There are shadows aplenty in film noir, yet Rowan Joffe has had to deal with more than the usual suspects for his big-screen directorial debut.
Spectre #1: The 1938 novel by Graham Greene, Brighton Rock is a classic piece of literature, hailed as a highlight in a career that enjoyed many a bright moment.
Spectre #2: The 1947 film by producer John and director Roy Boulting is regarded as one of the great British movies, even if the censors of the time deleted several violent scenes and diminished the work's religious overtones.
Spectre #3: Joffe's father is award-winning director Roland, whose canon includes The Killing Fields and The Mission.
Spectre #4: Joffe's own love and respect for Greene's work.
With all that in mind, it is put to Joffe that his first feature film (which opens in New Zealand on May 19) must have required a certain cache of bravery.
The British director and screenwriter, speaking on the telephone from London, puts it another way: "We have been as reverential as we can, but I tend to think one should be more reverential to characters than to plot. Judging by what Greene has said - and I've read everything he has ever written - I think he would probably agree."
Consistent to both the novel and the two subsequent film versions is the charting of the descent of Pinkie (played by Sam Riley), a razor-wielding, sociopathic teen, whose ambitions to lord over his gang-mates, rivals and, ultimately, the seaside town of Brighton are at odds with his feelings for Rose (Andrea Riseborough), a meek waitress who falls in love with Pinkie despite his obvious flaws.
"I feel quite certain that Greene, as cleverly as he masks Pinkie's emotional connections with Rose, is basically telling a dark love story about a devil and an angel," Joffe says.
"And if that devil had no feelings for the angel - as complex and as twisted as those feelings are - I don't think Greene would have bothered writing the novel."
Joffe first encountered Greene's book as a teenager whose compulsory reading list included Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill A Mockingbird and J.D. Salinger's 1951 work The Catcher In The Rye, both of which share with Brighton Rock themes involving loss of innocence.
"I love stories that take you to a dark place," Joffe says. "A match is struck in the dark with the possibility of some redeeming quality. In Pinkie, that redeeming quality is love."
Love might be the most luminous thread running through Brighton Rock, but the concept of choice, a tension between pre-ordained outcome and conscious decision-making, is also central; it is exemplified, respectively, by Pinkie's descent and Rose's embracing of her relationship with a character who, clearly, has sadistic and criminal tendencies.
"I think you are touching on something that is central to the story," Joffe agrees. "There is a fundamental ambiguity: what Pinkie wrestles with is his inevitable damnation but, of course, it only becomes inevitable in the Catholic faith if you turn away from the possibility of redemption, which is something he does do.
"I think redemption is central to Brighton Rock. By the end of the story, Rose, by wishing she was in hell with Pinkie, has raised herself to a kind of saint-like status. And one is left with the distinct impression that if God is on anyone's side, it is that of Rose."
In one of his early descriptions of Pinkie, Greene writes, "... when you met him face to face he looked older, the slatey eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went".
Similarly, a little later on, "... he trailed the clouds of his own glory after him: hell lay about him in his infancy. He was ready for more deaths".
Yet such powerful wordplay has its difficulties. Directors - and actors - are typically required to develop a character by incremental steps as opposed to that individual arriving on screen fully formed.
"It is certainly an immense challenge to try and embody on the page, and then the screen, a character as iconic and ruthless and damned as Pinkie but, of course, that is part of the attraction to a director and to an actor," Joffe says.
"Sam [Riley] doesn't blink once through the entire film; that was our attempt to come up with something representing that 'slatey-eyed annihilation'.
"I think there is no doubt Sam is a ruthless, sadistic and deceitful Pinkie, but I have emphasised - probably more than Richard Attenborough's performance [in the 1947 film] - that this is not a two-dimensional, reptilian villain with no human feelings.
"I needed an actor with real physical, sexual and charismatic qualities, but at the same time someone who could convey a very frightened, vulnerable, almost schoolboy character. I think that combination is one-in-a-million but Sam had it in spades. The minute I met him I knew I'd found my Pinkie."
Riley might best be described as an actor on the rise, but Helen Mirren, who plays the character Ida Arnold, is a performer who requires little introduction.
"In regards to Helen Mirren, we needed an actor who had sensuality and sex appeal, maternal warmth and charm and also an indomitable authority to her and I think Helen ticked all those boxes," Joffe explains.
"In a sense Ida becomes the engine of the story in a rather conventional, generic way. She is essentially the detective and her pursuit of Pinkie motivates a great deal of his actions from the middle of the movie onwards. She is a hugely important narrative device.
"Greene describes Hermione Baddeley's portrayal of Ida in the original 1947 Boulting brothers movie as 'vaudeville', which is a ringing criticism.
In the first part of Greene's autobiography we discover he didn't even like the character of Ida; he felt she never came off the page; he later described her as the villain of the piece because she represents a secular morality and is a very materialistic woman.
"I felt I was at liberty to make some forensic changes to Ida in terms of her position in the story."
Released in Britain in January, Brighton Rock has had its share of mixed reviews, some critics querying Joffe's decision to relocate the setting from pre-World War 2 to 1964, replacing the tension between racecourse gangs with running battles between mods and rockers.
Joffe is asked to explain his decision.
"The year 1964 seemed the perfect framing for the story because it was an era in which Britain was struggling to recognise the authority of the Church and was very uncertain about whether or not the way forward was to embrace prewar values or to embrace a more youth-oriented future, which was what inevitably happened.
"The mods and rockers riots represent not only Pinkie's youth but also his endemic violence.
The nation in 1964 was shocked by the amount and nature of aggression of the teenagers who tore up the southeast coast. They had never really made a mark on society until that point. It seemed to me the best way of making the movie feel more contemporary but also helping to contextualise the story.
"Pinkie represents one side of the war and Rose the other; you've got materialism versus Catholicism; but you've also got tradition and age versus youth and rebelliousness and immorality." Another metaphor is provided by Brighton Pier (although, for the record, seaside scenes were shot at Eastbourne), which serves as an ambiguous symbol of both heavenly escape and worldly entrapment.
"On one hand, it is full of memories of childhood; it has a dreamy quality to it; it's a place where people go to escape the drudgery of their lives," Joffe explains. "On the other hand, a pier leads nowhere and in some sense is a symbol of existential desperation.
"In a less pretentious sense, above the pier is the holiday crowd and below are the gangsters, the murders and the riots. That sums up Brighton Rock - the contrast between a world of darkness and one of brightness." Fittingly, Joffe ends the film with a shot of a crucifix, his reasoning the same as the Boulting brothers' 64 years ago.
"It's not that I'm trying to sell Catholicism, but that it is a symbol of suffering. Ultimately, what Greene is saying is the human condition is one of suffering and if there is a hell, it probably exists on Earth."
• Pinkie Brown, the central character in Graham Greene's novel Brighton Rock is not very nice.
Indeed, in his introduction to a later edition, author J. M. Coetzee describes him thus:"Amoral, charmless, prim, seething with resentment against 'them' and against the 'bogies' (police), whom 'they' use to keep him down, Pinkie is a chilling specimen of the Adolf Hitler type. He distrusts women, who in his view have nothing on their minds but marriage and babies. The very thought of sex revolts him ..."
Greene himself describes Pinkie repeatedly in the most irredeemable terms.
For example: "A dim desire for annihilation stretched in him: the vast superiority of vacancy".
When he first meets the young woman Rose, the story's "romantic interest", he shows her a bottle of vitriol, sulphuric acid.
Earlier he has told us: "Vitriol ... it scares a polony (woman) more than a knife".
Given that he was writing just before World War 2, it does indeed read as if Greene is describing another young Hitler closer to home.
For all the physical carnage Pinkie has a hand in during the story, his most grievous crime is to encourage his young Rose to follow him into damnation.
Pinkie tells Rose late in the book: "It'll be no good going to confession ever again - as long as we're both alive".
Greene continues: "He had a sense now that the murders ... were trivial acts, a boy's game, and he had put away childish things. Murder had only led up to this - this corruption."
- Tom McKinlay
