Director Rowan Joffe tells Steve Pratt about the unexpected criticism he’s faced over his new version of Brighton Rock.

ROWAN Joffe is learning that you remake a well-regarded film at your peril.

And there’s not a lot he can do about it, no matter how many times he explains himself.

The son of Killing Fields and The Misson director Roland Joffe says: “To a certain extent, I brought it on myself as my mum would say.”

The question is why he chose to make another film of Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock, previously filmed in 1947 with Richard Attenborough as razor-wielding teenage gangster Pinkie Brown.

“I’ve had some real kickings from certain critics and that’s fine, I absolutely understand it,” he says. “It’s an important question but some critics seem so reluctant to let anyone step on hallowed ground that no matter how impassioned or reasoned one’s answer is you never quite get away with it.”

It’s not as if he’s some young, inexperienced upstart meddling with a classic book and film. He’s both a writer (The American, Last Resort, 28 Weeks Later) as well as a Bafta best director for C4’s film The Shooting Of Thomas Hurndall.

Brighton Rock is his first feature film. The offer to direct was one he couldn’t refuse. It was the chance, among other things, to bring “one of the best stories every written alive for a whole new generation of cinemagoers”. He could do it in full colour with mobile cameras that Boulting Brothers didn’t have for the original film and could restore the novel’s clifftop ending that Greene himself altered for the first film.

“It was just such an incredible opportunity that I had to do it,” says Joffe. “If I didn’t love that book so much I wouldn’t have spent two-and-a-half years getting it on the big screen and probably ended my career by doing that.

“If you asked Greene ‘do you want your movie to gather dust in the boxed set of bolshy critics or aficionados up and down the country or do you want an honourable and passionate interpretation of your work to be brought to the big screen by some of the best actors in the country?’, I reckon he’d plump for the latter.”

He first came across the book at school and it was one of those books – Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird was another – that suddenly made English exciting. “And because it was about teenagers and was a love story and there was a bit of sex as well, it felt incredibly dangerous – and still did ten or 15 years later.”

Getting the film in front of the cameras wasn’t easy. Not just casting the leading roles of Pinkie and shy waitress Rose, but simply getting the project green-lit. It was all set to go with a ten million budget (he doesn’t specify pounds or dollars) until Oscar nominee (for An Education) Carey Mulligan dropped out. The money went with her. He was told to get a “significant name” before a new budget would be set.

He had two weeks to find someone. Helen Mirren was targeted (for what’s essentially a supporting role) and he headed off to her house for the make-or-break meeting. It didn’t go as he expected.

He arrived with a rucksack packed with research – books, films, music, plays and art work. “I decided you could approach the character of Ida by understanding she was half- Wagner and half-Beethoven,”

he explains.

“I laid everything out on the coffee table waiting for her to come into the living room. She came in, sat down and said ‘oh darling, I’m not that kind of actress’.

“There was a pause and I thought I’d put it all away because it was a bit embarrassing.

That bought me some time to think of what I was going to say. And she said ‘I don’t want to discuss the character of Ida, I think you’ve brought her to life and I understand her more than I do in the book. I just want to make sure you cast the character of Rose properly’.”

Mirren was in. He cast Sam Riley, the young actor acclaimed for his portrayal of Ian Curtis in Control, and North- East actress Andrea Riseborough, who played Mrs Thatcher in the BBC film A Long Way To Finchley and starred in C4’s The Devil’s Whore, as Rose.

He says that it was hard to chose between Mulligan and Riseborough but opted to go with the former. When she dropped out he went back to Riseborough – “humble pie dribbling down my cheek, on both knees” – and told her he wanted her for the part. “Actually neither of those things were necessary, Andrea said great, I’ll do it. I never even had to explain”.

His problems didn’t end there. The Palace Pier at Brighton looks nothing like it did in the Sixties, the era in which he decided to set the story as Mods and Rockers clash on the seafront.

So he filmed on Eastbourne pier and seafront. “It was an incredibly difficult decision and one I still feel slightly uneasy about,” he admits.

* Brighton Rock (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.