Spying success
RED JOAN I Producers of Brit espionage thriller on how to wrestle screen space from superheroes…
Goodmayes Hospital, Ilford, Essex. At least on the outside. Duck into its drab interior on a murky day in December 2017 and you’ll find yourself in a Cambridge science laboratory in the 1940s. The room is cluttered with strange-looking paraphernalia, at once clunky and exotic, while equations gallop across a blackboard. Well, what do you expect when the atomic bomb is being created?
“Joan is a young woman, very clever, who goes to Cambridge as a physics student,” explains co-producer Alice Dawson (Yardie) of the incredible true tale of KGB source Melita Norwood, here renamed Joan Stanley and played by Sophie Cookson.
“She becomes friendly with a bunch of Russian students and goes to communist marches. Then she graduates and is employed by the Cambridge nuclear research plant. During that time, the Russian contacts are trying to get information out of her. She refuses. Then she sees the footage of Hiroshima and is appalled. She decides the best thing to do is to share the secrets
with the Russians, so there will be a balance of power…”
But that’s just part of the tale. Joan’s espionage was unveiled in the late-’90s, meaning she faced trial as a pensioner (Judi Dench). The film flipflops between the time periods, with producer David Parfitt (Shakespeare In Love) saying, “It’s not really like le Carré, though it has elements of that. It’s a romantic-drama-thriller and a coming-of-age story.”
So here’s the question. How do adult, characterbased, hard to pigeon-hole and harder to pitch films such as Red Joan first find funding and then tempt viewers to the cinema in a modern marketplace dominated by superheroes?
“Well, [director] Trevor Nunn got Judi on board,” says Dawson. “He and Judi have worked together for years and years, back to the ’60s. And once you have Judi, Trevor and a fantastic script, other people want to be on board.”
“A lot of actors get very excited about working with Trevor, but financiers won’t care,” interjects Parfitt. “Independent films in the UK are a struggle. Budgets are half what they used to be. It’s a changing market. So we drew up a list of the dames and Judi was at the top!”
But, even with Dench, can a film like this hold its ground at the box office? Dawson and Parfitt think so, pointing out that Cookson draws a younger audience, but that the key demographic is older viewers, for while most blockbusters experience a 60 per cent drop at the box office in their second week, films like this can run and run. “Red Joan will hopefully play on screen three for weeks and weeks,” beams Parfitt.
ETA | 19 April / rEd JoAn opEns in ThE spring.