Peckham wry: on the set of Destiny Ekaragha’s Gone Too Far!

► Gone Too Far! is streaming on BFI Player and on Netflix.

It’s a drizzly mid-November morning and nearly two dozen cast and crew members are wedged into a narrow alley deep in the concrete heart of East London’s Bethnal Green. Today the district is doubling for South-East London counterpart Peckham and it’s the final day’s shooting on Gone Too Far!, a new comedy about a manic day in the lives of two newly met brothers (one Nigerian, one British). A big-screen adaptation of Bola Agbaje’s award-winning play, it’s one of the first films to receive production money from the new BFI Film Fund.

Producer Christopher Granier-Deferre of Poisson Rouge Pictures (co-producing with the BFI) first saw the play in 2008 at London’s Royal Court Theatre and immediately grasped its potential for screen adaptation: “It represented a great opportunity to portray a vibrant group in a way that’s not been done before.” Working alongside Bradley Quirk of the now-defunct UK Film Council, Granier-Deferre approached Agbaje with the idea of developing it as a feature. After a period of script work, director Destiny Ekaragha came on board in 2010; both Agbaje and Ekaragha are Nigerian Brits and Granier-Deferre describes them as having “clicked, just like twins”.

Funding was initially elusive; Ekaragha puts this down to potential investors’ inability to fit the film into a box. “It wasn’t the [film’s] structure that was holding us back. It was certain companies not getting it and saying: ‘There’s no audience for this.’ Any film with young Black boys in it is called ‘urban’.” Though gritty themes are broached in Gone Too Far!, neither drugs nor violence provide the backdrop, separating it from the recent trend of crime-fixated youth fare (think Kidulthood or Shank). All involved stress the film’s universality and basis in comedy; both Agbaje and Ekaragha cite John Hughes’s Planes, Trains & Automobiles as an influence.

In the period of transition following the UKFC’s dissolution, Granier-Deferre took the film on the road, including a spell at Film London’s Microwave programme. Ekarahga shot an eight-minute pilot, but it didn’t work out (“We had so many young actors, it looked like it was for Nickelodeon!”). The breakthrough came with a Royal Court reading in July 2012 in front of key executives. “It was registering with people and saying something about being from different communities in any city,” says Granier-Deferre. Soon after, Gone Too Far! received BFI funding of £35,000 for further development, and £357,000 for production. (The entire budget clocks in at under £1 million.)

Shooting began in October 2012, Peckham proving the most popular location for the crew. Peckham native Agbaje describes the local community as “urgent, vibrant and welcoming”. A key cast member caught chickenpox mid-shoot, forcing a recasting, but this proved to be the most stressful moment in an otherwise fairly serene shoot.

There’s another intriguing story here: in directing Gone Too Far!, Ekaragha becomes only the third female black British feature film director, following Ngozi Onwurah (Welcome II the Terrordome) and Amma Asante (A Way of Life). Visibly surprised by the observation, she says: “What I’d really love is if a little girl of ten or 11 sees me in a magazine and it’s normal in her world for there to be a Black female director – that would be amazing!” Then she departs to set up the shoot’s final scene. Clearly, whatever the end result, Gone Too Far! has the potential to represent a hugely promising step in a new direction for British cinema.