Hard news

‘THIS is the North, we do what we want,” snarls an officer in the West Yorkshire police, as he throws a journalist from a moving vehicle.

Having previously stripped, beaten and tortured him (handcuffs can be used as an offensive weapon, I must warn you), being chucked into the road is the least of his problems.

It’s fair to say that the police won’t be using Red Riding as a recruitment film.

The villains, including Sean Bean’s crooked property developer, are nasty, but the police, on the evidence offered here, are just as bad.

The three films, all with different directors and set in different periods of the Seventies and Eighties, are based on David Peace’s novels.

The first, set in 1974, isn’t an easy watch, as journalist Eddie Dunford returns from an unsuccessful time in London to work on the Yorkshire Post as a crime reporter.

He thinks he spots a link between the disappearance of several young girls in West Yorkshire. But his pursuit of a scoop leads him into a murky world of police brutality, dodgy business deals and a criminal underworld that works hand-inhand with corrupt coppers.

His involvement with the mother (Rebecca Hall) of a missing girl gets him even deeper into trouble with both sides of the law. “The devil triumphs when good men do nowt,” someone reminds him. But it isn’t easy for good to triumph in this sordid, violent world.

Director Julian Jarrold and a good cast – some, like Warren Clarke and David Morrissey, barely glimpsed but who’ll surface in later films – ensure this is brilliantly filmed and acted. But the slow pace, all-pervasive gloom, and the unattractiveness of virtually every character makes it difficult to connect. Some viewers will, I suspect, give up long before the bloody finale.

The role of journalist Eddie sees Andrew Garfield following his Bafta-winning performance in the TV drama Boy A and a role in the Robert Redford-directed movie Lions For Lambs.

Oddly enough, he did want to be a journalist at one point. “Part of me now is still very interested in investigative journalism,”

he says.

“As research for the role, I worked at the Yorkshire Post for a bit, which was really interesting. It was fascinating to spend time in their office and to see a big bunch of people with their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in our world, country and city right this second.

“It helped me to understand what draws people to a job like that. I’m a very curious person and I do find aspects of journalism really exciting. I’d still really like to do travel journalism at some point in my life.”

Eddie finds a sense of purpose as he investigates the missing girls, seeing a lot of injustice and ugliness that he wants to reverse.

“He’s got a very vivid imagination and underneath the hard exterior, he’s a very sensitive person. He’s a lost child within himself really. He has a real empathy for the darker shades of life because there’s a lot of darkness in his own life that he’s inflicted upon himself,”

he says.

The film meant going back to the Seventies. He wasn’t born until 1983, so it was all new to him. He was fascinated by the cars, clothes, adverts playing on TV, and all the things that were so different.

“I also got to drive a Seventies Vauxhall which was great,” he adds.

Garfield’s involved in some pretty disturbing scenes, as well as stunts including falling out of a car, a shoot-out and being beaten. “I found it very intense. The scenes weren’t easy to film and they weren’t fun, but they felt real, which is the most important thing,” he says.

“It was a struggle to throw myself into something so dangerous, particularly in the scenes where I’m being tortured, but it was scary and exciting at the same time.

“You have to try and make a joke in between takes, otherwise there’s a danger of taking it all too seriously. There was a real sense of community on set which helped everyone. We had a good balance between enjoying what we did and being very serious about it.”