Spoiling for a fight: Lone Scherfig on The Riot Club

The Danish director of An Education talks Jamie Oliver's posh chips, her growing Anglophilia, and the allure of the elite British world of her new film, The Riot Club.

19 September 2014

By Sam Wigley

The Riot Club (2014)

 

Copenhagen-born filmmaker Lone Scherfig’s career has taken an unusual trajectory: from breaking through internationally with Italian for Beginners (2000), a romantic comedy made within the aesthetic constraints of the Dogme 95 manifesto, to her current run as the go-to director for adaptations of hot British literary properties.

First came An Education (2008), a beautifully mounted film of journalist Lynn Barber’s girlhood memoir, which was nominated for Academy Awards for best picture, best actress for Carey Mulligan and best adapted screenplay for Nick Hornby. One Day followed in 2011, adapted by David Nicholls from his ubiquitous bestseller, and now The Riot Club brings to the screen Laura Wade’s acclaimed play Posh, set over the course of a debauched meal at a country pub where a private dining room has been booked by an elite Oxford University club.

When we spoke over the phone, Scherfig – at her home in Denmark – was excited by the morning’s news that (following a successful world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival) the American rights to her film had been picked up by IFC Films, thereby bringing far wider exposure beyond these shores to this very British story of class and hereditary privilege.

We asked her about her outsider’s view in on the rarified clique depicted in sumptuous, shocking detail in The Riot Club, and what it is that keeps drawing her back to British subject matter. Unprompted, she also had some very kind words about the BFI, which we humbly reprint below.

The Riot Club (2014)

When did you first hear about the play Posh?

I went to see it at the Royal Court, and then again a couple of years later in Soho. I tend to go to the theatre a lot when I’m in London. It was very obvious that you could make a very original film out of it. This group of men are at that age when everything is happening in their lives: they’re wild and untamed, and I thought that was great dramatic material.

How familiar were you already with this elite British world?

Very little, but I had a huge hunger for getting to know this world. That’s part of the fascination for me in filmmaking: to get immersed in a different world. It’s interesting that there’s been so much attention on how I approached this world, but it’s no different from any other – like Hell’s Angels or the Mormons or whatever. But because there is this glamour and almost an iron wall surrounding the British upper class, there’s a sense that it’s harder to get to know than anything else. It’s everything people dislike, but also what they strive for.

No one ever asks how I tried to get the restaurant kitchen scenes right, for instance! Sometimes I think: do I really come across as that mundane? It hasn’t occurred to anyone to figure out what my own class background was!

But I’m sure anyone from the inside will find lots of things that are not correct, as you would with any other film. When I think of how the film business has been depicted, one is very forgiving of how much is done wrong just to make a point or clarify things.

The Riot Club (2014)

You seem to be drawn to the world of British academia: in An Education, Carey Mulligan’s character is about to go to Oxford; One Day begins with a graduation; and now you have a film set around an Oxford club.

The school system is incredibly important to your society. Also, it is the period of people’s lives when they make their biggest decisions and where things can get very dramatic because of that. Innocence is also a theme that is in all three films.

How did you and Laura Wade open up the play for the cinema?

Laura almost made the film the play’s second act. She explained more about the world we’re in, because [with a film] you can’t take that knowledge for granted when it shows in other countries, for instance. She’s set up each of the characters more clearly, which helps us get to know them better and gives them a greater sense of individuality, even though they have essentially the same background, the same clothes, the same privileges, the same level of intelligence.

Given this similarity, how did you go about casting the male actors? Was each of them always intended for the part they ended up playing?

We did shuffle around a little bit, especially as some of the smaller parts are cast with actors I really like and I could see that they could have played several of the parts. Matthew Beard, for instance, who was in both One Day and An Education, and who ended up playing Guy Bellingfield, the man who runs the club’s different initiation procedures. I could easily have seen him play other parts, but now that the film is over I can’t imagine them shuffled around!

The Riot Club (2014)

To what extent do you want the audience to like or even want to be these characters? How did you moderate how sympathetic they are?

I think that was one of the top three challenges with this film. This is something we discussed a lot both with the BFI and Film4: how to do this seduction act where you begin to like them and then at some point find out that they aren’t 100% sympathetic, that they are different – almost a different species. Bit by bit, you start disbelieving what you see and feeling a bit deceived or turned away from people you were seduced by. One thermometer is Max Irons’s part Miles – you follow him into the Riot Club and see things with his eyes, but you also see things that he doesn’t notice because he becomes so stoned and drunk and seduced that he loses sense. His not leaving, his sins of omission are central to the plot: you always have the freedom to leave, no matter what tribe you’re in. I think that’s the thing that makes this film about more than just class, or about bad behaviour.

Why was the named changed from Posh to The Riot Club?

The Riot Club translates better. I’ve just been at the Toronto Film Festival, and it’s clear that the word ‘posh’ – which is so great in England – can’t really be translated. It’s packed with connotations; so much for such a short word! But because it means nothing to other countries, and it doesn’t help the film abroad, I was all for changing it. The first time I heard it, I wasn’t quite aware of what it meant, except I’d had Jamie Oliver’s ‘posh chips’! I think they have truffle oil on them.

The Riot Club (2014)

Are you intending to continue making films in Britain?

I hope so. Every time it’s a coincidence. I’m starting to become an Anglophile, but it’d didn’t start out that way. Your writers, your actors, your locations, but also the work ethic – the level of craft and artistry is extreme. This has to do with the fact that you do some of the biggest films in the world, but you also have a tradition for very small, intimate, low-budget dramas. It means that working with people in Britain feels like a great privilege.

And I think actually that there aren’t that many places in the world that have a state institution like the BFI that cares so much about the audience and the taxpayers. You feel that you have a very strong film tradition and people do what they can to maintain it and depict England as it is and reflect the thoughts of the people who are going to see the film: the problems or the worries or the joys. We have a similar organisation in Denmark, but I really think it’s unique for Britain. The scale of what the British Film Institute does – the archive, the Festival, the education, the Player – it’s admirable.


The Riot Club was backed by the BFI Film Fund.

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