Locke: Tom Hardy stars in the road movie to end all road movies

For Steven Knight’s unmissable new film, Locke, Tom Hardy spends the entire 90 minutes driving on a motorway with the camera on his face. It’s an unconventional story that demanded a different approach, discovers Nick Curtis
17 April 2014

It sounds like the sort of daft script idea Alan Partridge might pitch: a 90-minute feature film set entirely in a car, about a lone man driving from Birmingham to London, with other characters appearing only as voices on his phone, the dialogue alternating between domestic drama and the pouring of concrete on a huge construction site. Yet Locke, written and directed by Steven Knight and starring Tom Hardy at the head of a stellar but otherwise invisible cast, is the most singular, arresting and surprisingly cinematic British film you will see this year. And its creation was almost as unusual as its conception.

Knight came up with the idea when directing his debut feature film, Hummingbird, with Jason Statham, which he also wrote. “I discovered that anything shot in an urban environment with a digital camera was quite hypnotic,” he says. “And I was interested in stripping the process of making a film down to its basics.”

He pictured a man, Locke, urgently driving, fighting crises via his phone — “a real journey that is also a journey for a character who starts out with everything and ends up with nothing”.

Having worked on a building site as a student and met the site engineer on the Shard, he made Locke responsible for the biggest concrete pour in Europe “outside the nuclear and military” — thereby setting himself a narrative as well as a formal challenge: to make concrete interesting. (I’ve been asked not to reveal the nature of the domestic crisis.)

“It’s a very ordinary tragedy,” Knight concedes. “There are no gunshots or things that would make the papers. Could that sustain [an audience’s attention]? I really believe that when people go to the cinema, the most important thing is still the eyes of the actors.” Even so, this needed an unusually compelling actor, so Knight approached Hardy (the two are also working together on the second series of BBC2’s Peaky Blinders).

“Of course, Tom’s not available for about 11 years because he’s on big films, back-to-back,” says Guy Heeley, who produced Locke with his colleagues Paul Webster and Joe Wright at Shoebox Films. “So we reverse-engineered it around the only two weeks — in February — he was free. We got it financed off the idea of Tom being in it. Steve didn’t write the script till Christmas last year. Five weeks after he delivered the script, on January 5, we were shooting and a week later we were in post-production.” The entire budget was around $1.5 million (roughly £904,000).

It’s hard to imagine the film working without Hardy. He sports a beard and a soft South Wales accent. His Locke is afflicted with a cold and a conscience and a history of familial bitterness. He is a solid, patient, insistent man, and only once or twice betrays signs of stress. This, if anything, makes the film more tense, as does the constant expectation that the car will crash, or, at the very least, swerve — a bit of cinematic conditioning Knight was adamant he would not feed.

He was also insistent that the film should be shot as nearly as possible in real time and “live”. So for five days they ran the script from beginning to end, two or three times a night, between 9pm and 3am. There were three cameras focused on Hardy in the car, which was itself on a low-loader lorry, shooting in 37-minute takes, which was the capacity of the memory cards in the cameras.

“We basically shot it 16 times beginning to end and cut it together,” says Knight. Most directors would have recorded the voice parts of Locke’s interlocutors, but Knight put his actors “in a motorway service station conference room, with some red wine and biscuits, and on cue they’d go to a microphone next door to talk to Tom on the phone”.

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He had approached his first-choice actor for each role and was “shocked” that each and every one of them said yes — Olivia Colman, Ben Daniels, Andrew “Moriarty” Scott. Locke’s wife is played by the wonderful Ruth Wilson, his sons by Tom Holland and Bill Milner, the young stars of The Impossible and X-Men: First Class.

The whole thing almost collapsed before Hardy had even turned the ignition key on Locke’s BMW. “We were going to shoot it on the M1 between four junctions, but two weeks beforehand the Highways Agency reneged on our permission to film on motorways and the production nearly folded,” says Heeley. “Fortunately, we found the A13 going from Docklands out east is a three-lane road that, bizarrely, because of the way Docklands was developed, is privately owned. So we shot it there and on the North Circular in a circuit for five days. Then on the sixth day we stuck to the same route, without Tom. On days seven and eight we took two cars up to Birmingham — one drove the actual route all the way back, with a double [at the wheel], and we shot bits of hands, windscreen views, signage, all the crucial bits of the London approach. The other camera was on bridges shooting the cars going underneath, details of wheels and other stuff that is non-Tom.”

Ruth Wilson says that the combination of Knight’s reputation and the novelty of the project was irresistible. “I go for things that are different from the norm, challenging in a different way,” she says. “I hadn’t read anything like this before but I knew Tom’s work and lots of people signed onto it were brilliant. I thought, ‘What a great endeavour for Steve to be doing and what a great thing to be part of’.” She smiles. “Also, it wasn’t a huge time commitment…” Tom Holland echoes her sentiments: “I had never read anything like it.”

Before shooting began the entire cast read the script through together eight times, but after that Holland had to maintain a believable filial relationship with Hardy solely over the phone. “It was tricky at first but it didn’t have to be totally natural because we were on the phone,” he says. “There was room to make things more heightened here and there.”

Sightseers star Alice Lowe adds: “It was nerve-racking, trying to support the reality [Knight] was trying to create.” She plays a medical professional with whom Locke only exchanges a few lines. It’s a small part for an established writer and actor like her but the end result was “everything I hoped — strange and experimental and fascinating, with an amazing cast. You know, it was no hardship, hanging out with some really brilliant people for six days.”

The finished film is truly remarkable, not just for Hardy’s performance or the conviction and emotion with which the others invest their vocal parts. There is the detail — Locke’s Help for Heroes tax-disc holder, the ultimately gripping minutae of concrete-pouring, the alien glow and flare of motorway lights. But above all it is the combined tightness and everyday humanity of Knight’s vision that compels.

“Because of technology a lot of films invite the audience not to use their imagination, which invites people to create the characters themselves,” says Knight. “We didn’t know if there was an audience for this, but what’s great is that it’s people who are the furthest thing from art-house lovers who respond the most. A lot of middle-aged men who don’t usually go to cinemas end up with tears in their eyes. I think once people engage with the story, the character, they forget this is an experimental, unusual format. Once the story gets them, that’s it.”

Locke is released on Friday April 18.

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