Red Riding: Do you take it black?

The other week I was talking to a Great British Filmmaker who, inter alia, was madly enthused about the previous evening’s transmission of 1980, the second of three instalments in Channel 4’s production of David Peace’s Red Riding novels (this one directed by the esteemed James Marsh, he of Man On Wire and others.) So, yes, Great Filmmaker was blown away, thought it was all wonderful, etc. I don’t think he’d had as much pleasure in front of a television set since they cancelled Twin Peaks.
At the same time he was a tad puzzled and frustrated as to why such ostensibly ‘dark’ dramatic material could be made in such a ‘bold’ stylistic manner for television, without any apparent qualms, whereas any commensurate attempts to be ‘dark’ and ‘bold’ with a feature film project are struggling more than ever to get off the ground right now. Great Filmmaker was speaking from rueful recent experience: the demands and expectations of ‘genre’ have become the bane of his life. (Moreover I’m aware of what a hard fight it was for Revolution Films and Channel 4 to get Red Riding into production and onto screens, for all the talent that was assembled in front of the camera as well as behind it.)
But as one film executive recently put it to me, the only movies getting made right now are ones that have ‘a very clear idea of their target audience.’ On that level it will be interesting to see how the feature version of David’s The Damned United fares upon its UK release next Friday. Certainly it’s being offered to the public as a far friendlier, more approachable work than Red Riding, which was unabashed about its aura of suffocating bleakness and virulent Yorkshire-born evil.

Esquire (April 2009) now on stands: includes Clint, + RTK on The Damned United

They say Clint Eastwood has retired from movie acting, though I don't have to believe it, any more than do the many newspaper scribes (some of the same vintage as Clint) who have been penning nostalgic can-this-really-be-the-end? pieces in the wake of Gran Torino. (Peter Preston, for instance, former Guardian editor and film buff, who must quietly fancy himself as a bit of a veteran gunslinger.)

In any event, Clint the Director marches on. The Cannes Festival just gave him an honorary lifetime-achievement Palme d'Or, something they only bestowed once before, on Ingmar Bergman no less. Whatever you think of Clint the auteur, it's a fact that had he not existed then French film critics would have had to invent him, so closely does he resemble what they require American Cinema to be, or to mean.

Anyhow, here's Clint on the cover of another excellent issue of Esquire, just out. My contribution this ish is a piece about the new film version of David Peace's The Damned United. Among the more digestible things I say therein, this gobbet, after describing the picture as 'a typically English love story':

"[The film] shouldn’t be judged against Peace’s novel, but nor should it be forgotten that the novel is essentially a hate story – specifically the demoniac hatred Peace’s Clough feels for Revie and Leeds, worsened by other baneful spirits (including booze.)

David Peace's The Damned United: coming to a theatre near you, young man