Britz
Peter Kosminsky
Peter Kosminsky's career
path to becoming a writer and director of dramas is not exactly typical.
A chemistry degree at Oxford isn't generally on the CV of your typical
dramatist. By the same token, most haven't started off in TV journalism
and documentary-making. But the scientific and journalistic training
have turned Kosminsky into one of the most accurate, forensic film-makers
working today. His dramas are frequently fact-based, and their meticulous
research and fastidious accuracy have added to their political and emotional
potency.
Kosminsky's latest
work, Britz, is a two-part drama about a British Muslim brother
and sister whose lives take fundamentally divergent paths. It is an
extraordinary piece of film-making; both a tantalising thriller and
a deeply disturbing examination of the social and political reality
of being a Muslim in post-9/11 Britain. As ever with Kosminsky, punches
are not pulled, and the film makes no bones about nailing its political
colours to the mast. But the result is intelligent, thought-provoking
and controversial.
Here, Kosminsky discusses
his career to date, reveals why this was an intensely personal project,
and outlines his concerns about the world his children are growing up
in.
You started out making documentaries.
What made you switch to Drama?
Well, I was primarily doing documentaries at Yorkshire
Television. I worked on a monthly documentary strand on ITV called First
Tuesday, which no longer exists but was quite a hard-hitting documentary
strand in those days. I made documentaries in various trouble spots
all over the world. I then became interested in a series of shootings
that occurred in Northern Ireland in 1982 in Armagh. We were trying
to make a documentary about that. We got some good access to the team
of British policemen who were sent over there to investigate the killings.
The trouble was, they wouldn’t go on camera. There was nobody
to film, all the other people were either dead, disappeared or were
not allowed to talk to us. There was nothing to film but a few guilty
buildings. So we kind of came up with the idea of making it into a drama
because we were desperate to convey some of the things we were discovering
and we couldn’t think of any other way to do it. So I made my
first drama, which was known as Shoot to Kill, and was transmitted
by ITV in 1990. And that was just done as a matter of expediency really.
It was a way to tell a story that I wanted to tell but where there was
no obvious way to do it as a documentary.
Does having a background
in documentary-making help you with the more factual elements of your
dramas?
Yes, I think knowing the basic trade of the television
journalist has helped. Before I was making documentaries I worked in
the Current Affairs department at the BBC, on programmes like Nationwide
and Newsnight. So I was essentially a television journalist.
When I moved into documentaries I was using the same skills really.
So yes, I think knowing how to use researchers and how to commission
researchers, how to guide researchers, what you can and can’t
do – morally and legally as a television journalist – where
the elephant traps are, so to speak - those things are useful. If you’re
going to make drama based in any way around factual subjects, and quite
a few of the dramas I’ve made have been, then knowing the basic
tools of television journalism is extremely useful.
You’ve gone on to do
high profile US films. Why do you keep coming back to do TV dramas?
Well because I’m interested in impact and
it’s very difficult with a movie to have a political impact. One
obvious reason is that the effect is quite blunted. You put something
on in the cinema and it’s seen by people, scattered here and there.
And that exposure is then repeated over a period of several weeks and
then slowly in other countries. And that’s if the film is successful.
Television, even in the age of multi-channel and audience decline, on
Channel 4 for example, you can still hope to talk to anywhere between
one and three million people at one go. Which means that a sizeable
chunk of the British population is hearing what you’ve got to
say. So there’s a fighting chance that they may discuss it the
next day with their friends. And if they’re upset, maybe they’ll
write to their MP or something. But it’s a desire to have impact,
and I think that when you’re making films about public policy,
and a lot of mine are in some way or another about public policy, then
you want to be making that film on the device of mass-communication
in the country. And in this country, at the moment, the device of mass-communication
is television.
In a way, Britz
is sort of a sequel to The Government Inspector isn’t
it?
Well in a way it is, you’re absolutely right.
Because, The Government Inspector is sort of about why we went
to war. And Britz, at least in part, is to do with the effects
of that war, amongst other things, on young, second generation British
Muslims. And in fact, it was when we were sitting round after The
Government Inspector had transmitted, discussing what to do next,
that the bombs started going off on tube trains under our feet, in July
of 2005. That was when we decided upon this as our subject matter. So
the two are definitely connected.
Obviously you wrote
and directed Britz and it’s clearly a very personal project.
Why did the subject mean so much to you?
For a number of reasons. First of all, because
there are a number of points of contact for me personally with this
subject matter. I’m second generation immigrant on my mother’s
side, third generation on my father’s side. My mother was born
in Austria and came here when she was a small child. So on her side
of the family I’m the first generation to actually be born here.
And although obviously I’m an older person, that puts me into
the same situation as my characters. And like my characters, I’ve
always felt that there’s a battle for allegiance going on inside
me. On one hand the desire to be as British as I can be and to dig into
British society, and on the other hand the desire to over-turn the apple
cart. To cling more closely to my origin and not to swallow the British
experiment, whole.
Which is the typical dilemma
for British Muslims.
Exactly. And I’ve split that battle that
has raged in me throughout my life into two characters. The brother,
who feels very British, and the sister who doesn’t. What I’ve
tried to do is make them have a very similar set of experiences but
see that they react to them in very different ways. The other reason
why it’s personal to me is that I was a political activist when
I was young. And the journey of Nasima is the journey from political
activism to militancy. That was not a journey I undertook. But like
a lot of activists it was a journey I contemplated. So this is to some
extent living out in drama something that I thought about but didn’t
do when I was much younger. I should also say that, in a different way,
this was important to me because I have teenage children.
Explain what you mean by
that.
They are going to adulthood in Britain now and
I‘m very concerned about the world into which I have introduced
them. I am very, very worried about the way we are alienating a significant
minority of the population, in this case a million British Muslims.
We're doing this by our actions both domestically, through a raft of
repressive legislation recently introduced onto the statute books, and
internationally, through what is seen, at least by Muslims, as a declaration
of war on their co-religionists throughout the world.
One thing I think that comes
through quite convincingly in the film is that you put the blame quite
clearly on the New Labour government don’t you?
I have no doubt that many of the steps taken by
the present government, which are alienating Muslim youth over here,
would also have been taken by the Tories had they still been in power.
In fact, it’s striking how little there is to choose between the
two main parties on these rather critical issues. But yes, I suppose
, this has been a consistent theme for me and some of this, I’m
afraid, has to be put down to a sense of disappointment. I made a two-part
drama for the BBC called The Project, which was about New Labour
activists and the disillusionment many of them felt when watching Labour’s
actions on coming to power. And then of course The Government Inspector
was largely about the relationship between New Labour and the public,
and the concept of 'spin'. And Britz is about the impact on
one particular minority of New Labour’s attitude to the undoubted
security threat that we face in Britain. They’ve chosen to react
to it in what seems to me to be a particularly repressive way, which
is what I’m exploring. But then again you know, Labour is the
party of government and has been the party of government for ten years
and, were the Tories in power, I’ve no doubt I’d be making
similarly critical films, examining their policies.
It must be said,
I don’t think that the government's best keen on you either. You
talked about how difficult they made the filming of The Government
Inspector. Did you encounter anything similar during the filming
of Britz, or did the nature of the subject matter mean they
couldn’t really interfere?
No, I didn’t have any of that. As you know
I was quite public about just how obstructive they were with The
Government Inspector. Their ban on assisting us in any way was
so total and so unreasonable that I decided to write about it. And had
they been similarly obstructive it would have started to look like a
personal vendetta. But no, I actually received quite a lot of help and
guidance from the security services during the preparation of episode
one of Britz. So I can’t say anything other than a big
thank you to them for being generous with their time.
So how accurate was your
depiction is of MI5? How do you go about researching for films like
these?
I had a team of researchers, and the majority
of them focused on the Muslim experience. I’m not Muslim, I don’t
live in Bradford, and I’m not 22 - so there were a lot of things
I needed to understand. As much as I needed to know what it felt like
to be Muslim, I also actually needed to understand what it felt like
to be 20 in Britain today. I’m 50 so there’s a great big
age gap. So I needed help with that and the majority of our research
efforts were deployed in that direction. But my long-time research collaborator,
Rosanne Flynn, with whom I've been working for many years, turned her
attention to the security service MI5. And you know, part of the deal
one does with them is that one doesn’t say too much about the
help that they gave. But, as much as they were able, and only really
conveying things that were already in the public domain, they did guide
us. And a lot of what you see in Britz is things that they
helped us with, particularly in the recruitment process. However, there
were other things that they were less keen to talk about and we had
to source those from elsewhere.
So did the researchers conduct
a lot of interviews with young Muslims?
Precisely, yes. Many interviews were carried out.
Some in the Midlands, some in Leeds and Bradford and some here in London.
And they were detailed interviews as they had a lot of ground to cover.
They were covering, obviously, reaction to the British government’s
legislative record and foreign policy. But they were also covering relations
within the home between the first generation immigrants and the second
generation, the dynamic between siblings, male and female within a modern
British family where the religion is Islam. They were covering employment
issues, education issues, their interaction with the police. And I also
needed to know their taste in music, their fashion interests, things
that would enable me to write the kinds of scenes that you see in the
final films. So this was a lengthy process involving quite a few people
- both our staff and also the people who were interviewed.
By concentrating on the more
radical elements of the Muslim community, do you think that there’s
a risk that you’ll upset them?
Well first of all, I’d want to tackle the
premise of that. One of the films focuses on somebody who eventually
ends up as a militant. She’s not the kind of person we would normally
associate with radical Islam, in that she doesn’t become pious
at all. The other whole two hours is devoted to somebody who rejects
that totally. He is very persuaded by the whole concept of Britishness
and he is desperate to be as British as he can possibly be. I think
these are both fairly extreme reactions and what I’ve tried to
do is look effectively at two fairly polar positions rather than the
position which must be characteristic of most young British Muslims,
which is somewhere in the middle. So to answer your question in the
simplest way I would hope that the people looking at it would say, “Well
there’s both sides of the coin examined here.” So I hope
that would avoid causing annoyance and distress.
But there will always be
some people who will be offended. It's inevitable.
Yes. There will be people, for example, for whom
the depiction of cross-racial relationships will be offensive. That’s
part of the reason why in the film, and in life, second generation Muslims
who have these kind of relationships keep them secret, because they
will cause offence to certain elements of their family. And those same
elements will likely be offended to see it depicted in a film, but the
reason for including this is not to cause offence. It is to draw attention
to the fact that many second generation Muslims who are not dishonest
people by nature at all, tend to have to live a double life –
a polite way of saying that they are lying to their parents. And they
lie to their parents to avoid causing them pain. They live in the world
as it is in Britain today. They’re young, they go to school and
they operate in that world. And part of that life is doing and saying
things that their parents might not be very uncomfortable with. So they
don’t tell them, and as I say they don’t do it because they
are liars or they are dishonest people, they do it to avoid upsetting
them. So I’m trying to reflect that, but as a result of doing
so I may have depicted something that certain people, for the very reason
that we’ve been discussing, might take offence.
You refer to Nasima essentially
being non-religious and certainly not a zealot. Why did you decide to
make her character that way?
That’s one of the central questions. That
does differentiate her from a number of the 7/7 bombers, for example.
It’s because of what came out of the interviews. The more we talked
to people, and even those that had adopted quite an intense relationship
with their religion later in life, it was pretty clear to me that the
starting point was a political frustration with things in Britain and
things in America. And I thought it would be interesting to reflect
that, that the political frustration was the overwhelming motivation.
And you came across a lot
of frustration among young British Muslims?
It was present in every single interview we conducted.
In every single one, it’s referred to. There were no 'Sohails'
[the pro-British security services character] in our interviews, there
were no people that were unequivocally proud to be British. So I had
to work harder to create that pro-British character. That frustration
is there in every single one of our interviews and I thought, 'this
is what I have to highlight'. It’s the political frustration with
the way Britain is behaving in the world at the moment, and domestically.
And then to show how that might conceivably lead to militancy. I thought
that that was giving the audience the easiest way to understand it,
in a way that they could access why somebody might end up becoming a
militant.
So you want people to understand
why Muslims might feel so alienated?
Yes. Although this film is about Muslims, it’s
not primarily for Muslims. It’s primarily for non-Muslims. It’s
trying to help to explain why young, second generation Muslims are as
cross as they are. We don’t need to explain that to them, they
already know. We need to explain it to the rest of us, who think, 'well
these are just fanatics, these are insane people'. And I don’t
think we do the relatives and friends of the 52 odd people who died
on 7th July 2005 any great service by pretending the people who carried
it out were insane and fanatics. They clearly weren’t. They might
have been misguided, we might profoundly disagree with what they did,
but they weren’t clinically insane. They were rational, thinking
human beings, and British human beings at that. And we can’t possibly
hope to combat what it is they did and what it is that others like them
might do in the future unless we can begin to understand why they might
have been driven to such an extreme conclusion about British society.
So that’s what I’m doing, I’m trying to help us understand
why people might do this in hope that it will help us to avoid it happening
again.
What was the experience of
filming in Pakistan like?
Well we actually shot in India because I was concerned.
Things were quite tense at the point when we were filming this, and
I thought it might be quite dangerous to take a British film crew into
Pakistan. Also, there’s a much greater tradition of film-making
in India than there is in Pakistan. So we went to Hyderabad, which famously
has a large Muslim population, as you know there are more Muslims in
India than there are in Pakistan. And the old town in the centre of
Hyderabad, is essentially Muslim. The signage is in Urdu, the women
are dressed in a way that one would expect to see in a city like Rawalpindi
or Islamabad. So it was the ideal solution for us, because it allowed
us to draw on the Indian film-making expertise but still have visuals
that looked like they might well be in Pakistan.
Do you get a sense of anti-Western
sentiment there?
Not at all, no, not at all. We never encountered
it in India. All we encountered was hospitality, kindness and the difficulties
that you get when you’re trying to shoot on the street and tens
of thousands of people want to stand and watch you. Sometimes we were
trying to marshal, literally were trying to marshal crowds of tens of
thousands of people so that we could get our shot. I never once felt
nervous, day or night. I felt frustrated because there were a lot of
people waving and smiling at the camera, but it was always very good
natured.
You once said: "I see
my job as 90% getting the script right and choosing the right actors."
Are you happy with the actors you chose, especially your two leads?
I thought they were remarkable. The performances
they turned in were quite stunning, I was delighted with them.
So, enough of the political
stuff. When are you going to go off and make a nice romantic comedy?
[Laughs] I think I can safely say, 'never'.
By Benjie Goodhart
