Вкратце. В далеком 63 Брюс Рейнольдс (роль Люка) ограбил с группой единомышленников поезд британской почтовой службы, и украл 41 лям баксов по нынешним деньгам. Его искали, искали, да так и не сыскали. Телевизионный фильм BBC состоит из двух эпизодов по 90 минут, первый из которых "История грабителей" - как, кто, зачем. Вторая часть "Полицейская история" о попытках словить членов шайки-лейки.
Когда появится - точной даты не нашел, но трейлер BBC уже пустило
Итак, девочки и мальчики. Фильм по тв покажут где-то рядом с рождеством, а релиз на двд состоится только после сего события, поэтому дата открытая. ОТКУДА ЭТО
What attracted you to taking on the role of Bruce Reynolds in The Great Train Robbery?
It was a bit of everything really. The script was really great – I thought Chris [Chibnall] had done a fantastic job in revisiting this historical event and I felt the characters were really well written. You got a really good idea of their relationships with each other and their friendship. Also I think Julian Jarrold is a great director, and the other thing was that I haven’t really done any television and so this was a chance for me to widen my audience, by doing something for the BBC and something as great as this.
How did you find shooting for television rather than cinema?
There were a couple of differences… we worked at a much faster pace. Budgets on TV are never as big as the ones on film, but in the quality of what we were producing, there was absolutely no difference. What we shot was incredibly special and we had a great Director of Photography, George [Richmond] and the whole crew worked very well together. We travelled quite quickly to different locations and we worked in quite bleak surroundings sometimes - we worked through the night on train tracks in very very cold weather and had terribly snowy weather when it was supposed to be August, so that was very difficult. We did actually have to shoot a bit in the snow and incorporate that into the film. But apparently it was the coldest August here in history, so we’re not detracting too far from 1963! But apart from that, the production values were exactly the same. Just the speed of it is much quicker – we shot "A Robber’s Tale" in about five weeks.
What research did you do to prepare for taking on the role of Bruce Reynolds?
Being a 50-year-old story, there has been a huge amount of coverage, the capture of the robbers and the discovery of the train being robbed. There is a lot of ITN and BBC footage from the news at the time so I watched all the news reels which were great. There are also some fantastic books. Bruce was quite a charismatic human being. He had a lot of influence and he dressed very smartly. He wore glasses all the time and he was very much a one-woman man. He had some great qualities, as much as he was a criminal. But he was a very successful criminal at that, so there was loads to research. Loads and loads.
How challenging is it to take on a real-life figure in a drama?
Very much so. I think every role you take on, you should take on the responsibility of doing the best representation of that person or that character or that role. When it is a human being that has actually existed and it is a person that people know of, yeah, you feel an even more amount of pressure to do a good job. The sad story behind this is the fact that after it was announced that I was going to be playing the role of Bruce he sadly died, and so I never got to meet him which was a shame. It then felt even more of a responsibility to portray this man in the most authentic and accurate way possible. But I feel that when you take on any role you should do your best at it.
How is Bruce introduced to us in film one of The Great Train Robbery, A Robber’s Tale?
At the point you meet Bruce Reynolds, the year is 1962. The film starts off with a robbery at London Airport, which is now what we know as Heathrow Airport. It was a huge robbery at the time and Bruce was a hugely successful criminal. He lived a period of the year in South of France and had Aston Martins and Porches parked up on his drive - he had a very nice life. He dressed in Savile Row suits, which he had made for him, and he had shoes made for him too. He was a very smart dresser, and was never seen looking anything other than immaculate. And that’s where you meet him – at the height of what he is – of his criminal career, but still hungry for the big job. He was famous for saying the great train robbery for him was his Sistine Chapel; it was the pièce de résistance of a criminal getaway. So that’s where you meet him, this man that’s looking for the ultimate job that stops him from having to do it again.
What did you like about this period?
The Sixties was all about style and a certain look. But what was interesting about 1963 was that it was pre-Beatles so the clothes of that time, especially the suits, were very different from the clothes post-Beatlemania. Also Bruce was incredibly passionate about The Rat Pack and Frank Sinatra, he loved that sort of music and that sort of lifestyle - he smoked Montecristo cigars – that was his life. He lived it. He didn’t just pretend to be it, he was that person. So the style of the era is very much prominent in the film. Nothing is left out. The vehicles were authentic and the clothing was all of the period, and it looks great! I’ve been quoted on this many times, but you do all the work as the actor and you get into the skin of the character, but as soon as you put on that costume and the hair is done, that’s the icing on the cake. And with Bruce there was a lot of those little things that he had, the cigars or the glasses, hair being quiffed, suits being perfectly fitted – and that was him. There were so many pictures of Bruce I’ve looked at during that period of his life. He went out to the best clubs in London and was driven by chauffeurs. They lived it up – they really did. In a way they rubbed the police and detectives' faces in it constantly, as the money they were spending was often hot.
How did you perfect his accent?
Voices are always a challenge. I always have to work at each accent I do. I worked with a dialect coach, a lady called Penny Dyer who I’ve worked with on theatre productions and on film, and so we spent a lot of time perfecting the little idiosyncratic things that Bruce had with his accent. He wasn’t a plain South London lad. He had been brought up as a war child out of London, so he had a slight Suffolk rounding to some of his words. There was a couple of his sounding of words I had to acquire to make sure it was authentic. I hope I did a good job. It’s a lovely accent. Also I was surrounded by proper Londoners – some great actors, Paul Anderson and Neil Maskell – so listening to their real London accents obviously just informed me even more of being authentic and making sure it was right.
What was Bruce’s relationship like with the rest of the gang?
In real life the great train robbers spent a lot of time with each other, so what you are very aware of when you read the stories and see the documentaries, is that they would never ever do anybody in. They never gave up names of the crew – even if they went to prison. I’ve been told there are some robbers who never actually went to prison as they never had their names given to the police. So there was this camaraderie, this real sense of friendship between them. Our director Julian [Jarrold] and all the actors felt for this to feel authentic and have a sense of that strength and bond of brothers, we had to have that for real. So we hung out a lot and we got to rehearse too which meant we really got to suss each other out physically. They were a lovely bunch to work with and I’m looking forward to seeing their performances more than myself!
And finally, how much do we see of Bruce in the second film, A Copper’s Tale?
There are several scenes that Bruce pops up in the second film, and they are all quite brilliant. There is one scene I’m sure which people won’t believe actually happened, but apparently it did. It’s a scene where he somehow manages to convince the coppers that he is not Bruce Reynolds by doing something so crazy but brilliant that he gets away with it and goes on the run for a few more months.
It was wonderful filming that and I remember being told when Jim Broadbent said yes to playing the role of the detective and I was just over the moon to hear that he was going to be playing the role. It was very exciting and nice to be part of the second story. It really was a massive thing to catch these robbers as they’d humiliated the police force in such an obvious way. The police had this massive vendetta against them and made sure they went down. Thirty years is an extraordinary large amount of time for a robbery at that point, but it was to set a precedent and make an example of them.
It was a wonderful filming experience and it’s a fantastic scene when Bruce finally gets caught. The energy between Jim and myself when we did that scene was wonderful – it’s a great moment because you feel like these two men who were very driven but were from different sides of the tracks, but they somehow had similarities. It was a really enjoyable couple of days we had shooting that scene.
» 17.09.2013 » 
