CUSH JUMBO, JAMES FLOYD and ROSHAN SETH
First Assistant Director LANCE ROEHRIG Line Producer EIMHEAR McMAHON Casting by CELESTIA FOX
Hair and Make-up Designer NICOLE STAFFORD Costume Designer CLAIRE ANDERSON
Sound Designer KEVIN BRAZIER Editor DAVID CHARAP Music by RUTH BARRETT
Production Designer VICTOR MOLERO Director of Photography FELIX WIEDEMANN
Executive Producers CHARLES AUTY, PETER HAMPDEN, NORMAN MERRY, FUMIO NAGASE
CHRISTINE LANGAN, JOE OPPENHEIMER, NATASCHA WHARTON,
MICHIYO YOSHIZAKI and MARC SAMUELSON
Produced by ADO YOSHIZAKI CASSUTO, REBECCA O’BRIEN
Based on the novel “City Of Tiny Lights” by PATRICK NEATE
Screenplay by PATRICK NEATE
Directed by PETE TRAVIS
CITY OF TINY LIGHTS
SYNOPSIS
The lies people tell, the secrets that they don’t
Meet Tommy Akhtar, cricket fan, devoted son to an ailing father and deadbeat private eye. He’s got an office above a suburban cab firm, a taste for cigarettes and bourbon, and a finely tuned moral compass that he keeps hidden behind a sharp cynicism.
When Tommy walks into his office one morning to find high-class prostitute Melody seeking his help, he’s launched into a story that plays as an utterly original modern noir.
Melody wants Tommy to find her flatmate, Natasha, last seen meeting a new client at a Mayfair bar. During his bid to track her down Tommy finds the corpse of Pakistani businessman Usman Rana in a cheap hotel. Then, before he knows it, he’s been drawn into a sinister world triangulated by MI5, smack dealers and radical Islam. His journey to uncover the truth leads him into the murky politics of modern London and deeper still into his own history as a member of the Churchill Massive, a gang of London friends growing up together at the height of late-’90s New Labour optimism.
Haafiz ‘Lovely’ Ansari was the heart of the gang and was Tommy’s best friend. Lovely had it all: looks, charm, cool parents and a nice yard – everything Tommy lacked. Today, Lovely is a successful entrepreneur and a community figurehead. He’s still got it all. But Lovely is also Rana’s business partner and when Shelley Stevens, the Churchill Massive’s leading lady, returns to the old neighbourhood after a 20-year absence, Tommy sees his past and present becoming more entangled.
With the web of intrigue drawing tighter and friendships tested, Tommy finds himself confronted more and more by a tragic accident that hurt all three of these childhood friends. Only the bottle eases Tommy’s pain. Maybe, with Shelley’s help, Tommy can move on. Or will he succumb and let his past overwhelm him? Will he realize that the question is not ‘who’ killed Usman Rana but ‘why’? Maybe then he will learn the truth about the city with all those tiny lights…
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
The film’s journey to the screen began back in 2006 when producer Ado Yoshizaki Cassuto read the novel ‘City of Tiny Lights’ by award-winning writer Patrick Neate. He was immediately taken with the character, and the world, of the London-based private eye Tommy Akhtar. He optioned the film rights.
“I read the book at Christmas of that year and immediately fell in love with the world that Patrick shows,” begins Cassuto. “The book has this brilliant wit. It’s very cool and shows London as this place full of interesting characters. All these characters were jostling to find their place in this society and I thought it was magical, really.”
The first piece of the puzzle, the producer says, was to get Patrick Neate to write the screenplay while hiring Pete Travis to direct. “I wanted the three of us to develop it together,” notes Cassuto. “Pete worked on the script with Patrick for a number of years, making it more and more contemporary. I really admire Pete. He has this incredible humanist heart where he is obsessed with the idea of beauty and heartfelt sincerity.
“And I think that sincerity really comes through in his work. He’s been so focussed on making this film as good as it could possibly be. His instincts are very astute and working with him has been a master class.”
Peter Travis is known for his work on television — such as Cold Feet (1999), The Jury (2002) and Omagh (2004) — as well as in cinema, having directed Vantage Point (2008), Endgame (2009) and Dredd (2012).
“One of the most exciting things about City of Tiny Lights is that it’s about voices that don’t often get heard and that don’t normally get seen on screen,” says Travis. “When was there last a leading Asian man who wasn’t defined by his race or his social issues? It’s a gumshoe movie where our hero is a young, British Asian man and there aren’t that many of those around. This film just takes everybody as they are. It reflects London and the city’s diversity.”
Indeed, when turning to City of Tiny Lights, Travis was particularly taken with the idea of making a film about London that defied the usual stereotypes. “The leading man is Asian and it’s set in a part of London that’s not normally represented on screen,” the director explains. “There are no roles for Hollywood stars, we’re not blowing anything up and it’s not a ‘Mockney’ gangster story.
“In some ways it’s a tough sell,” he concedes. “We were essentially doing a noir thriller. It’s a gumshoe movie — so it has a genre element to it — and we’re trying to take that genre and make it in London. It hasn’t been done for a while, since films like My Beautiful Laundrette or Mona Lisa.
Flying a helicopter around and capturing shots of the House of Parliament and Canary Wharf is not what makes a great London movie, continues Travis. “A great movie doesn’t show you what a place is like, it makes you feel what it’s like to live there. Think of films by the likes of John Ford, Michael Mann, Wong Kar-Wai — they make you feel what it’s like to live in a certain city and we thought we’d show what it feels like to live in London. Living in a big city is often about making connections with new people.”
Cassuto agrees. “As the script developed, the story became much more about the characters, their pasts and their friendships, a city of slightly lost souls with all these people trying to find a connection. I think London is a lot like that.”
As with Neate’s novel, the film centres on private investigator Tommy Akhtar (who’s brought to life on screen by Riz Ahmed). Tommy is a cricket fan, a devoted son to his ailing father and failing private eye. He has an office above a suburban cab firm, a taste for cigarettes and booze and a finely tuned moral compass, although that is well hidden behind an ingrained cynicism.
“I thought it was a fresh take on an archetypal private investigator,” says Ahmed of the role. “I am always attracted to breaking tropes and refurbishing them. That is interesting territory. It has the same molecular structure but it is a different DNA. It is quite cool when writers do that.
“I liked Tommy,” he adds. “I liked the fresh take on classic noir material and, from a big picture point of view, I thought it was really great to see a British film which is actually about contemporary Britain. Very few British films are. And that is frustrating if you think about it.
“In a way, this film should have been made ages ago,” he adds. “I can’t name many contemporary British films that are about Britain at all. They all seem to be period dramas. And yet I don’t think our most exciting stories are way behind us in the distant past. I think our most exciting stories are happening right now. They are ahead of us, and I think this script embraces that.”
The narrative kicks off when Tommy walks into work one morning to find high-class prostitute Melody (Cush Jumbo) seeking his help, but he discovers a dead Pakistani businessman rather than the missing woman. Before long Tommy finds himself on a journey that takes him beneath the complex layers of modern London and which forces him to confront secrets that are very close to home.
“While early drafts of the script stayed very true to the book, we went on to change some of Tommy’s inner journey to represent it better on screen,” says Travis. “We changed aspects about his past. In the book, there was a compelling backstory but we wanted something that worked better on the screen, so Patrick honed the story more, focussing on a bunch of kids who grew up in London and were old friends. That made it more universal. That idea opened the film up.”
As the film moves through Tommy’s investigation and a London riddled with drug dealers, religious activists, unscrupulous property developers, prostitutes and ordinary, caring people, it also cuts back to Tommy’s youth in 1997, telling the story of his friendship with a kid called Lovely, another lad called Stuart, and his growing love for the latter’s girlfriend, Shelley.
“It is quite a traumatic period for Tommy at that time,” says Ahmed of his character’s younger years. “His mum has just died and he is a complete loner. His dad has stopped talking to him because he is dealing with depression after the death. Then Tommy gets introduced to a new bunch of friends and feels like he has got a new family.”
But things go wrong. “Eventually, he is shunned by that group because he does the worst thing imaginable, which is betray a fledgling trust,” continues Ahmed. Tommy falls in love with Shelley, Stuart’s girlfriend, and when the latter finds out, tragedy ensues. “Tommy feels responsible for one of their deaths and that was a defining moment in his life. The film revisits the experiences that make us what we are.”
Travis agrees. What happens in that past story, a tragedy born out of forbidden love, has a direct bearing on the present. Those childhood events still haunt Tommy. “This is a story of a man whose youth determines him,” the director says, “and when he’s in his 30s he has to re-evaluate all of that in light of what happens in his normal life, whether he’s living in the past or whether he’s going to be brave enough to live in the here and now.
“Essentially, Tommy is stuck and his journey asks whether he will he be brave enough to put what happened in the past behind him. In many ways, that is a metaphor for living in a city. There are exciting opportunities arising every day when you live in a city, but we often stay rooted in the past.”
CHARACTERS AND CAST
When choosing the actor to play the central character of Tommy Akhtar, there was only ever one choice, says Travis. “I’ve been talking to Riz about this role for four years. If it were an American story it’d be a young Al Pacino, but this is not an American story. Riz is Asian but he could be a young Al Pacino.”
The director believes that Ahmed is truthful in what he does. “He’s as tough as nails when he needs to be as a character. He also has a vulnerability that makes him very loveable. He looks lost sometimes, but he could also beat the shit out of you.
“He doesn’t look silly with a gun in his hand and he doesn’t look silly crying when he’s upset,” adds Travis. “Not many men can do that really well, only proper movie stars and Riz is a proper movie star. Riz has made Tommy extraordinary.”
Ahmed is on screen the entire time. “He’s carrying the whole film by himself,” Travis says, “and the camera loves him. He looks beautiful but he’s so soulful and elegant in the way that he works that you don’t see what he’s doing. That’s the beauty of proper acting. Real actors don’t look like they’re acting.”
One of Tommy’s main friends from childhood is a character called Lovely, a charming, affluent young man who’s played as an adult by James Floyd. “Finding Lovely was always difficult as he had to be ‘lovely’,” says Travis, “as the script described, and really there was only one person who could do that, and that was James Floyd.”
The two had worked together before on a TV film, The Blind Man of Seville. “I knew what James could do and he’s done some extraordinary work since then,” the director continues. “He brings a real vulnerability to a man who is quite damaged, despite being suave and sophisticated and very lovely. There’s an emptiness to that man’s soul and James seemed to effortlessly get that.”
Floyd says that the script felt very fresh. “It is a story about two Asian friends and they are very British in very different ways,” he says, “and while we have seen that a lot, I think that this film does it in a slightly different way.
“To me the flashbacks to ’97 and then the cutting back to the present day says a lot about being a second-generation British Asian. That is very interesting to me and very timely with what is going on politically in this country.”
Tommy and Lovely’s friendship is at the core of this film. The two have grown apart but find themselves reunited by Tommy’s case. Ahmed explains, “What is really interesting about the two characters is that they are mirror images of each other in terms of their personality traits, the way they deal with people, experiences they have had, their relative economic position.”
Lovely was a very popular, cool kid with loads of friends. Tommy was a loner. “Tommy didn’t have many friends until Lovely introduced him into this world, and so when they reconnect there is a sense that they’re both 17 again,” Ahmed says.
They discuss the tragedy that affected both of their lives. “Tommy’s trapped by his past whereas Lovely is a character who to some extent finds the past is disposable to him,” continues Ahmed. “His character is driven by aspiration, both socially and economically, and wanting to climb the ladder. He is not shackled in the same way by nostalgia, like Tommy.”
Floyd agrees, adding, “Lovely is like two people wrapped in one and he doesn’t know if he is the 17-year-old or the 35-year-old. That is his downfall.”
Another pivotal character from Tommy’s past who reappears in the present is Shelley, the adult version of whom is played by Billie Piper. “She made something really extraordinary out of a character that was very slight,” says Travis of the actress. “Billie gave Shelley a tenderness, warmth and vulnerability and she went to places where I’m not sure she’s been before. She was really brave.”
It was Tommy and Shelley’s burgeoning love affair that prompted the terrible tragedy that still haunts them to this day. When they meet again in the present, old feelings rise to the surface. “Shelley meets Tommy in their formative years and she’s a spirited and thoughtful teenager,” says Piper. “She leaves their home area very young when she has a child, but when they meet again you can see that she’s still very much in love with Tommy.”
That love was born in 1997 and vital segments of the film depict the adult characters back in their heady teenage years. “The kids that played those younger roles were all really brave,” says Travis. “I’m very tough with everybody. I’m totally uncompromising. I drive people really hard. But when you work with great people they give you way more than you ever imagined.”
The filmmakers spent almost five months searching for the young cast. “We trawled youth clubs to find the lad who plays Avid. He’d never done any acting before,” says Travis. Avid [Mohammad Ali Amiri] is a key character in the movie, a young kid on the verge of waywardness who Tommy tries to bring in line.
“We did the same with youth theatres, and schools, where we found the young Tommy [Reiss Kershi-Hussain] who’d never done any acting before. Then the young Shelley [Hannah Rae] was just about to start drama school but hadn’t done any professional acting before.
“Yet Hannah has a magnificent talent, something that you’re born with where you can just show things without doing anything. She made a part that was almost nothing on the page quite extraordinary.”
Another important woman in Tommy’s life is Melody, whom he meets at the start of the film when she commissions him to find her missing flatmate. Cush Jumbo takes on the role. “When I first read the script I was so excited by its depiction of London and the fact that it’s got this very contemporary film noir style,” she says. “It’s very unusual to find a movie like this. It holds up a mirror to London that is quite realistic. It’s not a period drama or a gangster movie.”
Travis says that he was very lucky to get the actress on board. “Cush is an extraordinary young actress,” he says. “She’s going to be a super huge movie star, I think. She makes Melody someone who was way more than she was in the script. She brings a real sense of humanity to Melody. It’s really quite beautiful.
“In her scenes with Riz they bring a real sexual tension that wasn’t in the script and that really made it fizz. There was also a real tender friendship that grows between the two characters throughout the film.”
The last major character in Tommy’s life is his ailing father, Farzad, who is struggling with his wife’s death and his own illness. Indian-born British actor Roshan Seth plays the role. “He’s as lost in the past, as his son,” notes Travis. “His wife has died and he’s been struggling with drink and depression and he doesn’t really live in the real world. He just watches endless reruns of old cricket matches.”
Cricket is something of a metaphor throughout the film and Farzad is a fount of wisdom. “In his drunken strangeness he seems able to tell the truth about what’s going on in the world,” the director adds. “Riz and Roshan were really beautiful together.”
Travis also says that Roshan has an ability to bring light and humour to a variety of situations. “And the tender pathos that he brought to the role was really quite beautiful,” the director says. “He’s funny and achingly sad and yet there’s hope in that man that seems to sum up the film. Roshan could see that hope in Farzad.”
Farzad, like Tommy, has his own journey. “He’s faced with a challenge at the end of the movie about whether he can step up to the plate and be more than what he was in the past,” says Travis. “It was so exciting working with him, especially given his link to those wonderful British films from the past, like My Beautiful Laundrette.”
Seth says that the highly nuanced script for City of Tiny Lights entranced him. “It’s witty, very contemporary, and also very poetic,” he says. “And Pete is a great director. I said to him that at this stage of my life, I just want to do good work. I don’t care about the money any more. And I thought there was a chance to do something good here, thought it’s really down to the audience to decide whether we’ve achieved that.”
He cites the example of My Beautiful Laundrette. “I remember at the time, no one had a clue what it’d be.” The film was a critical hit and remains a beloved film to this day. “Then I spoke to [the film’s director] Stephen Frears a few years ago and he said that films are like mushrooms — they grow in the dark!”
A CITY OF TINY LIGHTS
The location manager on My Beautiful Laundrette, Rebecca O’Brien, is now an experienced producer and she joined City of Tiny Lights as the production got up and running. She says that Pete Travis is just the right man to helm the picture, given not only his ability with actors but also his keen visual understanding.
“He has an incredible ambition for the film,” she says. “And the actors love working with him. He is very, very good with the actors. He is very sensitive. He builds a very strong rapport with them. That might sound like a cliché because that is what directors should do, but he does it really well.
“He is warm and creative,” she adds, “and he has got a very strong visual sense, which is fantastic, and he absolutely delivered on what he imagined, visually.”
Travis says that great movies about cities are visually amazing, an ambition he sought in City of Tiny Lights. “I think our film is visually amazing; it looks really beautiful but it has a soulfulness that shows what it is like to live in this city, and that’s what I’m most proud of.”
Being a noir, much of the film is shot at night, and there’s a strong neon presence throughout. It is also shot with handheld cameras. “It is all handheld, the colours are all vibrant, the lives of the characters are real,” Travis says. “And the actors seemed to thrive on the handheld, almost documentary style. The actors never know what the camera is going to do in my films and I usually do a whole scene in one shot so it’s quite tough. They have to perform the whole time.”
This film is less a string quartet and more like jazz, he says with a smile. “The camera is slightly improvised and the actors don’t know what the camera is going to do.”
O’Brien says that working with Travis has been highly rewarding, and great fun. “He gets himself out some of the most extraordinary scrapes,” she laughs. “And then trying to shoot at night in the middle of the summer is a challenge. Shooting at night is always expensive, and the nights have been way too short, but we have got it. You can’t have a film noir without it being night!”
And you can’t have a film noir without a pertinent score. For City of Tiny Lights, Travis reteamed with composer Ruth Barrett, with whom he worked on Endgame and the 2013 TV movie Legacy.
For the scenes set in 1997, the filmmakers opted for dance tracks from the time. “We wanted to find tracks that were danceable but which weren’t huge chart hits. But they would have been hits for the kids that feature in the film,” says Travis.
“But the main part of the film was always going to be score and Ruth is a genius,” he adds. “She manages to see an image and capture the soul of everything I expected it to feel like. The score is one of the most beautiful things about the film. As she’s done with both the films we’ve done together, she’s made my images so beautiful with her sound.
“I wanted the score to be soulful and exciting and to have an ‘otherness’ about it. The music gets under your skin.” As, hopes Travis, does the film itself. “The film has been a wonderful eight-year journey for me,” he says. “And I think we’ve made a really interesting parable about living in a big city.”
