Broken
Subscribe
X

Get the latest from Beat

All

Broken

broken.jpg

Norris and the producers saw close to 850 girls around Britain before deciding on Eloise Laurence for the part of the plucky 11-year-old Skunk. “We didn’t give up until we found someone we were really happy with,” he says. “As soon as I met with her and started reading with her, I felt an immediate affinity. She was coming at it very fresh, because she had never acted before. We knew we wanted her to have a trusting relationship with everyone in the cast, especially Tim Roth, who plays her father, and Cillian Murphy, who plays a teacher. Everyone who worked with her got with the program, on the understanding that if we didn’t get a good performance from her, we didn’t have a movie.”

As the directors of low-budget films are often forced to do, Norris took a no-nonsense attitude to the production of Broken. “We didn’t have a lot of time for ego and wanking around,” he says with a laugh, “so people had to do their jobs and get on with it. One of the things I knew is that I had to work hard to create the right atmosphere and the right environment. I’m very experienced at that in theatre, and I applied those principles to cinema. If the room is a happy place, and there is a lot of humour, then no matter how much pressure there is, people will be relaxed and give it their best. Eloise gave a relaxed performance, and that’s exactly what you want from a kid.”

Roth and Laurence make for a convincing onscreen father and daughter – a fact that may be down to the bonding they did before filming began. “At the start of rehearsals, Tim asked for a day when he could take Eloise and Bill Milner, who plays her brother, and have a family day out. They went to the zoo, they mucked about in London, Tim spoiled them and they all took the piss out of each other. They had a great laugh together,” he continues, “and they created a family unit. Tim really gave himself over to it. Tim is a father, so he understands. He’s very much a family man. That was a crucial aspect of the film, and the bonding they did makes it seem far more real.”

Before embarking on Broken, Norris spent years directing theatre, and many of the lessons he learned in his former career carried over. “Film and theatre are very different mediums,” he says, “but there are many ways in which they cross over.” Ultimately, he says, your job as a director is to tell a story in the way that you want, and extract the best performances that you can from your actors.

“In that sense, they’re the same,” he continues. “The visual style and the rhythms are different, the tools are different, but I think the basic craft is very similar. It’s often been said that there is a closer correlation between theatre and film than between theatre and television.”

If you go and see a piece of theatre, you leave the house, you go and sit down in a dark room with no distractions and watch the story unfold – if you don’t like it, it’s difficult to leave, unless you want to leave at interval. Film is similar, Norris says. “As a filmmaker, you can work on atmosphere – you know you have 90 minutes or 120 minutes to tell your story,” he explains. “With television, it’s different, because the audience is watching at home, and are therefore much more easily distracted – someone comes in and talks to them, they go and make a cup of tea, so as a storyteller, you have to keep people from reaching for the remote. There’s a very different pressure on you.”

Aside from being Rufus Norris’s debut feature, Broken is also notable in that it features a musical score by one Damon Albarn. “There’s a group called The Electric Wave Bureau who did the score,” Norris tells me, “and Damon is a core part of that. I did a show with Damon a few years ago called Doctor Dee – we did it for the Manchester International Festival, then reworked for the Cultural Olympiad. We split the work pretty evenly on that, and we became friends. I wanted to work with him again, so I approached him for this. He also has an understanding of the material, because he has a daughter who’s the same age as Skunk.”

BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN

Recommended