Jack Hazan and David Mingay's Rude Boy is now showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries—including the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, Turkey, and Ireland—in the series Rediscovered.
London, 1978: Ray Gange, a purposeless punk, shuffles from the unemployment benefit office to his beer-money job at a porno bookstore, selling dirty magazines to shifty-looking customers. Meanwhile, young fascists storm the streets, hurling abuse and waving banners in their fight against “communism in the classroom” and “race-mix propaganda.” Margaret Thatcher is on the cusp of seizing power and the National Front is at the height of its popularity. Racist graffiti, large-scale unemployment, run-down social housing, and right-wing riots: in five minutes flat, Rude Boy (1980) tells you everything you need to know about Britain at the dark end of the 1970s.
As much a gritty social-realist document of a country in transition as a charged concert film of the pioneering punk band the Clash, Rude Boy is loosely arranged around the story of a young punk’s drunken stumble into the music industry, only to be spat out again. Jack Hazan and David Mingay merge booze-soaked dramatic scenarios, live concert scenes, and real street footage of riots and protests into an electrifying look at pre-Thatcher Britain. The film was independently produced and financed—just like Hazan and Mingay’s previous collaboration, the David Hockney docudrama A Bigger Splash (1973)—and, out of economic necessity, stages semi-improvised scenes in which real people play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. Much like the music scene it documents, Rude Boy’s lasting effect is raw, unpolished, and in-your-face.
For fans of the Clash, the film is understandably a cult object, with torrid fallouts, never-better live musical performances, and rare behind-the-scenes glimpses of the recording of their feted second album, Give ’Em Enough Rope. Less concerned with narrative climaxes and high drama than with exploring the mood of a moment, Rude Boy moves at a stubbornly meandering tempo, with extended musical sequences or surly rehearsals interrupting the flow of the film. In fact, what could be more punk than to stop caring where the story is going and choose to spend the time lurking in a toilet cubicle? But neither Hazan nor Mingay were punks, far from it; both were substantially older than their punk subjects and only one of them was sympathetic to the scene. Mingay, a Cambridge-educated filmmaker and editor, had become interested in the punk scene by coming across their scuffles with police in Chelsea. Hazan, a lover of jazz and classical music, was happy to come along for the ride.
Joe Strummer (left) and Ray Gange in Rude Boy (Jack Hazan & David Mingay). Courtesy of Jack Hazan.
Almost superseding the rare window the film opens onto late-1970s London is the rough-edged veneer of its troubled production history, which has turned Rude Boy into one of punk cinema’s great films maudits. Moments of brilliance emerge when the artificiality of the film’s staged scenarios give way to something verging on the “authentic.” From a modern vantage point, this prefigures our current era of constructed reality, involving, to borrow Grace Dent’s lucid description of The Only Way Is Essex, “real people in modified situations, saying unscripted lines but in a structured way.” But this approach was not without its risks, creating combustible tensions that, shall we say, not everyone has been pleased about. At one point, the young nonprofessional actor (and real-life Clash roadie) Ray Gange and lead singer Joe Strummer talk about left-wing politics as they sink pints in Soho’s John Snow pub. Their now-infamous conversation feels uncensored and may well have been a source of remorse for its then-20-year-old star Gange.
Controversial in its portrayal of the era’s countercultural and institutional racism, and also inits relationship with its surly, non-cooperative subjects, Rude Boy came out, after premiering at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival, to mixed reviews. The Clash publicly disowned the film and later threatened legal action against the directors, largely due to how the film treated its Black characters (although the band allegedly also found the film “boring”). “We didn't like what they were doing with the Black people,” Strummer told Melody Maker, “because they were showing them dipping into pockets and then they were shown being done for something and that was their only role in the film [...] Who wants to propagate that? That's what the right wing use.” The Clash had badges printed that read “I don't want Rude Boy Clash Film.” Though its impact might have been felt at the box office, this campaign did the film’s cult aura a world of good.
Newly restored in 4K, Rude Boy is ready to be rediscovered, returning to us at a time when racial intolerance, political disenchantment, and economic decline are once again the vultures circling society’s carcasses. A lot of the film was shot around the streets of a pre-gentrified South London only a couple of years before the Brixton riots of 1981 proved a watershed moment for race relations in Britain. Even with its various faults, the film is acutely perceptive, I think, in delineating the outcome that ‘“hostile environment”’ strategies have on public life. If you institutionally spread and condone hate, it will flourish.
With Rude Boy now showing exclusively on MUBI, I interviewed Jack Hazan about punks, improvisation, and the art of taking risks.
Courtesy of Jack Hazan.
NOTEBOOK: I’d love to start by talking about improvisation in Rude Boy. How structured are the fictional scenes, and how much of it was improvised? How did you and David direct the participants, who are more or less playing versions of themselves?
JACK HAZAN: Everything was set up and very little was left to chance, except for the performances. Some of the performances were done for us. The scene with Joe and Ray, where Joe plays piano: he did that for us, he wrote that track for us. Otherwise everything else was original material. Ray was directed and told what to do, mostly by David. The whole thing was really his idea. I can’t say it was mine. I was really just a drag on him, trying to make everything practical and filmable, directable. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible. His ideas went everywhere and they had to be contained. I was doing the containing and putting it in a frame.
NOTEBOOK: What first attracted you to the punk scene?
HAZAN: David [Mingay] thought we should make a film about what was going on at the time. There were riots going on in Chelsea, with punks having running battles with police. It was all centered around the Malcolm McLaren shop SEX, which he had with Vivienne Westwood. David used to go there every Saturday and eventually he asked me to do a bit of filming. I had this 35mm camera and brought it along on a couple of Saturdays, except I never saw any rioting at all!
David went to this friend of ours who had a clothes shop but was also a filmmaker, John Pearse. He used to make putative features that never really got off the ground, and we would cut it and put it together for him. All these riots had been around punk, the new music at that time. One day we asked John what the biggest band was at that moment, and he told us it would be the Clash. We got in touch with them and got in agreement with Bernie Rose, the manager, to make a film. But it wasn’t straightforward at all…
NOTEBOOK: Famously, yes. I’m curious what the band thought they were getting into. Do you think they had a sense of what this film was going to do for their image? What were they expecting?
HAZAN: Bernie involved them. I don’t think they knew what the end product was going to be. In fact, they were quite shocked. They thought the film was very reactionary while they thought of themselves as progressive, liberal, and anti-racist. They saw Rude Boy as conforming to stereotypes of Black people, and they were very upset at the end.
NOTEBOOK: It’s interesting, though, that they don’t come across as reactionary at all in the film.
HAZAN: No they don’t, but they thought we were. They thought our entire treatment of the film was reactionary. Particularly Mick Jones, I think.
The cast of Rude Boy, from the promotional fanzine.
NOTEBOOK: What was the thinking then around the subplot, with the Black youths?
HAZAN: The subplot was a problem. I didn’t want to do it, but eventually got dragged into it. It was another added complexity: it was completely Byzantine. Usually when you have a subplot, it crosses with the main plot. But this one didn’t; it was like starting another movie. We tried like mad to recut the second plot to conform to something in the main film.
It was an essay, really, for David. He was describing the ethos of the time around the race discrimination and police abuse that was everywhere. He tried to persuade us to put as much of that in as possible, and there is a lot we left out and didn’t film that he wanted to.
NOTEBOOK: So the band sees the film and they don’t like it. Then what happened? What was the fallout?
HAZAN: Legal action was threatened. I remember at the time the band sent a telegram to every single cinema in the UK that this film was showing in, threatening them with legal action. It didn’t come to anything. It was scary, and in the end very nasty. A couple of years later, I was in Berwick Street Market in Soho and suddenly there was Joe Strummer. He came up to me and said, “Are you going to hit me?” “Why would I hit you?” I asked. “Because we were so nasty to you.” About a year later, Mick had a life-threatening illness and his personality changed, including his attitude to us: he became very friendly.
NOTEBOOK: How on board are the band now? Has their attitude changed? It’s such a cult hit for fans of the band but other people too. The furor they created benefited the film in some way, certainly not its box-office impact but its reputation.
HAZAN: It’s certainly an interesting document, fifty years later. I don’t know what I think about the film. In the restoration [process], I’ve had to see it over and over again. It is remarkable, and the filming is too. For most of the film, the camera is on my shoulder. And I think it’s remarkably well done.
The Clash onstage. Courtesy of Jack Hazan.
NOTEBOOK: How did you shoot the music footage? A lot of the time you’re on stage, it’s very intimate.
HAZAN: I was taught by a French film director called Claude Ventura. He used to have a program called Pop 2 (1970-1974) on the second channel in France. We used to go round filming all the rock groups, heavy metal mostly. He knew precisely how to film musicians. His method was to get on the stage whenever you could. But even if you couldn’t, you should never look a guitar head on.
The first couple of numbers you could throw away, because you were learning what to do. I learned that from him. I filmed maybe a dozen programs for Claude and learned how to shoot musicians. I filmed at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.
NOTEBOOK: Was that Murray Lerner’s documentary, Message to Love?
HAZAN: He was terrible. [Laughs.] I was on stage there with Jimi Hendrix and the Doors. I actually shot a lot of music. In this film I had access to the stage and got on stage for a lot of the numbers. It's from a particular point of view that people don’t normally see.
NOTEBOOK: As Ray becomes a roadie, the shots seem to move to the side of the stage.
HAZAN: The shots get more sophisticated. Don’t forget this is a 35mm studio camera, which is on my shoulder, and sometimes it has a 1000-foot magazine, which makes it quite heavy. When I’m squatting on the ground and have to get up, I signal to my assistant and he pulls me up with the camera to get to a standing position, because it's that heavy! You can’t tell; it's quite smooth and mobile.
Ray Gange. Courtesy of Jack Hazan.
NOTEBOOK: How did you end up picking Ray?
HAZAN: David chose him. He had roadied for the band before and it was a failure. So David got him to do it again. Ray took on the role with which he was familiar. He also worked in a sex shop. He’s like an innocent, a sap, spouting these right-wing views. He was too tall for me. It means something for the audience to look up to someone. He was a statue, if you’re looking up. So for me, he was too tall. We went with him anyway.
NOTEBOOK: Why does he have a writing credit and not others?
HAZAN: It was him and David concocting these things together. We were used to working in this way. On A Bigger Splash, I’d see Hockney’s crowd, I’d go home and write things down and then present it to them the next day: this is what you are going to say. For A Bigger Splash, it would just be a couple of questions, where this was more complicated. I was doing everything: the filming, setups.
NOTEBOOK: How did you come to work in this way?
HAZAN: We were using real people in the roles they play in life. We didn’t have money for actors. They would have wondered who we were anyway. I wasn’t from the theater, but from a visual background and that’s looked upon with suspicion in the UK. What do you know about words? I did know about words, and in A Bigger Splash I wrote the monologue. There was a lot of writing. But not in a three-act structure style.
You have to understand the characters, so if you give them dialogue to say or a suggestion of what to say, it has to be close to them, otherwise they won’t play ball. In A Bigger Splash, the performers would ask me, “How do you know that? That actually happened!” You learn a lot from being around these people and you can guess what they might be saying to each other. Very often I got very close to what actually happened. Which is extraordinary. That happened in Rude Boy as well.
I wasn’t a part of the art scene and I wasn’t a part of the punk scene. I don’t like rock music, which is helpful. I liked David Hockney but I wasn't an expert. It gives you a distance. When you start filming them you start off completely objectively, but then, of course, you are listening to the music, so you get more and more excited.
Mick Jones. Courtesy of Jack Hazan.
NOTEBOOK: Did your attitude to punk change after filming?
HAZAN: I was dispassionate at the beginning and I was dispassionate at the end. David was completely taken with it, completely absorbed by the scene and the fate of the Black boys, because I don’t think they did very well. Some of them came to a sticky end. I don’t know what really happened to them after the filming, but it wasn’t good.
NOTEBOOK: It’s those aspects that resonate today—particularly with policing. Did you know you were catching something?
HAZAN: It was honest filmmaking. Yes we were faking it, in that we were setting up scenes, but based on reality, what had happened. It's not a fantasy. There were terrifying confrontations with the fascists on the streets, where they were screaming abuse about Jews and Black people. It’s pretty horrifying. I never got into altercations. I was filming in the middle of a riot in Birmingham, there were bricks being thrown, it was dodgy. You wouldn’t necessarily know it had really happened though, it's filmed so dispassionately. Some people asked for some footage of it and wanted to know how much it cost to set it all up. I couldn’t believe it. They thought it was all constructed and faked. But it's completely real. There’s a control there that is maybe misleading. It segues so well between the fiction and the street scenes.
NOTEBOOK: What did you make of Joe Strummer?
HAZAN: He was definitely charismatic and enigmatic. He wouldn’t let you know too much about him. He was very easy to direct. The band was young but they knew what they wanted. Paul Simonon was difficult, almost childish actually. He behaved very badly at times, like a child. Everybody thought it was normal, but it wasn’t.
NOTEBOOK: The class dynamic comes through in the conversation between Ray and Joe in the pub. Were you aware of Strummer’s background?
HAZAN: We knew Joe’s parents were diplomats in Turkey and had come from a well-off family so he could afford to espouse these ethics. Whereas Ray came from a working-class background and was reflecting some of the ideas circulating at the time. I think Ray would probably wince now at the views he espoused in the film. He’s an artist now and quite left-wing. The film was the beginning and the ending of Ray’s acting career. He was locked in that film and couldn’t get out of it.
NOTEBOOK: And what about you? How did you feel about the project as it wrapped up?
HAZAN: The response to A Bigger Splash and Rude Boy was not what I thought it would be. In certain circles, people are ecstatic about Rude Boy, in others very critical. You live with that. I never wanted to make a mainstream film, and what’s more, I was never invited to. [Laughs.] Certainly after Rude Boy I was never invited to do a film for another 20 years. That was too bad. I had a life in being a lighting cameraman, director of photography, mostly in commercials. Then I got successful shooting cars in America. [Laughs.] It was disappointing I couldn’t do any more movies.
Down the years, you can feel better, but it still doesn’t take away all the years of disappointment. They are still there. You just learn to live with it. Then there’s the band: the Clash were the biggest rock band in the world, and then they broke up because they couldn’t stand each other.
Joe Strummer. Courtesy of Jack Hazan.
NOTEBOOK: Rude Boy looks expensive. How did it get funded? The band didn’t pay you.
HAZAN: Michael White, a theatrical impresario, financed Rude Boy, but we financed A Bigger Splash completely by ourselves. I remortgaged my house, in the end. To get film, the assistant cameraman would bring film stocks from disparate sources. We didn’t have money to buy virgin film stock until the very end of A Bigger Splash. We didn’t know if we would even finish it. It was a really existential bit of filmmaking. Is it going to happen, or isn’t it? You're living in the moment. You didn’t know if you could fashion an ending or not: it was terrifying. I had to wait two years to film the final scene of Celia Birtwell! It took two years to persuade her, God knows how, but she did it.
It was a force of personality, I just wouldn’t go away. In Rude Boy, there’s a plot, but it's flimsy: it's just Ray going on tour and then failing, going back to where he started. You have to have a compulsive personality, otherwise forget it. You walk away. It’s not worth it. If you go to bed thinking about this, it's the only way to make a film. Otherwise you just give up. You’re confronted with all these people who don’t know what you’re doing. Risk is terrible, it can break you. I’m just thankful it didn’t break us.