The Lawless Heart is one of those strange breed of films, it’s exciting, it’s fresh, it’s British and unashamedly proud of all those facts. Directors Tom Husinger and Neil Hunter and actors Douglas Henshall and Tom Hollander attended the Time Out Gala screening of the film at the Curzon Mayfair cinema to receive questions about the films development and its subsequent screening as part of this year’s London Film Festival.
Husinger was forthcoming about the unusual way the film was developed “We had a story, and the characters, and then we took the idea to the BBC and they commissioned a script first, and we got to cast first it was quite surprising. It was a great way to use talent in the right way and sort of – they have an investment in it, and they want to work in this way and it gives them a sort of freedom, really. Neil Hunter expanded when pushed about the structure of the film. “I remember seeing a Rohmer film called Rendezvous in Paris, which was three stories. But there was no connection between the stories, but I really liked the first story. And I kept wanting him to join the second and the third, the character from the first story to come back. So that was the basic germ of the idea, where we do one where the characters did come back and you saw them. And then as we worked on it, it became more and more intricate, and the possibilities of the structure became more obvious. It wasn’t initially obvious exactly what we’d do with the structure.”
Actor Tom Hollander, who plays Nick in the film spoke about working with two directors, “Neil did the technical stuff, and Tom did the acting stuff. So it sort of separated naturally. But it was a good experience. “It was fine. It was absolutely fine….Unusual, but fine,” he joked.
Douglas Henshall played the character of Tim in the film and he expanded on this “For a first feature, I think both Tom and Neil did extraordinarily well, because it’s a very difficult thing to do. But I think Neil was very good visually, and Tom was kind of dealing with the actors.
Not a typically British film then? “It’s got more in common with a lot of French and Italian films, where you take a simple story and you tell it well. It’s got more in common with that than anything else. And I think that’s a healthy thing for a British Film,” Henshall remarked.
Regus London Film Festival 2001.