Nigel Cole returns to the director's chair this week with his new comedy movie All Good Things, which is written by Ayub Khan-Din.
I caught up with the filmmaker to talk about his latest project as well as what lies ahead for him.
- All In Good Time is about to be released into UK cinemas so can you tell me a little bit about the movie?
The movie is based on the play by Ayub Khan-Din, who wrote East Is East, and it was at the National Theatre.
It is about an Indian family in Bolton in Lancashire and it begins with the wedding of a young couple. But the honeymoon is cancelled and they have to spend it in his father's house, which is a tiny house with paper thin walls and you can hear everything that is going on in the next room.
So it's difficult, claustrophobic and embarrassing and by the end of the second week they have still not consummated their marriage.
- How did you get involved with the movie and what was it about the script that really interested you?
Suzanne Mackie produced the movie and we did Calendar Girls together and we have been looking for something else to work on together for some time. When she called up excited about this one it got me excited as well.
I am a big fan of Ayub's writing and so I had high hopes for it and when I read it I was thrilled that I liked it. I like to tell stories that have a mixture of both comedy and drama and that can make you laugh and make you cry - this was clearly one of those.
The comedy was funnier than I have had and the drama was more powerful and emotional; it was taken to extremes I felt. I just felt that I had to take it on.
- The movie is about a very tight knit family so how great for you as a filmmaker was it to explore those dynamics?
Yes it was very exciting.People have been asking me a lot about the fact that it is a British/Indian film but we didn't look at it like that all as it is just a story about a family.
Originally Ayub based his play on a play called All In Good Time, where we get our title from, by Bill Naughton and that was set in a white, northern working class family.It is a timeless story and I think that anyone who has grown up in a family, and we all have, will recognise the dynamics.
It was nice to do something I felt was more part of my own life than Calendar Girls, I am not a member of the Women's Institute and I have never taken my clothes off for a calendar but I have grown up in a family with a father and a mother and sibling and a complicated dynamic. So I knew all about that.
- The movie is based on a well known and successful play so how familiar were you with the original material? And how often did you refer back to the play when you were making the movie?
Not at all really. I hadn't seen the play but I did go and see it in Bolton at the Octagon Theatre, they did a very good version of it, and I did see the National Theatre production on video tape.
What was clear from seeing that is that it was dominated by this wonderful performance from Harish Patel who had clearly picked up the ball with this part and just run with it.
This was a great plus for me and I just thought 'wow I have this great actor here so seems to understand this role and be capable of pulling off all these twists and turns'.
The dad character is grotesque at the beginning and you sort of hate him but by the end you grow to love him and you feel desperately sorry for him. That is a really difficult to pull off as an actor and Harish just seemed to effortlessly pull that off and communicate all this.
So it was important for me that I had this actor that I knew could play the part and just knew how to knock it out of the park.
- So how keen was he to return to the role?
With him and Meera Syal, who is also in the production, what was great was they knew their characters and they knew who these people were as they had done their homework so they came prepared.
But I am use to actors who do that anyway as I encourage actors to prepare properly and I expect them to come to the set having worked it out and know what they want to do with it.
Making a film is very different to putting on a play so it did feel very new for them I think and some of the cast were differnt and the young cast were different. Want was important was to make it feel fresh for them on the day and I did everything I could to make it feel different for them.
- The cast is very much a mix of youth and experience with the likes of Amara Karan and Reece Ritchie alongside Meera Syal as you have mentioned so can you tell me about the casting process?
Amara and Reece are more experienced than I expected because I thought that I would probably end up with two actors in those roles who were fairly new and relatively inexperienced.
I did an exhausting casting process up and down England for young new Asian actors and it turned out the two that I picked had been in movies before; Reece was in The Lovely Bones and I had seen Amara in The Darjeeling Limited.
But what was tricky about that piece of casting is inevitably it is a movie and they are the romantic couple and you want to feel the actors have some star quality and charisma about them but yet they are playing a very ordinary couple who live in Bolton.
So I had to find two actors who could pull that off really and who you could believe had grown up in this house but were sufficiently exciting and talented to carry off the leading roles in a movie.
- Amara and Reece play the two young leads Vina and Atul so what did you see in these two actors that you thought would be right for these characters?
In both their cases there was an openness and an honesty, they both had that way of making you feel that they were being honest about the material as well as a little touch of innocent.
In Reece's case the part really required an actor who made you believe that still waters ran deep and that there was something going on in his head, even in his quieter moments you still felt that he was troubled by something. I think that Reece caught that brilliantly and you saw flashes of that in the audition and I though 'yes I can use that'
It's extraordinary the casting process as it's everything, the most important thing and it's vital and yet you don't really know how you are doing it.
It's like picking a life partner as you don't set out saying 'I want someone with red hair and who is five foot ten' one day you just realise you have fallen in love with someone like that. So the casting process is a little like falling in love.
- How did you find working with them and what ideas did they bring to the table for their roles?
It's all about the tiny details, there are thousands of decisions to make all of the time when you are playing a part and it's about getting those in the right line.
We talked a lot about the pressure they were under and what it must have been like. We went up to Bolton together and visited those houses to feel the claustrophobia of them.
You end up doing a lot of talking you just talk it through and try and get the sense that you inhabit the part and then you can forget all about it.
- So how have you personally been finding the reaction to the movie?
I would say this wouldn't I but I have genuinely mean it I have been thrilled. There are some big surprises in the second half of the film and perhaps goes in a way that the audience perhaps isn't expecting; some big laugh out loud comedy is followed by some quite serious drama and yo never know how the audience are going to take to it.
But I have been thrilled by the way that they get it and they laugh, laugh again and then they are crying.
The trick, if you like, that we are trying to play on them seems to be working but you are never sure until you get it in front of two or three hundred people and see if it's going to play like that - to my relief it does.
- You have worked in movies as well as TV throughout your career so how do you find that the two compare & differ?
It's all the same thing really because at the end of the day you are telling a story doesn't matter if you are making a documentary or making a movie.
To some extent you are reliant on having a great story to tell and that's when writers like Ayub Khan-Din write this wonderful story you have to grab it as I am only as good as the story.
- Finally what's next for you?
Well I am working on a film at the moment, I am editing it, it's a British wedding comedy called The Wedding Video and it stars Lucy Punch, Rufus Hound and Robert Webb from British television.
It is the story of a best man coming home to be the best man at his brother's wedding and making a video of it. That will be out hopefully at the end of the year but I am not sure yet.
All Good Things is released 11th May
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw