After navigating America's rocky critical shoals with aplomb (mostly, anyhow), The Red Riding Trilogy has also drawn strong audiences in its ongoing theatrical runs in New York and Los Angeles. Not bad for a bleak five-hour drama about the all-consuming quest for a '70s-era serial killer in the north of England. Now, with the three films by directors Julian Jarrold (1974), James Marsh (1980) and Anand Tucker (1983) and source novelist David Peace's desaturated dystopia finally seeping into the Stateside consciousness, Movieline caught up with Marsh to discuss reactions, influences and the flexibility of truth.
Red Riding has taken a while to finally reach American audiences, who've responded pretty favorably to it. As someone who's been close to it for so long, what are your thoughts about the reaction?
Yeah, it took about two years for the TV channel that was involved to finally go forward with it. They were kind of nervous about it being fairly violent and relentless and all that. It's a big chunk of money, as well, for a TV channel to put into a three-part film series. But I was aware of it quite a long time ago and kind of tracked the project and lobbied very hard to get it. And we finished the films around this time last year before they went out on British television. So it's been nice to have a sort of unexpected life in America. We'd always hoped for it, but we never really expected it to materialize the way that it did.
And when it did, it hit pretty hard. Just the critical reaction -- "Better than The Godfather"? What was going through your mind reading and hearing this stuff?
It's setting us up for a fall in a way! I've been aware that quite a few of the eminent critics in America have responded very well to it. I was at Telluride when it screened there, and I got the impression there that the film really worked for American audiences in an interesting way. What we're doing, essentially, is exporting an American genre back to genre. I think most of the directors saw a lot of film noir in the way the films were written and in their procedural qualities. And also some of us were opening up to being influenced by a lot of the great American thrillers of the '70s. So we've taken some of those lessons and rooted a series that's set very specifically in a time and place. I think that character disguises what the genre of the films actually is, and I'm thrilled it's found an audience.
If only we could understand the tougher English dialects.
That was something that IFC agonized over. At Telluride they were all shown with subtitles. For me it was weird to see them this way -- obviously I knew everything going on -- but I'm not sure whether it's an issue or not with audiences. It could very well be; the accents are pretty strong. They're very pronounced regional accents even for England. They also speak in murmurs, or quickly, or in police slang as well. That said, the plotting of the films is dense and kind of elliptical anyway. I guess the language makes it more so.
I was reading that Sidney Lumet and Sean Connery's The Offence was among those '70s influences. What were some others?
Actually, I didn't see that. Well, I did see it when Andrew Eaton, our producer, recommended it to me. I didn't actually end up watching the whole thing. I watched the first 20 minutes. I'd seen the film a long time ago, and I didn't think it was very useful to me -- largely because it was set at Britain at that time. I wanted to make something that was a bit more timeless, in a way, and a bit more mythical. I felt there were other British films -- kind of an interesting combination of thrillers and gangster films in England. Not the Guy Ritchie ones, but I'm thinking of Performance, which stars James Fox (above), who I cast in my film. It's a great film that works in two separate halves, and that's the kind of thing I was aware of when I was making this. There's another film called Get Carter, which was remade very badly with Sylvester Stallone a few years back. The original stars Michael Caine, and that's a really well-made, very tough, very grim thriller. Those were more important to me than The Offense.
You won an Oscar last year for Man on Wire, which Red Riding sort of reflects as a fusion of fiction and nonfiction -- and it's a thriller. Was it always the idea to blend those threads together?
I guess so, and for fairly clear reasons. I mean, David's novels sort of weave real events into fictional stories. There are all these overt examples to real murder cases or real cases of police corruption. And I guess the middle film, which I directed, has the most overt reference to a very well-known criminal case that involved a man known as the Yorkshire Ripper. He was at large for six years in the north of England, largely of the town of Yorkshire. That subject matter is absolutely authentic, and so I decided to open the film with a kind of collage of contemporary news reports from the time, which gradually bleeds into some of our characters being part of those news reports and sort of taking over. So that was a nice starting point for anchoring the film in something that was actually real. [SPOILER ALERT] When you see in the film the Yorkshire Ripper's confession, that's taken verbatim from transcripts that were made available by the police after the case was finished. So that adds an intriguing real-life aspect to the way the film was put together -- and the way it was written, in fact.
Recalling the reenactments in Man on Wire, though, this new one felt to me like you were on to a specific technique -- kind of a signature style, perhaps?
What's interesting is that Man on Wire opens with a fairly elaborate reenactment, and Red Riding opens with what's ostensibly documentary footage. But it's really just what the subject requires. You ask yourself: "What's the best way to tell this story?" In the case of Man on Wire, there were obviously elements of the story that weren't documented or filmed. And they were very exciting and very dramatic. Because Phillipe's story was very much like a heist-film narrative, I thought that if I were to embrace that idea and do reconstructions that were kind of in that genre, then that would feel entirely aprporiate to the venture he was on. I don't know if you remember from the film, but there's a brief reference to him sitting him there watching crime films to get ideas of what he was going to do. So that felt like a pleasing way of telling the story as best I could. I was surprised when some people who reviewed the film couldn't tell the difference between the reconstructions and the archival [footage]. I always thought it was kind of obvious, and I was kind of pleased they couldn't. The confusion didn't bother me at all. It was like, "Just enjoy the story."