Interview: "Colin comes home" (Total TV Guide)

When fictional drama Cathy Come Home was first shown on British TV in 1966, it was such a realistic look at the issue of homelessness that many viewers mistook it for a documentary. Forty years on, a new one-off drama about social exclusion, Born Equal, hits our screens.
And while it’s unlikely to have the same shock value as Ken Loach’s original film—viewers are used to seeing gritty social dramas— it promises to be just as bleak and thought-provoking.
Boasting an all-star cast, Born Equal interweaves the stories of several characters whose paths collide in and around a London B&B that houses the homeless and dispossessed. The story was given an even rougher edge by writer and director Dominic Savage’s style of letting his cast improvise much of the story themselves at the start.
“I’d never done anything like this before, where there’s absolutely no dialogue to begin with,” says Colin Firth, 46, who plays Mark, a wealthy but disillusioned City worker. “You just jump in cold, which is a bizarre feeling. You’re flying by the seat of your pants all the time.”
Despite money, status and beautiful, pregnant wife Laura (Emilia Fox), Mark is dissatisfied with his life and finds himself moved to do something more, with devastating consequences.

“Mark works in a world of big business, a world of self-interest, and it bothers him, and for one reason or another he ends up working with homeless people,” says Colin, who made his name as the moody Mr Darcy in the 1995 TV version of Pride And Prejudice and whose recent work has been on the big screen in films such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually and Girl With A Pearl Earring.
“Perhaps some of what he goes through is a product of a mid-life crisis, problems with his marriage or his wanting to run away from feeling trapped.”
But things spiral out of control when he becomes involved with a teenage runaway, Zoë (Nichola Burley), who begins to rely on him.
“Mark is a sympathetic character at times, but there are other times when his behaviour makes it impossible to feel that about him. In trying to assuage his guilt, he ends of hurting a lot of people,” explains Colin, who lives in London with his Italian TV producer wife Livia and their two sons Luca, five and Mateo, three.
The actor feels that his character is not so far removed from those he helps.

“It’s not just about middle-class versus sleeping rough. Mark is as alienated from his life in his own bedroom as he is from life in some underpass. He and Zoë have something in common in that they’re both fugitives. In Zoë’s case it’s more understandable but with Mark it’s much less defined.

With thanks to an English Fan

Interview: "Nowhere Like Home" (Radio Times UK)

On seeing Colin Firth in Dominic Savage's powerful tale of homelessness, Born Equal, you could be forgiven for thinking the part he takes is hardly a stretch. After all, as Mark, a City hedge fund manager, stricken by guilt at his own wealth and with a desire to help London's most needy, Firth, 46, appears to be playing the kind of comfortable, urban, middle-class role that over the years has been, if not his bread and butter, then certainly his focaccia and olive oil.

But, as the actor is at pains to point out, the role took him outside his comfort zone in more ways than one. It's been suggested that to play a City boy with a conscience could be the ultimate challenge for any actor, but Firth found it difficult initially because the world of finance is a mystery to him.

"I don't know people from that world at all," he says. "I don't understand it. I look at those screens and the figures and I feel like I'm drowning."

This unfamiliarity became more of a problem because of Dominic Savage's improvisational method of film-making. The director discussed with his cast the outline of the drama, which sees Mark befriend teenage runaway Zoe (Goldplated's Nichola Burley) sleeping rough in London, but left it up to them to come up with their own dialogue.

"I don't have anything in common with that character except that we might share an English accent," explains Firth. "And that makes finding his words difficult. My way into the character was to see him as a guy for whom something snaps and his excuses don't add up, whether it's fear of fatherhood [Mark's wife is pregnant] or just finding life empty. That's something almost everybody has experienced at some time."

With admirable candour, however, Firth - whose grandparents were Congregationalist missionaries - admits that the biggest difference between him and his character is that, unlike Mark, he doesn't have a guilty conscience.

"My own view is that Mark is a colossally naive person, and that's a challenge for me," he says “I’m naïve about a lot of things , but not in the areas that he is. I did my soul-searching many years ago. Now , when I see there’s something I feel I can do, I just do it and I know it's inadequate, but I just live with the shortcomings. I throw my hands up and say, 'Yeah, hypocrite! Contradictions? You've got me!' I live quite comfortably alongside my excuses now. I'm not the soul-searcher I once was."

Neither is that the only difference between the actor now and in his younger days. Asked if he considered sleeping rough for the purposes of researching his role, he laughs, "The short answer is I wouldn't dream of it now. But there was a time when I would have leapt at it. Even if the part didn't require it."

Born Equal offered Firth the further challenge of shooting on the streets of London. At one point this involved a fuIl scale row with Nichola Burley's character.
"There was no closed set," he explains. "It was just off Marylebone High Street. We just had to do it and b****r off before the neighbours got cross."

Yet, while the scenes were shot, nobody intervened - a fact that doesn't surprise Firth. "People don't want to get involved," he reasons. "{ think it's embarrassment, which is a British quality. I remember some years ago Ben Elton joking about an untended package on the Tube, saying that British people would probably sit there hoping it would go off rather than face the embarrassment of asking if it belonged to anyone."

Does this reflect one of the truths at the heart of Born Equal, that people prefer to look the other way, whatever the problem?

"Quite possibly," he replies. "I remember years ago in [Falklands War drama] Tumbledown the camera was hidden in the roof of a supermarket on the King's Road. 1 had half my brain hanging out and was one-handedly wheeling myself across the road. Everyone pretended I didn't exist."

Anne_Marie Duff

Anne_Marie Duff remembers Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) as the television drama that first made her aware that perhaps the world wasn’t that great a place”

It's tempting to think that her moving performance in Born Equal may have a similar impact on a younger generation. The 35-year-old plays Michelle, a pregnant single mum who has run away to London with her daughter to escape domestic abuse. Michelle' s just one of the desperate people whose lives collide at a bed-and- breakfast temporarily housing the homeless.

The former Shameless star admits that the drama has been an education, and one that has caused her to question some of her self-confessed "woolly liberal" views.

"I had this scene where I was talking to a real social worker," recalls Duff. "I was saying, 'I'm a single mum and I have another child on the way', and she said, 'You'll be looking at three years before you get somewhere to live.' Facts like that blow your mind. I hope people will be affected."

From her experience on location she believes, like Colin Firth, that the general public needs to be affected. Duff's opening scene in the drama was shot on the concourse at London's King's Cross station, with cameras in the distance & the actress in apparent distress

Nobody, but nobody, asked me if I was all right," she recalls. "I was a heavily pregnant woman, for all they knew, with a six-year-old girl, sobbing my eyes out, and nobody asked, 'Excuse me, darling, are you all right?' I was shocked. You like to think yourself that there's no way you'd walk past someone like that."

For Duff, whose next TV appearance will be in ITV 1 's more upbeat The History of Mr Pally, due for transmission over Christmas, Born Equal carries a simple but powerful message. "I suppose the message is that these people are out of sight and out of mind," she says. "It's asking us to question that."

Dominic Savage

It is a measure of Dominic Savage's life less ordinary that as a child he worked with both the idiosyncratic film director Stanley Kubrick and the hyperactive infant hoofer Bonnie Langford, and survived to tell the tale. The former was as a child actor in the 1975 film of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon; the latter, somewhat less grandly, as an organist on 1970s TV tot -talent programme Junior Show time . Both were way-stations on his long and winding road to being one of Britain's most respected filmmakers, one associated with hard-hitting, socially conscious films like this latest project, Born Equal.

In work such as Love + Hate and When I Was 12, Savage has marked out his territory--identifying with the underdog and aiming to give a voice to his social conscience, he believes comes from growing up in Kent, where his father entertained holidaymakers with organ recitals in the summer months,and scratched a precarious living the rest of the year

Inspired by his chidhood meeting with Kubrick, Savage quickly realized despite a brief stint at stage school his future lay behind the camera. After graduating from the National Film School he began making documentaries – until he was exposed by a tabloid newspaper for having staged scenes in a film called Rough Males, which supposedly folIowed the lives of a group of Manchester wideboys

"It hit the front page of the Daily Mirror chuckles Savage. "I had that page ‘Fake doc' - framed in my loo for a while”

Savage abandoned documentaries for dramas, albeit ones shot in his unorthodox fashion, with a strong sense of realism ,no rehearsals and improvised dialogue .

His track record made him an obvious choice when the BBC were looking for a new film to mark the 40th anniversary of Ken Loach's landmark drama Cathy Come Home. Although Born Equal has no direct connection with the original (early, mistaken press reports suggested it was to be a sequel) Savage was delighted to get the call To Colin Firth and Anne- Marie Duff in his cast of starry British talent, he added David Oyelowo as a Nigerian desperate to bring his father to Britain, and Robert Carlyle as an ex-con trying to find his mother.

"I was very interested in people who just don’t have anything in life," explains Savage .No-one to turn to and nowhere to go. Above all, what this film deals with is a lack of love, a lack of family, a lack of everything. It's not just about not having money, which is bad in itself"

Like Cathy Come Home, Born Equal at times makes uncomfortable viewing. While the showing of the former famously led to the creation of homeless charity Shelter, what does, think his film can achieve?

"As long as we think about those people's lives, about this ridiculous gap between the very rich and the very poor and our consciences are stirred, I'll be happy”, he says. "I think it's a warning that there by the grace of God go us. It woildn’t take much for it all to fall apart. There aren’t the safety nets out there that we think there are.

Interview: "We're too embarrassed to help needy, says Firth" by Alexia Baracaia (The Evening Standard)

"People don't want to get involved. I think it's embarrassment, which is a British quality. I remember Ben Elton joking about an unattended package on the Tube, saying people would probably sit there hoping it would go off rather than face the embarrassment of asking if it belonged to anyone."

He told Radio Times he had a similar experience while filming scenes in Kings Road for the 1989 Falklands war TV drama, Tumbledown.

He said: "I had half my brain hanging out and was one-handedly wheeling myself across the road. Everyone pretended I didn't exist.....more 

Interview: "Born Equal?" by Peter John Meiklem (Big Issue Scotland)

Archived completely due to unavailability on the internet

Forty years after Cathy Come Home, the BBC's shocking film about homelessness, the station is confronting the issue again. As our government gears up to end homelessness by 2012, we find out if television can still change the world

Colin Firth will soon appear in the television equivalent of a Trojan horse. The Hollywood actor, famous for smouldering in that wet shirt in Pride and Prejudice as well as getting the girl in Bridget Jones' Diary, says his next project will be a surprise akin to a hidden army of Santa's elves climbing out of the Christmas presents. A new production, to be broadcast by the BBC in the run-up Christmas, it will bring stars like Firth, Robert Carlyle and former Shameless actress Anne-Marie Duff into the warm, festive living rooms of television fans.

Many of them, no doubt, will be expecting a wee smoulder or a bumbling joke from Firth: a good laugh before the holidays begin. But they'll be disappointed.

acclaimed Dominic Savage (Love and Hate, Out of Control) the film has been commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of ground-breaking docudrama Cathy Come Home, the film that shocked 1960s Britain into confronting the grim reality of homelessness and led to the formation of housing and homelessness charity Shelter.
Firth is looking forward to raising some eyebrows. "If the audience tuning in to see me are expecting a romantic comedy then that would be great," he says. "I think all the cast would be thrilled by that kind of surprise. Personally, I don't want to be condemned to romantic comedies for the rest of my career. I like participating in something that goes into different territory."

Firth plays a businessman in the throes of a mid-life crisis who, after an attack of guilt, decides to help the homeless. He says his celebrity could be useful tool in encouraging the audience to deal with the tricky social problems behind the drama.

"There's something about familiarity which makes people engage. It's not just a man in a suit with crisis. It's him. I know him. It's his crisis. If people go with it, and sympathise with it, that might take them a bit further than they might otherwise might have."

When it comes to people living on the streets, part of the problem is that it's generalised in people's minds. The suspicion and fear and hatred can only be preserved if they don't know any individuals in that position." People stop hating a social group when they make contact."

Public outcry
Usually, nobody expects a television drama, especially one broadcast at Christmas time, to do more than keep the family's bums on the sofa for a few hours. But not every drama was commissioned to commemorate the anniversary of Cathy Come Home. That docu-drama, the first of its kind directed by a young Ken Loach, was broadcast in 1968 to a quarter of Britain's people. It appalled millions, leading to a political outcry that succeeded in provoking real social change.

Born Equal, too, aims to be an out-of-the-ordinary piece of work; no scripts were given to the all-star cast and the actors were expected to improvise the dialogue interacting with both actors and, like Cathy Come Home, real people who were homeless for many different reasons.

Director Dominic Savage says he wanted to produce a piece that was as true to life as it could be. Asked by the BBC to come up with a drama around homelessness he was quickly drawn to the lives of people living in homeless hostels and temporary accommodation. It's a story plucked from today's society - here in Scotland, as property prices continue to soar, 8,135 households, both individuals and families, are currently living in unsuitable temporary accommodation. But Savage says it will be difficult for his drama to emulate the success of Loach's Cathy Come Home.

"I don't think it can have that same impact. When Cathy Come Home was broadcast people weren't used to shocking material but now we're exposed to it all the time. It's a very difficult thing to shock people, to make them think differently or to change people. All you can do is make something that engages people, makes them think about others a bit more, makes them think about the injustice and inequalities in society and hope that people care a bit more about those who are less fortunate than them."

The issues facing homeless people have, in some senses, changed since the 1960s and Savage was keen to tell a new story. He says that hostels, and the events in people's lives that have led them to be there, were both the most "dramatically interesting" and the best way to expose the social inequalities in modern Britain.

"It's the idea of the journey to that hostel and why those people fall from grace. Something can go wrong in someone's life, suddenly they find themselves without a home, and that's interesting," he explains.

Falling from grace
Born Equal's plot - weaving in asylum seekers, battered mothers and recently released prisoners, all sectors of the population routinely in danger of becoming homeless - shows there are as many ways to "fall from grace" as there are people in the world. Homelessness has never been simply about bricks and mortar, as the old soundbite goes. Savage hopes his work will encourage his audience to think a little bit harder about their own lives.
"Anyone with any sense realises that all our lives are fragile and it doesn't take much for us to upset that balance and for us to be left in a desperate situation," Savage says. "That's what stirred me to make it.

"We live in our own bubbles. We just think everything's alright and we get locked into our own world. Lets break out of those bubbles and see what happens when people do. But, of course, there are no easy answers." Encouraging an audience to break out of their bubble is no mean feat, and Savage says he is glad to have his "extremely gifted" big name cast. He's hoping the draw of celebrity will bring an unexpected audience to his film where, the "Trojan horse" will both shock, surprise and fascinate.
"When you make something as dark as this then it's a difficult, emotional and harrowing journey. If you want to get an audience for this sort of thing you want to make it as attractive as possible to people. Those actors are very fine and talented and that was the reason for choosing them. But they are also the actors that people want to see.

"They allow people to come into a film such as this where they might have avoided it otherwise. It might be relegated to a late night slot if it was full of newcomers. You don't want that, you want to be in there and get as big as possible an audience watching it. You forget they're stars after a bit and you get on board with them as characters.

"It's an ambitious piece. I wanted to make a film that dealt with the huge divide between the people that have and the people that don't. It's by showing that contrast, that huge gulf, you can show people it's not right."

But can a bunch of celebrities in a TV drama really make people care? After all, homelessness isn't just a convenient background to filmmaker's story, it's a real and damaging social ill. According to Shelter, who this week marked the anniversary of Cathy Come Home with a reminder about the problems of homelessness today, Scotland is in the middle of a housing crisis. In 2005/06, 39,923 households were homeless.

Shelter claim nearly 30,000 children are homeless, most of them living in unsuitable temporary accommodation. At a screening of the 60s film this week, Shelter Scotland head Archie Stoddart called for more housing to be built to meet demand - and for continuing commitment from government and councils to reach the 2012 deadline set to end homelessness.

"You can hope that this drama will help but I don't think it will," says Anne Marie Duff. "I don't think people give a shit anymore. I'm a storyteller. You like to feel you've got some power some of the time, maybe, to change things or make people more aware. I just think a lot of people think the world is a ghastly place but don't act upon things."

Duff says audiences, like the society they live in, have changed since Cathy Come Home was broadcast 40 years ago.

"I think people have got less of a sense of community than they did in the 60s," she says. "I think we've been encouraged to be insular and not involve ourselves in other people's problems. There is a strange terror that if we do then they'll permeate and become part of your life."

Duff plays a heavily pregnant young woman who, with her child in tow, has run away from an abusive partner. Many of her scenes were shot in public places where passers by didn't know she was an actress in costume. It was an experience she found harrowing. "I stood in two railway stations: one in Basildon and one in Kings Cross. I was standing there with a child who was six years old, I had a big bloody lip, I had an eight-month pregnant belly on me, crying my eyes out.

"Nobody stopped. You think in your head there's no way you'd see a pregnant women with a kid and not say 'excuse me, love, are you alright' but they do," she says. "People walk past all the time.

A call for motivation
She says that reaction from the public made her feel ashamed. "They looked at me with disgust. We [actors] are usually woolly liberals. We like to think that we don't judge people, anyway, but I'm sure it's given me an insight. There's no way it couldn't. People do look at you like you're some sort of stain and you've spoiled their day. I found that really shocking."

Although unsure of the reaction Born Equal will provoke and - like the rest of the cast and the director - unhappy with it being measured against Cathy Come Home, Duff isn't completely despondent. She says there is no point in giving in.
"You just hope that a project like this will motivate somebody, somewhere, who has any kind of power to address the housing situation. It's a problem people need to know more about because if they can't see it then it doesn't affect them. The audience, because of the actors that are involved, will think 'oooh, I'll watch that because so-and-so's involved'.
"I'm hoping we'll get an audience you wouldn't expect."

Born Equal will be screened on BBC1 on December 17 at 9pm

Interview: "Colin Firth plays Mark in Born Equal" (BBC)

For Firth, Mark's story really began to fall into place as the cameras rolled.

"For me, it was never simply a case of him being well-intentioned but naïve. I didn't want to see him behaving out of moral purity or idealism, I wanted it to be muddier than that," he says.

"Perhaps some of what he goes through is a product of a mid-life crisis, problems with his marriage or his wanting to run away from something he feels trapped by – perhaps any of those things might create disillusion or fear in a middle-aged man.

"But I think it's far more interesting to try to tell a story about a guy who has a multitude of motivations and conflicts and whose failings are very apparent.....more