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| ‘It’s a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate’ … Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes, in white skirts, as Rita and Sue, and George Costigan, far right, as Bob. |
How we made
Film
How we made Rita, Sue and Bob Too
Monday 26 June 2017
George Costigan: ‘I watched the premiere with my wife on one side of me – and my mother on the other’
Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of the Royal Court theatre
Rita, Sue and Bob Too really happened. Andrea Dunbar, who wrote the play and the screenplay, had an affair with a married man, having sex with him in his car, along with her friend Eileen. I commissioned the play as a follow-up to her 1980 drama The Arbor. Andrea was the most talented and original young writer I’d ever come across.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jbf477OqjI
Alan Clarke, who directed the film adaptation, cannily gave it an upbeat ending, which Andrea hated. She said: “You’d never go back with somebody who had betrayed you.” She told me not to go and see it. But the judgment of people involved with the film had been astute. It was successful, which did us a great service in terms of reviving the play, even if their version is a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate.
Andrea’s life was much grimmer. The incidents in Rita, Sue and Bob Too were sandwiched between a brutal childhood and a grim, hopeless adulthood. She died at the age of 29.
George Costigan, actor
I almost messed things up with Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes, who played Rita and Sue. At the start, I was too smug. Alan was still auditioning me but I was sure I’d got the gig. Then when I left, I thought: “You’ve blown it.” So I rang him up and asked for another chance. I’m not really sure why they chose me, though later someone said how ridiculously vain my character is in the film – to which Alan replied: “Well, George is a bit of a check-the-mirror actor.”
Alan’s life was devoted to working-class culture, but he’d never made a film that was funny. He insisted we didn’t get heavy and gritty. He wanted to make a film that celebrated the working classes. The message was: “Look, we’ll laugh through anything.”
We rehearsed for two weeks in a Bradford school during the summer holidays, doing an entire run-through on the last day. And we practised the shagging in the car. Michelle and Siobhan were 19 or 20 and I was nearly 40. If I’d stopped to think about it, I’d have gone: “This is a bit weird.” But there was nothing to do but go for it. It was almost like enacting somebody’s fantasy, which is sometimes how the film is received: I’ve met blokes to whom Bob is some sort of a hero. But he was a gas to play, because his point of view was so narrow. It starts with his dick and ends there as well.
The scene Alan spent the longest talking to me about was when I take a piss against a wall after the car sex. He did seven takes – just for a shot of me from behind. The budget was only £800,000 and I thought we didn’t have enough money for that kind of thing, but he kept saying I wasn’t pissing triumphantly enough. He spent more effort on that than anything else in the movie.
I don’t think we were particularly integrated into the Buttershaw estate. The residents were nice, but their lives were so different to all these people swanning around making a film. The contrast between the rates of pay we were getting and the lives of everyone around us was so shamefully different that we fled as soon as we finished.
I was not prepared for the reaction of what you might call the southern press when we opened the film at the Brighton film festival. They couldn’t believe it was like this in the north. We said: “Do you think we’ve made this up as some kind of romp?” I watched the finished film with my wife on one side and my mother on the other. My mother said: “I’m very glad I’ve seen it, but I won’t be telling many people about it.”The film is still relevant today. Apart from the fact the girls would have mobile phones glued to their hands and a lot more makeup, nothing’s changed. We’re still a divided country.
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