Adapted
for the screen by Joe Penhall from his award-winning
Royal Court play, Some Voices
may be set in west London, but don't expect
double-decker buses, secondhand bookshops
and Julia Roberts lookalikes. "It's very,
very much not Notting Hill," director Simon
Cellan Jones says of his debut feature.
"The camera was not allowed within W7."
The
film tells the emotionally charged story
of Ray, a sweet-natured but vulnerable man
who is released from a psychiatric hospital
into the care of his overprotective brother,
Peter. Ray has an addiction problem
he's addicted to not taking his drugs
and has some kind of mental illness, which
is never quite explained.
"When
he takes drugs, he fine; he's all right, a
bit quiet and flat," Cellan Jones explains,
"but he doesn't cause himself or anybody else
any
harm. His real thing is he wants to be himself
he doesn't want to be a chemical
formula. But by not taking his drugs, he's
putting himself in great danger."
The
project has been gestating for quite some
time. The initial funding fell through,
allowing Cellan Jones and Penhall to spend
more time working on the screenplay and
scouting locations. Both the writer and
the director are big fans of the Westway
(a road which straddles Shepherds Bush and
passes over Notting Hill without actually
touching it), and Cellan Jones was determined
to make sure that his "favourite road" featured.
Daniel
Craig, with whom Cellan Jones worked on
TV series" Our Friends In The North,"
was his first choice as the schizophrenic
Ray, a part that
was played by two different characters on
stage. "When I read the script, I was straight
on the phone telling him that we were going
to do this next," Cellan Jones remembers.
Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting,
House) plays Laura, the wild
Scottish girl Ray falls in love with, while
David Morrissey is Pete.
Cellan
Jones describes Some Voices
as "quite an out-there film," concluding
that, "...it's about London; it's not about
English people. It's about the fireworks
that go off inside your head. It's about
what happens when you start to fuck up and
how living in a big old city screws you
up whether you're mad in the first place
or not."
Damon
Wise
