The villain of The Bank Job is Lew Vogel, played by David Suchet, a distinguished character actor who became an international television favorite as Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Explains Suchet, “Vogel is a very unsavory type. He’s a typical East End London boy who grew up into the vice racket while also running the pornography industry in Soho. Not a very nice man at all. He can be charming, but absolutely ruthless.”
Peter de Jersey rounds out the primary cast as Michael X, a real-life con-man and gangster who tried to assume leadership of the black power movement in London. “Michael X began to believe his own myth,” says de Jersey. “While he was in Trinidad he was asked the question, ‘Are you a Socialist?’ And he said, ‘No, think more along the lines of Napoleon and Hitler.'”
Michael X becomes the inciting figure in THE BANK JOB’s plot when he threatens to start a high-level scandal by exposing incriminating evidence stored in his safety deposit box on Baker Street. Explains Roven, “MI5 and MI6 decided to set up a bank job so they could go ahead and steal this evidence and prosecute this guy. That was the reason for the whole set up.”
Aside from Michael X, screenwriters La Frenais and Clement had to piece together disparate bits of research in order to create the cast of characters. “We had to invent them, based on the fact that there were so many guys involved, working in so many different businesses,” explains La Frenais. “No one in Terry’s crew was an experienced professional criminal. They were pretty small-time players.”
“We were told that ‘Terry’ was involved in the slightly dodgy used car trade,” adds Clement. “And we found out that ‘Kevin’ – these are not their real names – was a photographer, a sort of would-be David Bailey, but not quite in that league. And clearly there was a woman involved, because all the police reports say they heard a female voice down there. So we invented Martine. Vogel was based on a real character who ran a sort of porn empire.”
Though it is prohibitively expensive for film productions to shoot in London, Chasman and Roven decided it was necessary for reasons of authenticity. “What’s fascinating is that the geography hasn’t changed at all,” reports Roven. “You can still go to Baker Street, right this minute, and you can see exactly where the shop is where they tunneled in from. Nothing’s changed in 35 years.”
Donaldson was also interested in making a film in England again, his first since The Bounty in 1984. “My dad was born here, my son lives in London, so I was keen to make a film here,” he explains. “One of the great things about shooting in England is that there is a fantastic depth of really good, talented actors and so casting is always a great pleasure. For me, the movie is all about who’s in it.”
The production covered an extraordinary amount of ground during the ten-week shoot. The locations ranged from luxurious Bayswater apartments to East End workshops, from the Royal Courts of Justice to Chatham’s Historic Naval Dockyard. Scenes on the London Underground were filmed at the decommissioned Aldwych station and, for two memorable days, the production took over Platform One at London’s bustling Paddington Station, complete with a 1971 locomotive and carriages, the first time ever that a film company had brought a train into the station.
The script’s high number of locations posed a considerable challenge to production designer Gavin Bocquet. “Finding those little areas of London that more or less can be shot as 1970s, without much work being done, was very difficult,” he says. “But we did an awful lot of research into that period. We had some very good BBC news footage, especially of the bank robbery itself.”
Many sequences, such as the one depicting the actual bank break-in, were assembled using vastly different locations. According to Bocquet, “We ended up with an exterior street set at Pinewood and three stage sets at Ealing which include the tunnel and the basement of Le Sac. Then another location, which was the bank vault, was built in the old Bethnal Green Town Hall. But the way Roger shot it, everyone will think that it was done in one location.”
According to costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux, a great deal of research went into the period look of the film, involving her staff, the hair and make-up team and the art department. “You could see from the clothes in the newsreels that what people think of as the Seventies isn’t really Seventies – the period is still stuck a little bit in the Sixties in terms of the general public. So, with that in mind, I kept that as an overall feeling for the film. With each individual character, I tried to find a famous personality of the period to give them their look.”
Hair and make-up designer Kirstin Chalmers had to recreate a wide range of period hairstyles. “A lot of the actors who were cast had very modern hair and it’s a completely different style, a completely different length. So a lot of the actors had to have wigs and facial hair that they wouldn’t normally have – sideburns, moustaches. It’s all in the cut. If you get the silhouette and shape right, it pulls you straight into the period.”
THE BANK JOB was filmed with the latest high-definition digital cameras, the Arriflex D-20, which presented some interesting challenges for the production team. As Kirstin Chalmers points out, “HD is so much sharper than film, so make-up is more obvious, wig lace shows up more – even hair looks more super-real.”
For Donaldson, the new technology had its advantages. “It’s my first movie in HD and, of course, HD is the future. It gives you a unique opportunity at the time of shooting where you can see exactly what you are doing. It’s not easy to work with, but to see what you’re doing, as you can with digital photography, is a real advantage.”
“The depth of field is much longer and things come into focus much more quickly, so you have to be careful with your mid-ground and far-ground finishes,” says production designer Bocquet. “We work in a world of illusion, so usually we work things theatrically, but obviously as soon as things start to get finer in detail, you have to be careful.”
For the actors, HD presents a different set of challenges. “I do like the speed with which we can work, that’s terrific,” says Burrows. “But the fact that it’s merciless is not something I like as an actor. The human eye focuses on something and leaves the outer edges slightly out of focus, whereas HD is quite clinically clear.”
For Statham, the greatest pleasure of the production was the opportunity to work with Donaldson. “He’s probably one of the most easy going people you will ever get to meet,” says Statham. “And the fact he has made a bucketful of brilliant films gives us the ease to come on set and take direction without even questioning him because he’s such a great filmmaker. He understands different characters, the story telling aspect and the look. He’s just one of the greatest directors I have ever had to work with. I feel very lucky on that side of things.”
The Bank Job (2008)
Directed by: Roger Donaldson
Starring: Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Campbell Moore, Daniel Mays, James Faulkner, Alki David, Michael Jibson, Richard Lintern, Don Gallagher
Screenplay by: Dick Clement
Production Design by: Gavin Bocquet
Cinematography by: Michael Coulter
Film Editing by: John Gilbert
Costume Design by: Odile Dicks – Mireaux
Music by: J. Peter Robinson
MPAA Rating: R for for sexual content, nudity, violence, language.
Studio: Lionsgate Films
Release Date: March 7, 2008
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