Interview: Film Director Ron Peck

The identity of British independent film, and its future directions, has always been a matter of some contention – and with the ongoing transfer of authority on funding issues from the now-defunct UK Film Council to the British Film Institute, it’s a question that isn’t going to go away. For Ron Peck, whose most recent film Cross-Channel has been released on DVD, coinciding with the re-release of his Empire State, it's a question close to the heart, as director of what has been called Britain’s first openly gay film, Nighthawks, and the much-acclaimed boxing documentary Fighters.

Peck is most keenly aware of a thinning in the presence of independent film, and international cinema in particular, in the current UK climate, and looks back to the past with a feeling that is more than just nostalgia. “The 1970s and 1980s were an extraordinary period for anyone interested in cinema. Every aspect of film-making – production, aesthetics, criticism, film history, the social and political role of cinema as an experience – all were in question for a wide swathe of film-makers,” he says.

In that context, he made his debut feature Nighthawks (pictured below right) in 1978 (it would be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and was re-released by the BFI two years ago): “In such a cultural environment, making a film like Nighthawks seemed not only possible but necessary, as a contribution to a much larger shift in things.” Clearly that was as much of social attitude – though the label of Britain’s first gay film may be one that obscures its values purely as a film – and a reflection of its times.

Peck admits that the same would not happen today, so work on Cross-Channel has been necessarily trimmed down, to the level of a micro-budget. “I made Cross-Channel in exactly the same way as I made Nighthawks, not with institutional support, but with private finance cobbled together from different individuals. Nighthawks today would be an impossible proposition. It was possible in 1978 because there was more openness to trial and error, possibilities of wide independent cinema and television distribution. Most of that has gone. What we have today is the internet,” he said.

That’s a context which may have limited the scale of Cross-Channel, but in some way has only concentrated its aesthetic. As its title suggests, it’s a story set largely on a ferry, but it’s a journey as much in the head of the narrator – through Peck’s own voice – as he observes two individuals, brothers from the East End, who are playing out their own personal narrative, as interpreted and to some extent precipitated by the narrator. It’s slow, sometimes static, and reflects not least on the experience of the journey in itself, that of moving away from your customary location, for whatever reason. For those sceptical that atmosphere of any kind can be found on a cross-channel ferry, there is real poetry there. (Brittany Ferries offered unrestricted access, apparently, and that shows. But almost like Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, and its use of the Eurostar, it’s a clever exploitation of a new location for telling a story, rather than a promo for the brand itself.)

With a budget of less than £20,000, and distribution so far by internet only (though theatrical release in France is on the cards), it poses the question of whether micro-budget projects – previously more familiar from the new music world – can make films happen that otherwise wouldn’t appear in conditions today.

It’s also a manifesto for things close to Peck’s heart – working with non-professional actors (the two leads in Cross-Channel), allowing a degree of improvisation to steer the process, feature films which border on the edge of documentary - and the East End. Peck moved to that part of London in 1974, and its character has engaged his work ever since. “I came to east London as an outsider. I connected with the people I got to know here very fully and very immediately, and never more so than in the community I got to know through the boxing world,” he said. That connection is nowhere more apparent than in his boxing documentary Fighters, which stands up against competition as a real insight into a world, a sporting community, with its triumphs and its tragedies.

“I think I felt more at home here than anywhere else I have ever lived. I benefited from the sense of energy to create a space for yourself, that insistence that you are here, a strong sense of work, family, loyalty of clan and district that doesn’t exist in the suburban world I grew up in. Fighters probably expresses that feeling most directly, that personal sense of connection.”

And the East End itself is the effective hero of Empire State, a very different, much more staged film from 1987 that catches the chance-it feeling of the area, itself just on the cusp of the major building developments of the time. It’s practically a Jacobean tragedy transplanted to a new location 400-odd years on – where power, sex, money, the transfer of an old order into a new order, is all up for negotiation. Peck comments: “Empire State was an attempt at a bigger picture, the East End seen from many conflicting angles, intensifying the feel of things by deploying melodrama, extremes of violence, colour, emotion, the environment of dog-eat-dog, and greed.” The contrast of style was evident in casting: “We mixed much more professional and non-professional actors. Marin Landau, a major Hollywood actor, played opposite Lee Drysdale, an East Ender who’d never performed before, and this combination created a different kind of chemisty.”

It was also an assertion of exactly the kind of independent cinema that was being produced at the time; the work of Derek Jarman may be better known, and Peck and Jarman were something of comrades in that movement (the latter plays a cameo role in Nighthawks). It was a direction that didn’t come without its controversy – notably articulated in a Sunday Times article deploring the work of the likes of Jarman and Peck for their depiction of contemporary Britain. (The Empire State DVD has fascinating extensive extras, including Peck’s appearance on Right to Reply.)

As for the future, the director is somewhat sanguine: “I hope that new work will not get lost in this new free-for-all where everyone with a cellphone is potentially a film-maker. How can more ambitious and sometimes more difficult work get a footing? We are in a transitional phase between on the one hand cinema and television, and on the other hand the net, though the movement is really all one way. For the moment the cinema is still vital for a film of any scale to get a decent launch and important for the return of production.”

That has left his latest script for a project titled Technically Perfect on and off the boil for around five years. It’s a psychological thriller about an ex-US secret service operative who’s cut loose from his old world, and ends up in Ukraine and Russia, where it becomes clear that finally his past is a world from which it's almost impossible to flee.

There are plans for more micro-budget films, “cobbled together” with help from friends and sponsors. There may well eventually be a “ferry trilogy” – unlikely though that may sound - and Peck is adamant that such enclosed environments are very alluring for creating small-scale drama.

But the bigger picture will be being worked out elsewhere. “I have some hopes that BFI Production will have a broader and more international view than the UK Film Council. It will need some strong figures to stir things up a bit, to provoke the national cinema out of its complacency. Of all places the BFI is the most likely to rethink the past - it is its main activity – and that will mean rethinking the role independent cinema has had here, re-evaluating its contribution, which connects back to earlier shifts of thinking about film – the role of Free Cinema, for example. It’s also about time we opened our eyes more to international film-making of the last 50 years.” We can only hope.

• Cross-Channel and Empire State are screened at Riverside Studios, Hammermsith on 8 June
• Find out more about Cross-Channel
• Find Ron Peck films on Amazon