Give us a little Sugar...
Sugarhouse is the new British urban thriller starring Steven Mackintosh, Ashley Walters, Andy Serkis, Adam Deacon and Tolga Safer. It is director Gary Love's feature debut, and was based on screenwriter Dominic Leyton's critically-acclaimed stage play, Collision...
Question: Andy, you’ve played some dark characters, but Hoodwink was terrifying — were you worried about how you could give him humanity?
Serkis: No, because people like Hoodwink are very much out there, although he is flamboyant and quite an extrovert in many ways. People have said well he’s a bit pantomime-ised, a bit larger than life, but no, he’s based on a couple of people that Gary [Love] knows personally and that I know of in terms of the way he dresses and so on. But the thing is with all the characters, they’re all morally ambivalent; they all want something, or they’re all striving to survive in a particular way, and Hoodwink is a product of his environment. You know people are out there driving cars and there’s a hair trigger that can go at any time; I’m always amazed there isn’t more violence in London quite frankly; it’s only a hair’s breadth away almost all the time. So what I’m saying is people like Hoodwink are not kind of evil villains they are part of humanity. We can choose to disassociate ourselves from them, we can choose to pretend they’re not there, but they are. We are all together in this.
Q: Steven, Tom is just as compelling as the larger than life characters in Sugarhouse. Was it cathartic going from repressed to raging bull in the bathroom scene?
Mackintosh: Yes I think that’s what the appeal was to the character if you get a chance to flip or reveal another side of yourself. And I think from the start of the film Tom is quite ambiguous, you don’t really know a lot about him. And he’s keeping a lid on everything; he’s playing his cards very close to his chest. He’s got something that he wants and he’s going to get it as quickly and as cleanly as possible without giving anything away and that’s how he’d like to end the transaction. Unfortunately it doesn’t go as smoothly as he’d like because Ashley’s character is such a kind of nutcase really and is flying off the walls and this really isn’t what he’d bargained for. And eventually the course of events forces him to breaking point really and that’s how it feels — it feels like a pressure cooker situation. You’ve got these characters in this room and the temperature’s rising until they’re forced to explode and that’s what happens to Tom. And finally when it reaches this explosion in the bathroom that you’ve mentioned he breaks down and reveals who he is, and that’s not just some kind of cold distant business man, there’s a heart beating in there and there’s a real story and I think that’s definitely what was appealing about it.
Q: How long did it take to shoot smashing up the bathroom?
Mackintosh: It was the good part of a day. A whole day of smashing ... a smashing day!
Love: Because of our budget we only had one sink we could smash — so we could only smash it once: "Don’t hit that!"
Q: Ashley, did you use a method approach to flesh out D, and how did you research crack addiction?
Walters: We read a lot, we watched some documentaries, we met some addicts which was pretty surreal. I mean for me, I’ve personally never been around anyone like D, so it was really hard to get there and it meant going out and putting myself in situations to see what would happen. So we spent some time doing research; hours and hours on end talking about what D was about and what he would do, how he would walk what he would look like. Just very detailed, but I must say D's energy is crazy it’s very up and down all the way through the film and it was really hard to keep it up there, but with Gary being so demanding I got there in the end.
Q: I believe you had help in finding ‘D’s walk?
Walters: Yes I stuck a stone in my shoe to get a funny walk, so I had to walk with that for about a month.
Love: And he came to me one day and said, "You know the stone’s not working any more," and I said, "What do you mean?" and he said, "I’ve got to get a bigger stone!"
Walters: It got to the point where I had an indentation in the bottom of my foot, so the stone actually sunk into that, so it didn’t work any more and we had to keep changing it.
Q: And I believe you were driven somewhere and just left you to your own devices in character as D?
Walters: Yes, they took me to Stratford Station and I jumped out of the car and I started begging basically and it was a good test for me, I needed to do that, because I explained to Gary I didn’t know how I felt about playing D in front of everyone. It was about confidence and about crossing the boundary because I was out there begging in front of people who knew about Asher D and Ashley Walters from other projects, so they actually believed it had all come to an end!
Love: They put his costume on and sent him out and by that time he was working quite hard on his hair, napping his hair, and we had some teeth made for him by the big teeth people who did Johnny Depp’s teeth for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and they looked at Ashley’s teeth and they went, "My god, his teeth are beautiful, what are you going to do with them?" So he put the teeth in and put the clothes on and we sent him out to the station.
Walters: I made about £3.50.
Serkis: That’s more than our wages!
Q: Were you all given a warm welcome shooting on the council estate?
Deacon: Yes we did you know; everyone was cool and everyone came out of their flats and got involved. There was a couple of kids in particular who were always there, so we saw the same faces on set all the time.
Safer: It was more curiosity than anything; everyone was standing out on their balconies and watching and little kids coming up saying, "Are you famous? Are you famous?" And I’m like, "Not yet!"
Love: The council estate’s quite a harsh looking building in the film and because we had no money so we couldn’t buy any flats. And we’re also shooting in August, which was a school holiday, so we were thinking this is going to be an absolute nightmare. And one day we were doing a rekkie and we saw this big piece of concrete in the middle of it and there’s this guy growing things in the middle of this aggressive looking estate; growing tomatoes, spring onions and potatoes. But no one had damaged it or wee’d on it — it was amazing and it turned out the estate was really friendly, it was lovely. We did get the odd egg thrown though!
Q: Did shooting digital help spontaneity?
Mackintosh: For me it was the speed and pace of it because the story moved at a certain pace and because a lot of it was at a certain pitch it helps you remain in that space I think without having long gaps, and without having to think ‘how am I going to get the energy again?’ Or having to wait and hold onto that energy for a long time, the pace really helped me anyway.
Serkis: There is this thing of being aware that you can take "real time", 35mm film isn’t ticking away so it’s subconscious — performances are allowed to breathe in a much more real way I think.
Walters: It was the same for me, but I must say you have to be really careful with it because it picks up everything. You have to make sure the money looks authentic, and the teeth and the makeup we had to really concentrate on that.
Love: It’s sharper than the human eye so you had to be careful with the colour of the blood and like you said we had to use real money, and a lot of the scars on Ashley’s face and the scars on Andy and the tattoos would sing if they were wrong. But as long as the team know up front, because a lot of people still haven’t worked on digital in this business, so you had to get them with the program. I’d shot quite a lot on digital so I knew, so letting them all know well in advance, "you know you’re off", and if you get a good enough monitor which obviously we couldn’t afford, but if it’s good to the eye it’s good to the film. With 35mm you can get away with all sorts of things but you can’t with hi def.
Q: Because of the power and intensity of the film how difficult was it to switch off and go for a beer at the end of the day?
Walters: For me, to be fair I wanted to come out of character but Gary and the rest of them wouldn’t let me. Some days they didn’t even feed me, I’m not kidding! I was put on a diet before the film that was basically steamed fish once a day, Gary doesn’t know this but I cheated a few times. But it was a gruelling schedule and it was really hot and the pace at which we were shooting it was really hard to get any time to relax, and I stayed in the clothes all the time, and the clothes weren’t washed so they did actually smell and the concentration of getting the movie done and staying in character was very high.
Love: I’m just remembering what it was like; we shot it in 24 days, it was crackers, we were shooting 5 minutes a day we were really banging at it and none of them had any time for anything and if they did we had them working on scenes, there didn’t seem to be any break at all — which was good for the film.
Mackintosh: It was quite claustrophobic and the temperature was really high at the time so it added to that kind of pressure cooker thing that I mentioned which was great for the film, but I don’t think I’ve done anything as physically demanding ever.
Q: You had absolutely no budget yet you had the Casino Royale stunt team on board?
Love: Yes, Ben Gibson is our producer and he’s the top in the UK, 2nd AD, so he did Casino Royale, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory among lots of other great big features. So he knows Gary Powell and his team very well and had just worked with them on Casino Royale and called it up really and I’d worked with Gary Powell years ago and I guess he kind of thought I’ll do it for Ben and I know Gary as well and it brought the team to the table. And at first it was like, "Can you do this bit for us and can you do that, and that?" And by the end of it we knew we had such a small budget that we couldn’t push the boundaries because part of my job was making sure we could shoot the film within the time constraints and within the budget. So the stunts were coordinated for that and Gary Powell and his team were incredible. You know, you think oh they’ve got weeks for Bond and they haven’t got that time for this but it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. They were smiling all the way through, they looked after the actors all the time it was a great experience.
Q: Ashley, how would you respond to someone saying D is yet another stereotypical black drugster?
Walters: I’d say that’s ridiculous because D was made up of loads of different crackheads and none of them was black!...
Love: And one was a girl!
Walters: Exactly, that we researched. Putting that to one side I think there’s a lot more to a drug addict than a lot of people understand. I mean on the exterior there’s a lot of itching going on, but D’s depth and where he’s coming from and what he’s been through and the place where we find him is what I was trying to find. I think there’s a point you get to as an addict where you understand you have to stop doing what you’re doing but you’ve gone beyond that point there is no going back. So you’re constantly fighting yourself because everything you do is about the next fix, but at the same time you’d like to walk away from it and that’s the conflict I was trying to find. I think we need to see that to know this is a crackhead, but I think the depth comes from his emotion and what he’s about.
Q: What’s Gary like as a director?
Mackintosh: I’d worked with Gary as an actor and he’s a great actor so I trusted his instincts from the start and that’s a great place to start from and you can see that he understands how actors work, he understands where you need to get to be in the right place in the scene that you’re trying to do and I think it was all a bonus that he’s an actor. But he’s incredibly passionate, single-minded and focussed and wants to push it that one stage further each time and I think that’s what every actor would want and ask for if they had the choice.
Walters: He can be very annoying sometimes though, but seriously like Steve said sometimes we’d be doing a scene and Gary would show me what he wanted to see, and I think I’m imitating him to a T: "I just did what you said." "No Ash, you’ve gotta get there." I’m like, "Where do you want me to go, what is this?" We had that conflict a few times on set but I realised he knew what he was doing and you just have to get to a point where you trust someone. Because I was in a space I didn’t really know — I didn’t really know how to be a crackhead, I was making it up from what I’d seen, different parts of different people, and I’m sure Gary doesn’t know either but he knew what he wanted to see on the screen visually. And it was a big confidence thing because I wasn’t sure whether to over-egg it, under-do it, how to play it, so I just had to go with what he was saying. We got there in the end but it was tough, tough.
Deacon: For me he was just a genuine nice guy, I’ve worked with a lot of other people and with Gary he would let me do my thing and then he would come and say, "Do it a bit more like this or like that," and you just learned a lot especially about what you have to put into a film to make it and I didn’t really know. I mean I suppose get a bit of pain on set I used to have it in my mind like, "I don’t want to get hurt on set, I’m just coming here to act", but you need to a little. And talking to Gary about those things — you learned a lot, man.
Q: What’s the best or worst memory from the shoot?
Serkis: The very, very first day I came in and I had to hit...
Love: Bear in mind he’d been in Tuscany the day before and he’d just spent 20 hours on a bed having his arse tattooed!
Serkis: ...And I had to get up to an incredibly high octane; it was the scene with the three lads and Hoodwink’s asking where the gun’s gone. And Teddy is this really energetic enthusiastic young actor who I thought was going out of the remit of his character because he was trying to front up to my character which I didin’t think he ever would have done. So I kind of had to put him in his place, and I’m wired to fuck to get this scene right and I went storming down and I was pinning them all up against the garage door and everything and anyway he sort of fronted me and I couldn’t control myself and I grabbed him and shoved him on the floor and I just started smacking him saying: "Are you fucking fronting up to the Hoody?", and all this sort of stuff and then suddenly he was gone, vanished. And we went to do another take. And he’d gone round the corner and he was crying and he said he thought his character would take me on. So I went round the corner and said "Teddy, look mate we’re just acting and it gets a bit like that, it’s a bit rough." And that was just the rehearsal — but I kinda felt I established the state of the character after that! So when we went to do the take there was tension in the air and all that. But the dude was crying and I felt really bad and said, "Look mate" and I went a bit soft, I went a bit gay for a moment trying to calm him down and he was okay. And then on the last day he came up to me in the dressing room and Ashley was there and he said, "Andy can I just ask you something? I really respect you man, and I’ve loved working with you, do you mind if I just do this?" And I said, "What, yeah," and he went bang and smacked me as hard as he could around the face, and I went, "I’ve really enjoyed working with you too, mate!"
• Read Janina Conboye's Sugarhouse review
• Watch a Sugarhouse scene: CLIP 1 WMV | QT : CLIP 2 WMV | QT : CLIP 3 WMV | QT