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"No one else currently working
in TV drama can do that. He's interested in doing what hasn't been done
before. That's what makes his films both unique and outstanding."
Poliakoff begins by outlining
the aims of the film. "It's about work, ambition, aspiration, respect,
self-esteem, which are all things that motivate us as much as, if not more
than sexual love. We work longer hours than anyone else in Europe and often
see more of our work colleagues than our families."
However, the writer-director
continues: "Most of all, the film is about how many certainties have
melted away as things have become much more fluid and fast.
"Until the early Eighties,
technology had been static for decades. When Noel Coward had his first play
at the Everyman in the Twenties, he ran up the stairs to be greeted by a
young man with a typewriter. "When I had my first play at the Bush in
the Seventies, I had exactly the same experience. There were no
answer-phones, no mobile phones and no computers.
"Throughout the Sixties and
Seventies, things changed with an increase in sexual freedom and more
outlandish clothes, but a traditional view of the world, if you like,
remained intact. The way society was run, with old people telling the young
what to do, stayed exactly the same. Then all of a sudden, the fabric of
life changed completely. That change has always intrigued me, and I thought
it would make a good basis for a drama because it's never been tackled
before."
The radical changes that society
underwent in the Eighties and Nineties are told through the evolving
relationship between Paul and Lizzie. They first meet in the early Eighties,
when Paul is living a Great Gatsby-style existence in a sumptuous country
house. There he is surrounded by a salon of interesting people he has
collected, including the eminently clubbable journalist, Sneath (played by
Robert Lindsay). He also dreams up radical plans to transform city centres,
is passionate about the potential of wind power and keeps crocodiles,
convinced they may have a health benefit for humans. Having only dabbled up
to now, Paul decides to employ the level-headed Lizzie to put his sometimes
wayward, yet visionary ideas into action.
Over the next 20 years, they try
to work together on a succession of variously successful business projects,
Paul's dreamy idealism often clashing with Lizzie's more down-to-earth
practicality. "I've always been fascinated by how we're affected by
people who mentor us early on in our careers," Poliakoff continues.
"We think about them often for the rest of our lives. We constantly
want to please them but, if they behave badly, it feels like a terrible
betrayal, almost worse than a sexual betrayal. "It can be very
disillusioning and very haunting. One of the themes that runs through the
film is that we should always try to work with people who threaten and push
us.
"There aren't many
relationships like this depicted in fiction because the market place insists
on romance. But as this is not a Hollywood movie, I don't have to stay
within that convention. In fact, I never want to have to stay within any
conventions!" Nicolas Brown - who has also produced Ladies in Lavender,
White Teeth, Nicholas Nickleby, Deceit and Hope and Glory - chips in with
his own assessment of the central relationship in Friends and Crocodiles.
"It's initially a boss and secretary relationship, but it develops into
a story about the people we meet at work who have a profound effect on us.
"Paul and Lizzie have a
massive influence on each other. It's not a conventional romance, it's much
more layered and subtle than that. "Lizzie is inspired by Paul and
wants his respect. She wants to make things happen and becomes his
right-hand woman. She's intensely loyal and gets enormously upset when she
sees him wasting his potential. Paul and Lizzie's relationship is about
respect and it's about finding a way of connecting and communicating with
work colleagues. These are people you were born to spend most of your time
with, without ever marrying or sleeping with them. It's a connection that
millions of us have."
Brown concludes by saying that
Friends and Crocodiles reflects, "how the world has dramatically
speeded up in the last two decades. The film starts in the early Eighties,
when there was plenty of time and no rush. But all that began to change in
the mid-Eighties with the arrival of mobiles and then email. Now there is
never enough time, and as a result it seems that perfectly intelligent
people can make really stupid decisions. In the film, we watch a big company
implode because of thoughtless and hasty decisions. It becomes obsessed with
management consultants and reorganising its offices.
"The world is now a much
faster place, with no time to think or dream. Having space to dream is
really important because it allows writers like Stephen Poliakoff to produce
films like Friends and Crocodiles."
Friends and Crocodiles is a
TalkBack Thames production, part of the FremantleMedia Group, for the BBC.
We also have interviews with
stars Laurence
Fox and Olivia
Poulet
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