This
was a Stephen Poliakoff film broadcast on Channel 4 in 1988
In London,
a journalist and a picture researcher uncover a secret from the past and
discover hidden aspects of the city. For James Richards there are no surprises
left; he is too much in control of his life. Sharon is a child of the video age
who enters his life with a vengeance. Her all-consuming passion is to find the
truth behind a mysterious piece of film she has found inserted into a
government information reel. Through her he discovers that the London he
thought he knew is in reality a mysterious and Hidden City.
LONDON
— Hundreds of feet below the city streets in some abandoned tunnels
that sheltered thousands during the World War II bombings, Charles Dance
is making a new thriller, "Hidden City."
"It will," says first-time director Stephen Poliakoff, "show a London few people have ever seen before."
That
it will. Forget about Big Ben, the Tower, Westminster Abbey. Welcome to
the dank, dark world where so many Londoners spent their nights back in
the '40s.
For that's where much of the story takes place as Dance, playing a
writer, takes on the dangerous task of helping a young woman (Cassie
Stuart) search for some classified government information stored in the
underground tunnels.
"It's certainly a different look at London,"
said Dance, who, even at this level, cuts an imposing figure.
"Here we
are hundreds of feet below the people and the traffic. A lot of the beds
are still here from the war. But, of course, it's no longer open to the
public. I wanted to do this because it's Stephen's debut as a
director and he wrote it (Poliakoff is best known here as a playwright;
his "Breaking the Silence" was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company)
and I must say it's looking good.
"The only trouble is we have
only a six-week shoot, which isn't nearly long enough. Film makers in
this country work under such difficult circumstances. And that's a shame
because we have such talented people."
("Hidden City," which has no distributor yet, is partly financed by Britain's Channel 4 television network.)
Charles on working with Poliakoff :
I had the good fortune to work with Stephen Poliakoff on his first two films where he was both writer and director – Hidden City and Century.
I was and remain a huge fan of his work. He seems to be able to
seize upon seemingly obscure or ordinary incidents and characters and
certainly places, around which he weaves the most compelling of
storylines in a style that defies comparison with any other writer.
One of his earlier works for television Caught On A Train,
starring Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Michael Kitchen, was set largely in the
confines of a train carriage. It begins with the most uneventful and
chance meeting of two unconnected characters and slowly develops into a
nightmare scenario for one of them. It was principally this film that
made me want to work with him. That and Breaking The Silence
for The Royal Shakespeare Company. Again set on a train but based, I
believe, on a period of his grandfather’s life in post revolutionary
Russia.
His work for the cinema, television, and the theatre has a knack of
drawing his audiences into the worlds he creates. I don’t think I’m
alone in feeling that I need to sit forward in my seat rather than
lounge back into it – lest I miss a small but ultimately telling detail
that will illuminate a character.
He has a deserved reputation for being one of the most original, enlightening and innovative playwrights of his generation.
http://www.almeida.co.uk/event/mycity/actors-on-stephen-Poliakoff
