SARAH GAVRON BRICK LANE/IS GOING PLACES

Why would a clever woman director like Sarah Gavron choose such a controversial novel for her feature debut? And what will she do next?

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Gavron says, "I began in documentaries but knew that I wanted to do fiction and was fortunate enough to get accepted into the National Film and Television School, where I made half a dozen short films."

The final one, The Girl In The Lay-By, got Gavron noticed by the industry and, in 2003, she won favour for her TV work, This Little Life, starring Kate Ashfield and David Morrissey as a loving couple with a tiny, dangerously ill baby.

Still she was on her own developing a project for a couple of years until she was asked to direct Brick Lane, an admired, literate, sensitive, caring novel which, she says, "was exploring very similar ideas to her own thematically, so it was a very obvious project for me to pick up."

How difficult could adapting this fine novel be for a temperament like hers?

Very difficult, it turned out.

"From the moment I was approached to direct ‘Brick Lane’, I wanted to do it," she says, "but I knew it was going to be both a privilege and a challenge.

One example, casting.

Since the characters of the novel were so particularly described, we decided to do a worldwide search."

You might think the challenge was to find the female lead, someone who could handle the complex demands of arousing admiration for her stoicism when she bends to her husband will but also can earn sympathy when she breaks with tradition and breaks out, as well as ageing from a virginal seventeen to a mother of two thirty year old.

"Actually, filling that role was easy," says Gavron. "We found Tannishtha Chatterjee early on as we toured south Asia and she proved an stunning choice.

But it was much harder to find her husband, Chanu."

Harder! Why? The brief here must have been something like: An irritating, single-minded, overweight dreamer. Simple surely.

But it took Gavron some eight months of globe trotting to find the right man, partly because actors tend to be fit rather than fat and she needed someone who could perform in English as well.

"No one looked right," she says. "It was not until three weeks before shooting that Satish Kaushik’s name came up and I Googled him. He looked perfect – rotund, the right age – but could he handle the part. Until then he had mainly played comedy.

We flew to Delhi, met Kaushik for dinner at his restaurant and knew we had found our man. Monica Ali was amazed that somehow we had found the real-life Chanu.

Yet the challenge of casting was as nothing compared to the tribulations of, one, trying to make a film about the relatively secretive Bangladeshi community and, two, trying to film in the actual community.

Gavron was careful to enlist Bangladeshis as key crew members and feels she would never have been able to achieve the right personal relationships and location access to make the film without them.

After such a gruelling baptism, it would be understandable if Gavron needed a break, a complete change from this daunting “community” she has been immersed in for so long.

But that this not the way the movie business works.

Her enthusiasm for the film and for filmmaking is undiminished and she talks as excitedly about Brick Lane now as if she had only just wrapped the film. Indeed, in a sense she has, as the DVD was released on March 10th and, crucially, the the film itself is only now being released in two major new territories, France and the US.

So Gavron is once again on the road touting the charms of the tale she first got invovled with four long years ago and seeming fresh as morning flower.

As well, good news for her fans, as she will soon make a decision about which one of two Film Four projects to plunge into for another long term commitment.

Sarah Gavron was interviewed in central London.

Filed March 12, 2008.