Danny Dyer: East End Boy

by Joe Allan

  Danny refrained from taking any big jobs that might tie him up for an extended period of time, but he was able to work on a few smaller projects, the first of which was a film called Tabloid, which, despite boasting an impressive cast and a decent budget and a sharply observed satirical script, was never given a cinema or DVD release in the UK. For Danny, it acted as a timely reminder of the fickle nature of the film industry and proof that you can never tell where your next success, or indeed your next failure, is coming from.

  The next project he committed to seemed like the perfect stopgap job. He’d received a script from a film-maker named Thomas Clay, a first-time director who planned to finance his film completely with his own money. Danny was always flattered when talented new writers and directors approached him with work and the fact he would be paid a reasonable amount for only four days’ filming was a bonus. Danny’s big mistake – one he would never make again – was not reading the entire script.

  The movie was called The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael and Danny’s scenes only appear near the beginning of the film, and thus he didn’t bother to read past that point in the script. If he had, he would have come across some very disturbing parts of the story, featuring graphic sexual violence. When the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it received an unprecedented reaction from the audience for its extreme tastelessness. Danny started to see reports of people being sick as they watched it and, as the biggest name in the cast, he received part of the blame. He admitted in his book, ‘I was embarrassed to be associated with it, to be honest.’ Thankfully, the quality of his work on The Business meant that Robert Carmichael survives as little more than a footnote on Danny’s CV.

  He also managed to squeeze another minor project into this period of Nick Love-induced limbo, a romantic comedy entitled The Other Half. However, the film was woefully short on both romance and comedy, but the producers were planning to use the upcoming Euro 2004 football championships as the backdrop to the film and offered Danny tickets to every England match as a sweetener to ensure his involvement.

  The story saw Danny taking his new bride on honeymoon to Portugal on the pretence that it would be a beautiful holiday experience, while secretly sneaking out to every England match without her knowing this had been his intention all along.

  In the end, the film turned into a bit of a fiasco. Danny had to attend the England games alone as the producers had only managed to secure one ticket for each match. It seemed most of the budget for the film had been spent on acquiring these single tickets, leaving Danny to sleep on a blow-up mattress in the apartment he had to share with the lead actress and the producer. The crew had not secured any permits to allow them to film legally and everything had to be done on the fly, which was made virtually impossible by the fact Danny was now constantly recognized as ‘that guy from The Football Factory’. To round the farcical experience off, the ending of the film – which was meant to involve the couple celebrating their newfound love for each other as England lifted the trophy – was scuppered by England’s sharp exit from the tournament in the quarter-finals. Danny had considered jumping ship, but stayed on, buoyed by the fact England’s defeat meant the filming would wrap up early. He also had to endure one day’s filming with Vinnie Jones, who had been drafted in to bookend the film. Danny was not enamoured of Jones after his time on Mean Machine, and Jones’ behaviour here – leaving to go home immediately after shooting his scenes – would do nothing to improve their relationship.

  Thankfully, Nick Love had finally completed his script for The Business and there was a part in it created solely for Danny. The director contacted him personally, offering him the lead role. Having a part written specifically for him was a great honour for Danny, as he felt it was a real seal of approval from Love, one which he did not take for granted.

  In his autobiography, he described feeling like a child on Christmas Day as he got the script. Such excitement is certainly understandable, as this was Danny’s first real leading role. He was set to play Frankie, a naive wannabe London gangster who dreams of escaping the inevitable dead-end drudgery of his working-class background and making something of his life. After he is involved in a serious assault, he flees the UK and agrees to make a ‘no-questions-asked’ delivery to a family friend, Playboy Charlie, on the Costa del Sol. Unwittingly, Frankie has made his first drug run. Frankie and Charlie bond immediately, and the latter decides to take the young man under his wing. Over the course of the next decade, he becomes embroiled in their various illegal exploits and reaps the many rewards associated with a life of crime – money, beautiful women and power. As the gang’s involvement in the Moroccan drug trade escalates, so too does Frankie’s influence with them, and eventually he is enjoying the luxury lifestyle and status he has fantasized about all his life.

  As with The Football Factory, Love was keen not to glamorize the lifestyle or the violence of the drug dealers. He wanted to make the consequences of their actions clear for both criminal and victim, and did not shy away from showing the gang’s eventual downfall. As always, Love was much more interested in exploring the relationships of a group of people thrown together and living in extreme circumstances, examining how far their loyalties would stretch once tested.

  Love aimed to lift the lid on the ex-pat criminal gangs operating in and around the Spanish coastal regions, hoping to do for organized crime gangs what The Football Factory had done for football hooliganism. The film is set in the early 1980s, at a time when Spain’s Costa del Sol became a safe haven for countless fugitives, criminals and gangsters – so much so that the region was christened the Costa del Crime by the British media.

  Danny was set to join Love and the rest of the crew in Spain for a week of preparation and rehearsals before filming began. After severe flight delays, Danny arrived at their Spanish hotel a little worse for wear, and unfortunately for him, the director was waiting for him in the hotel lobby and was furious when he saw how drunk his lead actor was. Thinking Danny had learnt nothing and was throwing the lifeline he’d given him back in his face, Love stormed off.

  Danny was disappointed in himself, not least because he was more or less drug-free at this stage, but also because he knew worrying about the actors he had hand-picked for his film was the last thing Love needed. While it didn’t exactly set the tone for the entire shoot, it acted as an early indication of the pressure Love felt filming The Business.

  This was a big step up for Love in terms of delivering on his early promise, and he had been given a much bigger budget to work with, and consequently had to deal with the expectations that went with it. In an interview on The Business’s DVD extras, Love says, ‘On my first film, I had to answer to people. I didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t found my aggression. I didn’t really understand the game. But The Football Factory and The Business, they are both exactly the films I wanted to make.’

  A perfectionist, Love expected everyone and everything to be just the way he wanted it on a film set, and with this movie in particular, he had the added complication of the 1980s period setting. He was determined every element would be authentically eighties, stating on the DVD, ‘You can’t afford to be wrong. You just can’t get one thing wrong or it will scupper someone’s enjoyment of the film.’ This preoccupation with capturing the detail, or, as Love himself describes it, the ‘camp and cool’ nature of the decade, would cause several problems with the film’s production designers and set dressers. As a result, the atmosphere on set was decidedly more tense and aggressive than Danny was used to – and, considering Love’s last picture saw drunken football hooligans on the production, that was saying something.

  Littered with minute details, the film flawlessly captures the look and feel of the era. From Adidas supplying vintage trainers for the actors to wear to the costume department sourcing original designer gear and clothes from extinct fashion labels, everything looks real. Love would veto certain branded shopping bags appearing in a shot if he was unsure about their aut
henticity and double-checked every bottle on display behind the bar in the nightclub scenes to ensure it belonged there. The film’s colour palette changes from dull, washed-out greys in the sequences set in England to the bold, over-saturated colours and DayGlo highlights used to signify the hedonistic extravagance of the Spanish lifestyle. Add a soundtrack featuring some of the biggest eighties hits (and a few lesser-known cult classics), and Love succeeded in creating a perfect, nostalgic snapshot of the decade.

  Danny’s preparation, on the other hand, was minimal. Love was well aware of what Danny could deliver, but wanted him to understand the idea of ‘honour among thieves’ and get to grips with the relationships that exist between men who are bound to one another more by necessity than love. He needed him to see how mutual distrust and the fear of betrayal can create stronger bonds than friendship. He had asked Danny to watch Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and The Godfather trilogy to get an understanding of one of the main themes of his film, in the latter paying particular attention to the journey Al Pacino’s character makes as he rises through the ranks of the Mob towards his ultimate fate.

  After getting off on the wrong foot with Love on the film, things for Danny improved once they started filming. The director had shown a lot of faith in him, giving him the lead role in his biggest film to date, and Danny was not only relishing the opportunity to work with Love again, but was also glad to reconnect with Tamer Hassan and his old Charlie Bright and Football Factory co-star, Roland Manookian. The fact that the movie had been custom-written for the actors, using Love’s familiarity with their past performances, nurtured an almost telepathic understanding between the group of actors and the director.

  This meant the mood changed from tense to extremely focused very quickly. That feeling of being totally wrapped up in their characters wasn’t left on set; Danny recalls he and the principal actors would head back to the hotel after the day’s work and talk obsessively about their characters and their relationships well into the early hours. This total immersion in their roles would continue for over two months of shooting.

  It was an intoxicating, creative atmosphere for Danny and, as he revealed in an interview for DVD, one which had its positives and negatives. ‘[I’ve got] a lot on my mind. The hardest thing for me is shaking it off at the end of the day because my [head’s] all over the place at the moment. I’m so involved with this job. I’m obsessed with it, which is great when you’re filming but [not so much] when you go home.’ He added, ‘I’m learning a lot as an actor because I’ve never been that involved in a part; I’ve never had the opportunity to [employ this] method.’

  As part of his extra responsibility on the film, Love allowed Danny to take part in the casting process for the main female character, and he was only too happy to sit in on the auditions of countless beautiful girls to test their on-screen chemistry. The eventual choice of Georgina Chapman in the role may not have been the best choice, as the lack of a spark between Danny and Chapman is clearly visible in the finished cut.

  It is probably just as well that his leading lady was less of a distraction than she might have been, as a large contingent of the Dyer family had been invited along for some of the location shoot. Perhaps conscious of what had happened on Danny’s last extended movie abroad, Joanne and Dani, as well as Danny’s mother, grandma and sister, all spent some holiday time with him while he was filming in Spain. Being able to show off a little and treating his family was one of the many highlights of the experience.

  Principal photography continued well into October 2004, with additional location footage shot back in the UK for the opening scenes and flashbacks. When filming was over, there was a long and exhaustive process to get the picture ready for official release. Love, speaking in an interview on the DVD, said, ‘There’s not a single person in the cast that has [given] anything less than 100 per cent, I love it.’ In extracting yet another uninhibited and well-balanced performance from Danny, Love had demonstrated that their ongoing collaboration was an increasingly fruitful one.

  With the finished film in the can, it seemed the intensity and passion everyone had expended on the project was paying off. Love in particular received praise upon its release in September 2005, with Adrian Hennigan in his review for the BBC Film website proclaiming, ‘Nick Love is now officially Britain’s hottest director.’

  The movie was yet another entry in Love’s study of the complexity of male relationships, something he’d continue to explore in his work, including in his last release, The Sweeney, in 2012. But with The Business, Love was also reaching for something more layered and textured. The film has obvious thematic links to the Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s, but Love, through his choice of locations and shooting style, also wanted to conjure images of the Wild West, and in particular the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. The lawlessness and unrestricted violence meted out by the ex-pat gangsters, as well as their corruption and exploitation of the Spanish locals, acts as a decent metaphor for the colonization of the American Old West.

  The Business was fairly well received by UK critics upon its release in 2005, Jason Solomons labelling it ‘deliciously entertaining’ in his Observer review, while NME branded it ‘a gangster gem’. The film fared best with the ‘lads’ mags’, which took the mix of gangsters, guns and girls to their hearts. Here was a film that spoke their language, Nuts calling it ‘savagely funny’ and awarding it five stars, and Jeff Maysh at Loaded matching the rating, writing, ‘finally, a blindin’ British gangster film’. Front raved the film had ‘more guns than Goodfellas, more charlie than Casino and more swearing than Scarface’. The movie also performed at the UK box office, turning a profit on its release and becoming a sizeable hit on DVD, having sold around a million copies at the time of writing.

  There is little doubt the film stands up today as a high point in Danny’s career. His director, Nick Love, revealed during the ‘making of ’ documentary for the film, ‘He’s got this amazing stillness [that proved] to be priceless on this film’, and told Film4 that ‘most of the stuff was done in just one or two takes’. Danny, in The Films of Danny Dyer, agreed it was a quality piece of work, saying, ‘I’m so proud of The Business . . . I’m really happy I’m in it. I’m so on it in that film.’ He finished, ‘It set me up nicely for whatever I was going to do next.’

  As it turned out, The Business would be the only time Nick Love would write a role specifically for Danny, and, as such, the film is still the pair’s masterpiece. Their relationship had been extremely productive and had allowed both director and actor to reach new heights in their professional lives. In the intervening years, however, Love has struggled to recapture the promise evident in his early work and has only made three movies since filming The Business. Today, Danny’s relationship with Love has petered out and it remains to be seen if the director will find another suitably inspirational muse for his work. But for Danny, back in 2005, their collaboration was not yet over, and elsewhere, things were looking up.

  MTV contacted Danny about an idea they had for a documentary called The Backpacker’s Guide to Thailand, which would follow a British backpacker travelling around the country, witnessing first hand the devastation left behind by the tsunami that hit on 26 December 2004. They hoped the awareness from the piece might help kick-start the country’s shattered economy, which had relied so heavily on the tourist trade. Danny needed the money and, relishing the thought of a free holiday, agreed to head out to Thailand in February 2005. He admits that he wasn’t really thinking about what he was about to see, yet, even so, nothing could have prepared him for the reality of the situation.

  MTV eased Danny into the job by taking him around a few of the inland tourist destinations, but it wasn’t long before he was confronted with the full force of what had happened only a few weeks before. He interviewed survivors who had faced the total destruction of everything they owned and met many who had seen the deaths of their entire families. Soon he was helping the aid workers and locals as they sear
ched for bodies, hoping that DNA testing would assist in identifying as many of the deceased as possible. Danny was as unaware as most of the viewers back home as to what had happened to the country after the news crews left the scene, and it made for heartbreaking viewing. He was deeply affected by his experiences there and felt it changed him in ways that were impossible to describe; watching his distress and astonishment as he reacted to what he saw around him was genuinely moving, and all too real. Danny began to think about Joanne and Dani back home, appreciating what it would mean to lose something so precious. As a tribute to the people he’d met and as a constant reminder of what was most important in his life he decided to get Dani’s name tattooed on his hand – he’d never again undervalue what was most precious to him.

  Next up for Danny would be a comedy horror film called Severance. The mastermind behind the film was relative newcomer Christopher Smith. Smith’s debut feature, Creep, had wowed critics and become a cult hit with both British and American audiences. For his follow-up, Smith wanted to use real locations and ramp up the humour, as well as the horror elements. The film saw Danny play another version of his drug-obsessed, pill-popping persona, perfected in Human Traffic. He would be one of a group of co-workers sent on a team-building weekend by their employer. The group get lost on the way to their hotel and end up staying at a disused research facility, and are soon being picked off, one by one, by the human experiments that have been abandoned there.

  Getting the part had been an unusual struggle for Danny. The producers were sure Danny could handle the action and the physical side of the performance, but had doubts about his ability to deliver on the comedy elements of the script, wrongly assuming his range was limited to hard men and hooligans. Director Smith made sure they saw Human Traffic, which eventually helped swing the decision Danny’s way. Danny headed off to Hungary with a spring in his step: he was about to play his first action hero role – be it one with a shotgun in one hand and a joint in the other!