'Tommy's broken and cracked'
Tom Harper on directing the “explosive” film finale
Gerome Defrance/WireImage
- Michael Hodges
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You worked on the very first series — what’s it like to come back to Peaky Blinders?
We didn’t know what it would become, but we had cinematic aspirations for it and to be able to realise that was too good an opportunity to miss.
Did Nick Cave record a new version of the theme song Red Right Hand for a key scene with Cillian?
Yes, when we put that scene together in the edit, it immediately felt wrong with the original Red Right Hand, which feels like Tommy’s a young man, full of bravado and swagger. Of course, Tommy still has some of those things, but he’s broken and he’s cracked. So, we went back to Nick and he re-recorded it for us and I think it works perfectly. Tommy and Nick match each other a little bit. Nick’s older, wiser and sadder maybe. There’s tragedy in his voice, it’s more cracked, more broken. It’s beautiful and human.
Why did you decide to keep Cillian and Barry apart for a long section at the beginning of the film?
It was always inherent in Steve’s script and the question was: “How long can you make people wait? When are you just going to piss off your fans?” I always wanted to push it as long as we could without feeling self-indulgent. Structurally, there are two very different energies — the stillness and the isolation of Tommy and the chaos and the energy of Duke. And you play them off each other until they come together and you get this kind of explosion.
You’re a Quaker, did you worry about the violence in the film?
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Terrible violence exists in life and I think that storytelling helps us to understand things and to try and look at that in the most truthful, human way possible. It’s why I’m interested in this story of the Shelbys and always have been. As a group of people, they have experienced a great trauma. They came back from fighting for their king and country and were cast aside by the government, so they tried to take back something for themselves.
Authors
Michael Hodges
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