Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

He told Tim he wanted to play the part because he’s always playing abusers, and ‘it would be nice to play a good guy for a change!’ Maybe he was joking, but I think a key for him to Dad’s character is that he refuses point-blank to admit to himself what he is. Ray was phenomenal in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth , but here he’ll have to expose a part of himself that, as the father of his own teenage daughter, demands real courage and has certainly scared away other actors in the past. Anyway, it’s great to have him around, if only so that I can tease Dixie that Ray is the archetypal New Man.

Monday February 23, 1998

We have a read-through of the script today with our four leads, Lara, Freddie, Tilda and Ray. Tim has me read the directions aloud. Thanks to his desire to have a largely visual film, driven more by looks and gesture than dialogue, there is far more action in the script than I would usually include, so I have a lot to read, and reading it in front of the cast makes me feel self-conscious. It’s a good discipline, though, in terms of the writing – just as bookstore readings have always made me want to be lethal in tightening up my prose.

Tonight at the pub, I jokingly tell Ray I am going to pick a fight with him. ‘No, you’re not,’ he says, extremely convincingly. ‘You wouldn’t be able to write with no fingers.’

‘I could type with my nose,’ I tell him.

‘Ah,’ he grins, ‘but you wouldn’t have one of those, either.’

Friday February 27, 1998

Today for the first time, I see the interior of the house we are using as the family’s house in the film. My one-word response: ‘ Fuck!!! ’

It’s truly horrible: the art department has transformed a solitary Devon home, surrounded by windswept fields, into the most monstrous memory anyone could have of childhood. It’s dark, poky, totally claustrophobic and decorated with various styles of specially produced wallpaper that could drive anyone to commit murderous acts. In fact, I think it will look quite subtle on screen, but the effect of the house is to make anyone who enters it want to leave immediately.

I have spent the week getting to know various members of the unit. Michael Carlin, our Australian-born production designer and the bastard responsible for this aberration of a house, is a great character to have around, thanks to that dependable Ozzie ability to cut through any bullshit. I discover that Australians think of Brits as the great unwashed, when he tells me an Ocker joke: ‘Where do you hide a five-pound note from a Pom? Under a bar of soap.’

I am deeply impressed by the wartime shelter his department has built on the sea front here – a recreation of the one I used in the novel for the key scene in which Tom witnesses his father abusing Jessie.

The art-department job, which is constructed of plywood and plaster above a rocky ocean promontory, is actually far more striking and dramatic than the bunker which inspired me, on the hillside at Branscombe.

I originally chose it for this section of the novel because I wanted a space that would be horrific and memorable – the first time I saw it, the real shelter in Devon stank of urine, and was littered with used condoms.

The art department’s version on the rocks here looks, if anything, even more desolate, yet with a kind of vast, Turneresque seascape behind it that locates our characters firmly in a very primal Britain, just as Tim and I have wanted to do since our earliest discussions.

Tonight, I have dinner with Tilda Swinton and her husband, John, at their cottage, which is just across the way from where Tim, Ray, Dixie, Sarah Radclyffe, Seamus McGarvey, Michael Carlin and I are staying. Tilda has just had twins, which is perfect timing for us, as the mother in the film gives birth to a baby in a car wreck right at the beginning.

Tilda has a gracious, redheaded beauty, and is warm and real, absolutely enjoying motherhood at the moment (no doubt helped by the fact that the twins are both asleep by 8:30 p.m.). We talk at length about my son, Joe Buffalo – staying in Devon has been quite strange, because this was a geographical starting-point for the book just before Joe was born, and somewhere I used to visit fairly regularly with Joe and his mother, Ann Totterdell. Seeing Tilda and John with their babies brings back memories, most of them wonderful but some also tied to the later pain of Joe’s cancer and death.

On a lighter note, we are all still reeling from Freddie’s unannounced disappearance yesterday. Our young lead actor, who’s in virtually every shot, quietly organized a taxi for the hour-plus ride to the nearest railway station, then took a train up to London for the night – three days before we are due to start shooting. Despite the general fear and chaos this caused, he scores well for initiative.

Sunday March 1, 1998

Good pub lunch with everyone today. Afterwards, while we are all resting, Tim calls me from his cottage, two doors down. ‘Cup of tea?’ he asks. We start shooting tomorrow, and he seems, if not nervous, then certainly slightly tense. It’s a huge responsibility for him, but nothing he has done or said since our first meeting has cast any doubt in my mind that he can pull it off.

Our producers, Sarah and Dixie, cook dinner for everyone tonight, and we gather around the table, all a little anxious but trying to hide it. The house is full of kids at the moment: Sarah’s two sons, Callum and Sam, are here with her husband, Bill, as are Michael Carlin’s wife, Laura, and baby daughter, Maeve, and it’s an effective distraction. As a good-luck totem, Tim gives me a champagne cork with a coin in the top of it, which he says he does at the start of every film.

I go to bed filled with anticipation about the start of production tomorrow. It’s been almost ten years since the book was published, during every year of which I have worked on various drafts of the script with various producers and directors. Now we are finally getting to make it!

Monday March 2, 1998

Didn’t sleep well last night – I’m still on California time. I get up at 5:30 a.m., email Charong in Los Angeles, then shower and wait for the minibus to take us to the production base at Hartland Abbey at 7:00. From there, after a communal breakfast amid a bustle of energy and nerves, we go to the house, where Tim, Seamus and the crew are already setting up for the first shot – which is also one of the first shots in the film, of Tom cycling up to the Devon home he hates.

Tim looks totally comfortable as a director, answering the endless questions from every direction that a film shoot entails, looking through the viewfinder to make sure he’s happy with the composition, joking with Freddie to keep him relaxed. I wonder if for Tim there’s an element of acting the director – and when the actuality takes hold.

We turn over at 9:00 a.m., with the weather providing just the backdrop Tim wants: moody skies, a little rain, the house suitably isolated and desolate against the landscape. It’s a strange feeling to know that the camera is turning and the film has really started. There is a little cheer and a round of applause once the first take is in the can.

Tuesday March 3, 1998

Our second day of shooting – and my last in England before I fly back to LA to write another draft of Among the Thugs . Tim wants me around for the whole of the shoot – which is unusual. Ordinarily the writer is the last person anyone on a film unit hopes to see once shooting has started, especially directors, who often feel threatened that the writer will be watching hawk-like for every word that is changed – but I’m contractually bound to do the script for Kiefer, and anyway I feel uncomfortable being on a film set for too long, even if it’s my own work that’s being filmed.