Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

North London. The Harrow Road. I’ve cycled up here from the poncy foreign calm of Bayswater. Two black kids have just tossed a woman’s shopping bag off a moving bus, then jumped after it. They don’t want what’s in it, they just don’t want anything to stand still. A plastic carton of eggs hits the pavement near the relics of a secondhand furniture shop. Squeeze-wrapped sausages vanish under a car tire. My bike scrunches across a box of cornflakes and one of the kids chucks a loaf of bread at my face. It’s amazing, the punch sliced white can carry.

‘Fuck off!’ I shout.

‘Fuck you, Maurice!’ the other one yells, making the name sound French and faggoty. A ketchup bottle buzzes past my ear and smashes in the road.

‘Maurice?’ I wonder. I pedal harder as both of them come after me, one on the pavement, the other dodging the traffic to try and catch hold of my rear mudguard. I turn two corners and wheel down a street pitted with ruts and potholes, then slide through a piss-smelling alley between dark houses and come out onto waste ground. The boys will find me if they want to, but I don’t think they’re that motivated.

I take a breather and stare out over the view, my pulse racing. Through a wire fence and down an embankment, railway tracks stretch into the distance. A single line curls off at one point into a shed half buried by the shadow of the road bridge. Nearby, the gravel under the sleepers is stained with rust, a color you don’t see much of in Bayswater.

I’m on high ground and the land dips away from me across the tracks, toward the poky back gardens of terraced houses. Their scraggly lawns and washing lines edge onto a dumping ground littered with rotting mattresses, a wrecked pushchair, black rubbish sacks, the scarred remains of a fire.

Above all this hangs a big expanse of sky, blood red where it touches the backbone of the houses, spilling out overhead into a great, glowing fish tank of orange and blue. London is wonderful, I love it. It’s alive, spreading out before me, old and new, humming like the railway track, telling me everything’s great, I can do anything here – if only we weren’t moving next week.

This is my sentence, then, for a crime I’m guilty as hell of but can’t put my finger on just now, there are so many. Devon, tranquil Devon, the Devon we have moved to, maybe not as tranquil as it used to be, but too bloody tranquil for me. Rubbers in the river are nothing – I want the scum of London, turds in the doorways, the stench of telephone booths, the heat from a burning car. London looks beautiful with all that stuff. Everything’s falling apart, but still the city has splendor. The country, well the country doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore. It doesn’t have a hope, it doesn’t know how to be healthy: the water we’re paddling through must be thick with invisible pollution, radioactive fallout, and yet…

And yet Jessica has just slipped out of the canoe to swim in that muck. It’s clear enough, even the green and slimy weed three feet down is visible, but it feels too warm to me. English water is never warm, not outside, not without the help of some factory somewhere, pissing out hot waste – or a minor cock-up at the nearest reactor. But there’s no time to think such thoughts. Something else is happening, something I’m a part of but can’t quite understand. Perhaps I’m just tired, confused, heat hazed?

We have turned a bend in the river and are well out of sight of the boys on the bridge. The trees here grow right by the water, their branches almost meeting overhead so that the sun shoots a web of light across us all. Jessie is swimming close to the canoe, her back flashing in the triangles of sun, her skin browner than I ever I manage to get. She kicks hard, reaching awkwardly behind her to untie her bikini top…

But wait a minute. None of this is going to mean anything unless I can make you understand how weird we all felt that afternoon, how watching a fresh little bastard come sliming into the world from the collective pool of your family blood makes you think about things you might otherwise not choose to consider. We felt close, all right, but it was a closeness that cut through the bullshit of family life and suspended the rules. I’m talking about honesty. And, you know, when you get down to it, honesty – life without the lies, the protective film of accepted behavior – is bloody dangerous.

In 1996, when I decided to look for material to direct, the first thing that came through the door was The War Zone . Sarah Radclyffe – a producer I had worked with as an actor some years before, on A World Apart – heard I was interested in directing and gave a copy of Alex’s novel to my agent, Ilene Feldman. I sat down, read it and it made me cry, it just broke my heart. It was beautiful and sad, and thankfully I felt it was really cinematic.

This was important to me, because I didn’t want to make a faux documentary, I wanted to make a piece of cinema. I grew up watching great British and European films, with widescreen images and beautiful lighting, and I was inspired by two of our most extraordinary directors, Alan Clarke and Ken Loach – people who made films that came from their hearts. And to a certain extent I wanted to make traditional, old-fashioned cinema – a grown-up film about what people do to their children. The emotions the book brought out in me are what I went on, gut reaction, but the film would have to work on a suspense level as well, in terms of Tom’s discovery of what was happening around him. I saw in it the opportunity to make the kind of film that we just don’t see enough of any more, a film that genuinely has the potential to say something.

The War Zone was the first thing that came along, but it was also the hardest. I had no sense before I read it of what kind of film I wanted to direct, except that I knew I wanted to jump in the deepest part of the deep end and find out if I could do the job. People asked, ‘Why this subject? Why this film?’ I said, ‘What do you want me to do, a light comedy? To get my toes wet, see if I can direct? What’s the point?’

I thought it was a universal story, a family with two kids. They seem to love each other, and they do love each other. The parents want the best for their children, and the kids just want to be kids: like all children that age, they are trying to define themselves. But the family harbors a secret. The book showed that incest is everywhere, even in a family that truly love each other. It is the universal taboo. But Alex’s novel wasn’t the horror we read about in the newspaper and see on the evening news. It wasn’t sensationalist or something only affecting other people; it felt real and complex, and you could see how damaged the characters were right away. Jessie was hurting and defiant, and Tom was wonderful. He was going through his own hard adolescence when he witnessed this horrible act. Ultimately, all the love in the family couldn’t hide what the father was doing. He seemed at first like a great dad, a dad you’d want to have – then you found out what he was, and it was devastating. That was what I wanted to portray: I wanted a family that anyone could identify with, Black, Asian, American, English, a family that has a dark secret.

I see film as a medium that can be understood across all boundaries. I believe in the importance of images. A story on film must be told not through dialogue, like a play, but with what you see. I wanted to end up with a film that honored the book and honored the subject. The worst adaptation is a literal adaptation – somehow you must follow your instincts and be true to the sadness of it. I wanted the audience to receive the impact of the book in the same way that I had.