Born Equal – showing on Sunday 17 December at 9pm on 91Èȱ¬ One
Introduction
Colin Firth, Anne-Marie Duff, David Oyelowo with Robert Carlyle head an all-star cast in 91Èȱ¬ One's Born Equal, a major new drama from Bafta Award-winning writer and director Dominic Savage.
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Savage's gritty films - including When I Was Twelve, Love + Hate, Out Of Control and Nice Girl - have all tackled contemporary social issues.
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In Born Equal, he addresses social inequality in Britain today through the interweaving stories of several characters whose paths collide in and around a B&B temporarily housing the homeless and dispossessed.
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Mark (Colin Firth) is a wealthy City worker whose conscience and guilt about his luxurious lifestyle prompt him to try to help those less fortunate, but it results in turmoil for himself and others.
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Staying at the B&B are: Michelle (Anne-Marie Duff), a pregnant mother with a young child, who has escaped an abusive husband; Yemi (David Oyelowo), his wife Itshe (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their young daughter, Adanna, who have fled the threat of violence in their native Nigeria; and Robert (Robert Carlyle), newly released from prison and embarking on a search for his mother.
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The stellar cast also includes Emilia Fox, Julia Davis, Megan Dodds, Nichola Burley, Emily Woof and Pearce Quigley.
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All of the characters are struggling with personal crises – even Mark who, on the surface, has everything, explains Savage.
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"They are people in desperate circumstances and the film captures their intertwining, different lives. It's ultimately about people's relationships and the difficulties, dilemmas and moral issues they face."
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Born Equal started life as a film about homelessness but, as Savage embarked upon his research, a markedly different film began to take shape.
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"When I began to look into the problem of homelessness, my sense was that there was a really big issue around people living in temporary accommodation for long periods of time.
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"They're known as the ‘hidden homeless' because, although they've got a roof over their heads, it's far from being a home," says the director.
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Savage visited a number of these hostels and met many different people who generously shared their stories with him – stories he says he will never forget.
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"I was struck by the diverse reasons why people end up in those places: a fall from grace, a relationship break-up, coming out of prison, leaving the Army, being a refugee.
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"All of those different stories come together in this one place and, for me, that was the starting-point of the film."
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One of the hostels Savage visited was located in London's Swiss Cottage, literally around the corner from a row of multi-million-pound homes.
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"I knew then that one of the issues I really wanted to deal with was the extremes of difference in people's lives – and, in a place like London, those extremes can be experienced within just a few streets. People can be in hugely different worlds but sharing the same space.
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"The film shows huge contrasts between people and how they live, their ideas, what they've got and what they haven't got," says Savage, who points out that although the film is set in London, the same contrasts can be seen all over Britain.
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Produced by Ruth Caleb (Out Of Control, Care, Bullet Boy) and Lucy Hillman (Derailed, Whistleblower, Panorama), the drama was completely improvised and filmed without rehearsal.
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It was a process described by David Oyelowo, who plays Yemi, as "the acting equivalent of extreme sports".
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Savage says: "It's the most organic way of making a film but also the most risky way because film-making is about delivering something people have an expectation about."
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He shot two alternative endings to the drama and did not decide upon the final scenes until the very last moment.
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"Working like this is more like a journey – the film keeps developing and changing as you shoot. It's exciting not quite knowing what you're going to get.
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"You have a sense of it and you can talk about it with the actors in detail but then it's open to change and that's what I like. You're completely thinking on your feet."
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With the cast having so much input – not a single line of dialogue was scripted in advance – making the film became a very democratic process, he adds.
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"I think it was an incredibly liberating process for the actors and I was really interested in what their life experiences brought to it. It was vital that they didn't mind exposing certain elements of themselves," he says.
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"For me, there was something about all of them that connected with the role they were playing. There was an element of reality in it for them and that was really important. They empathised and understood it, but also felt that they could give something quite personal to it."
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For Savage, the film taps into the way a lot of people today are beginning to think about society, wealth and poverty, and the way we live now.
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"If you're fairly well-off, fairly comfortable, and you see people who aren't – who have nothing – living at the end of your road, you do start to think about it. It makes you think about these vast differences between our lives and that's what the film is about," he says.
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"I want people to go on a journey with the characters. If we, as an audience, care about them, irrespective of our preconceptions, that's what matters.
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"In the end, what the film aspires to achieve is to encourage people to think more about others, care about the less fortunate and be more aware of what's going on around them."
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Born Equal is a 91Èȱ¬ production with 91Èȱ¬ Films.
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