From speeding motorcycle to getaway van, director Roger Donaldson's latest flick digs up London's murky criminal and political past. He talks to Russell Baillie
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It might be called The Bank Job. It might be about a multimillion pound safe-cracking raid, the details of which are still shrouded in mystery. But Roger Donaldson - the Aussie-born, New Zealand-grounded globetrotting director on his first film since local box office champ The World's Fastest
Indian - wasn't intending to make just another heist movie.
"Well you know, it's funny," he says sounding slightly exasperated at being asked if he's always wanted to stage a robbery amongst his genre-hopping career, "Of course it is about a bank heist and it's in the true spirit of heist movies - the set-up, the job and the aftermath that invariably goes wrong. In that way it is genre, but in its own way I see it more as a political thriller."
That's because the film is based on a true - if here, highly conjectured - story about the raid of the vault of Lloyds Bank on London's Baker St in 1971.
Tunnelling into the vault from a shop a few doors up the famous street, the thieves ransacked safety deposit boxes, and made off with an estimated haul of 3 million (NZ$8 million).
But the headlines about the heist disappeared after the British government issued a "D notice" which forbade the press reporting on events in the interest of national security. There was something - here's where the conspiracy theory takes over - in the safety deposit boxes that the establishment didn't want to get out.
Based on years of speculation, the movie proposes the cover-up was to do with one of the boxes holding sexually compromising pictures of a member of the royal family (let's not spoil it here) and that the robbery had been staged by MI5 to retrieve them.
The photos had been used by Michael X - a Jamaican black radical who mixed with the likes of John Lennon and Vanessa Redgrave - as insurance for his criminal sidelines. "The names of many people in this film have been changed to protect the guilty," says the film's titles.
"I have to come clean - I have never seen the photos," says Donaldson when asked about his own take on the conspiracy theory. "Without having seen anything myself I couldn't vouch for anything other than the words of the people who say they have - and why are they to be trusted any more than people who say it's bullshit?"
"What I do know for a fact is there was compromising stuff in there. It's no secret that there was stuff in there that people would have preferred stayed there."
"I think there is a real degree of truth to it, I was keen to suss out the facts as much as I could. And what I found was the more I got into it, the harder it was to get to the bottom of the facts."
The script by the veteran English duo of Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais had been in the works since Clement met journalist George McIndoe in the late 70s who, claiming to have known some of the robbers, pitched a movie on the robbery with Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
It finally reached Donaldson a few years ago and he was intrigued by its possibilities.
"It's the sort of movie I would enjoy seeing myself and that is the best sort of movie to make - one that you would go along and see yourself."
That involved him doing his own research about the robbery.
"I went to the National Archives and dug up every newspaper article I could find about the real robbery and talked to a lot of people. I did my homework in terms of just immersing myself in the period and the subject and the politics of the time."
And there was the matter of how to capture London of 1971 on film.
"In a way it was a challenge to capture the Englishness of it. I think even the England of 1971 is different to the England of today. Filming it was a challenge, too, because the city has changed a lot."
"I looked at everything from David Bowie photos to just news shots and news reels and newspaper photos about the event. In some ways that pre-production is the most fun you have on a movie."
Shot in London, the movie stars Jason Statham as car-dealing wideboy Terry who, despite his efforts to go straight and be a family man, is tempted into the heist by old flame Martine (Saffron Burrows). The former athlete-turned-action star Statham has been down these streets before, especially in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.
"Hearing Jason's stories of his life in London, it is really entertaining stuff and it is the stuff that the characters in the film ... their background is totally in sync with who Jason's is. But even though that is his background, Jason was an Olympic diver: he's a guy who has embraced what an acting career has given him and there is a quality that Jason has that is Steve McQueen-esque. He does a lot with a little. He has very charismatic eyes and people notice him. I think he's got that quality that men and women both like him and it doesn't really matter what age they are."
Statham's profile has helped the film with an estimated budget of a modest US$20 million, (NZ$27 million) grossing a tidy US$46 million after its US and UK runs making it one of Donaldson's bigger box office successes - despite its NZ$7 million success at home, The World's Fastest Indian only reached US$18 million worldwide.
Donaldson was surprised by The Bank Job's success stateside.
"America tends to be fairly parochial about what it likes, but somehow this movie kept hanging on - it opened well and it never dropped off, stayed on and on. This movie has had more notice taken of it in Hollywood than any film I have done for a long time."
The film evokes a London of 70s British crime shows - that dominated New Zealand telly of the time - like The Sweeney. And if briefly resembles 70s British comedy like The Benny Hill Show - a saucy little 70s blue movie film features within the film.
'I must say I find Benny Hill very amusing. But I don't see the similarities," counters Donaldson. Well, there's that porn flick scene ...
"Oh that, yes. Well, I must say I am not cut out to be a porn film director. It's not as easy as it looks. I was trying to do that tongue-in-cheek. Benny Hill is exactly right. You're spot on there."
LOWDOWN
Who: Roger Donaldson, pioneering New Zealand film-maker and Hollywood veteran Sleeping Dogs (1977), Nutcase (1980), Smash Palace (1981), The Bounty (1984), Marie (1985), No Way Out (1987), Cocktail (1988), Cadillac Man (1990), White Sands (1992), The Getaway (1994), Species (1995), Dante's Peak (1997), Thirteen Days (2000), The Recruit (2003), The World's Fastest Indian (2005)
Latest: The Bank Job opens August 7