what they say goes’. Danny, our DP, was great at adapting to this.

Yes, they had to pull it right down. There was some sadness to it all, because obviously before Olivia Colman was cast, there was someone else playing that part, and it was the same with Tom Hardy. It was a sad reality of the project. That said, everyone who was in the show had a good crack of the whip, and sometimes you have to make those decisions for the right reasons. For example Kate Fleetwood, who played Julie in the stage version, is brilliant in the film as one of the prostitutes. We had done the show twice, changing the cast, so we were lucky to have 13 people who had done it on stage to the level that they were really embedded in the story.

There are huge crossovers, but I just don’t know anywhere enough about film to answer the question properly. I am hugely critical of my theatre work. I think learning just how a camera works, or how the camera and an actor relate was new for me. I am very used to telling the audience where to look in a play. Take, for instance, the play I am working on at the moment [Behind the Beautiful Forevers] where there are 23 people on stage for the majority of the time. The stage is absolute chaos, and it has to be like that because it is set in a slum in India. Now, I know that what the actors are doing on stage will get the audience to look where I want them to look, that is just craft. When making a film the camera does that for you, so there is a whole layer of nuance and decisions that I have yet to fully appreciate the delicacy of.

I am good at creating a room in the theatre where people feel empowered and happy, and I can then put actors through it at the last minute. You can’t do that with film, but what is exciting with film is getting everything planned and then keeping that little window open for what the promise is now. There was this one scene that we needed to be sunny, and it was pouring with rain, and it felt like God was telling me to give up, and scrap it. We did continue to shoot, and it is a lovely moment in the film – we even got a few rays of sunlight. There is something that cinema and theatre share, in that you get everything set up so that you can respond at the moment.

I have very much enjoyed the editing process on the limited amount of filming that I have done. In the end I love working with actors, and those moments where you get something you didn’t expect.

You have to be pretty bipolar, and the saddest thing for me is that I have taken on this huge role that is a huge privilege and quite a complicated change in my life. The saddest thing is that after all this time I finally manage to find my way in film and enjoy it and then I had to make this decision to walk away for the time being. My contract is for five years, so for the time being I couldn’t make a film because if you are going to do it, you have to do it properly.

Words: Joseph Walsh