Moses, Margate and the Red Sea Algae
In Penny Woolcock’s modern-day take on the Book of Exodus, marginal members of society are confined by a political Pharaoh in the seaside town of Margate. Jan Gilbert talks to Penny about her unconventional approach, including use of professional and non-professional actors.

Born to a middle-class family and raised in a conservative British community in Argentina, writer-director Penny Woolcock’s life could easily have been very different. Her ex-pat peers in Argentina were content with their buttoned-up lives, which took them from boarding school and on to work as secretaries or schoolteachers until they found eligible bankers to wed. But Penny was more interested in the people living in the shanty towns she passed by on her boarding school’s weekly outing to church. So after a year stifled by blue serge skirts and blazers, Penny ran away from home at the age of sixteen to begin her own life on the margins. This new life took her to Barcelona, where she had a baby at nineteen, and then to the UK, where she had what she calls a ‘peripatetic and precarious existence’, before falling into filmmaking in her mid-30s.

Although a relative latecomer to the film industry, Penny quickly made an impression as a director, winning a Royal Television Society Award for her first film When the Dog Bites, a documentary for Channel 4 about a Newcastle housing estate. It was while making that film that Penny became interested in how communities carve out new lifestyles based on alternative economies and moralities following the decline of traditional industries. Her fascination with life on the margins and the humour and ingenuity needed to survive it has infused much of her subsequent work, from the documentary The Wet House to her trilogy of Leeds-based dramas, Tina Goes Shopping, Tina Takes a Break, and Mischief Night. Her latest feature film Exodus, a contemporary retelling of the second book of the Old Testament, is no exception.

The story at the heart of Exodus, of people exiled in their own country, is one that Penny has wanted to bring to the big screen for a long time. It was in her mind as far back as Tina Goes Shopping (1999), which she originally titled Exodus, only changing its name when she found nobody understood why she had given it that title. However, when her new film Exodus screens at the London Film Festival this month and on Channel 4 in November, there is little chance of any similar confusion.

So what is it about the biblical tale of exile that has drawn Penny back to it, over eight years since her first Tina film? ‘I think it’s one of those stories, a bit like certain fairy stories, that hold a sort of truth in it,’ she tells me. ‘Also the Jews in Exodus are not classic victims. They behave really badly. They’re always arguing and complaining, so it’s psychologically much truer than victim narratives. And there’s the other story in it that I love, which is that we’re all looking for the Promised Land.’

When Michael Morris, co-director of Artangel, which pioneers new ways of collaborating with artists, approached Penny about a project in Margate, she realised it would be the perfect place to set her version of the biblical story. ‘I knew a lot of asylum seekers arrive through Dover and are put in empty hotels in the impoverished little seaside town of Margate. And I knew the sort of tensions that come out of that: the asylum seekers are looking for their Promised Land, if you like, a place of safety, and the local population, with its high unemployment, feels marginalised. So it seemed like a good story for that place.’

Of course Penny’s first port of call while writing the screenplay was the Old Testament, but the internet also played its part in her research, as she explains. ‘I read the original story over and over again until I distilled it to the key narrative points I needed to hit: baby Moses is given away; he’s brought up by the Pharaoh, and discovers his roots. Then there are the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and the burning bush. I had the idea that the plagues could be acts of terrorism, and using Google I found out about microscopic algae that poison the sea and turn it red. The webpage had a picture of the algae with a quote from Exodus underneath it. Finding that was one of those breathtaking moments you get as a writer, when you have an idea, and you just know it’s right. Then I had to find a way that Moses would know about those algae, so I made him a marine biologist.’

With the screenplay finished, so began the mammoth task of filming Exodus. This involved some 800 people during a seven-week shoot, including a day of public filming and a huge concert. Despite the sheer scale of the venture, Penny never felt daunted. In fact, she has always preferred filming big outside pieces rather than small studio scenes. Once again, Margate proved to be the perfect location. ‘I absolutely loved Margate. We had beautiful light as the town’s on the edge of the country and surrounded by the sea, so the light bounces off the water and looks lovely and soft, very beautiful. Also because there are no high buildings, no massive Georgian architecture the way there is in Brighton, you have these big skies and this rather magnificent coastline, so we had a place where we really could film something on a more epic scale.’

For some the word ‘epic’ in the context of a film about the life of Moses may bring to mind images of Charlton Heston in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Yet Penny’s tale of 21st-century exile could not be more different. The epic scale in the British director’s vision of the biblical story included her crew building an enormous shanty town called Dreamland, where politician Pharaoh Mann forces all those he no longer wants in his Promised Land to live – including asylum seekers, the unemployed, petty criminals, and ethnic minorities. ‘It was built on the site of an old fun fair, with a rickety wooden rollercoaster on one side and a railway track on the other,’ says Penny. ‘We built it all out of rubbish, so basically the art department went through all the recycling centres and the council-collected rubbish, and we went round door-to-door until we had piles of rubbish everywhere! We actually made the set in the way that people build shanty towns, out of whatever materials are around, which meant we built a very big set incredibly cheaply!’

As with all her previous films, Penny was eager to work with the local community both off-screen and in front of the camera on Exodus. ‘We had an amazing crew in the art department – half of them had just finished working on the Bond movie, Casino Royale, and the other half were petty criminals and graffiti artists; it worked really well,’ she assures me. ‘As for the actors, I started off with the rule that if we could cast every single part in Margate, then that’s what we’d do. If a professional actor and a local non-actor were as good as each other, Margate would always win.’

As well as holding the usual open auditions, Penny found some of her cast in somewhat less conventional ways. ‘My assistant was in Primark when she bumped into a local schoolteacher called Michael Tulloch, and thought I’d like him. So we gave him the Rastafarian yardman’s speech to learn, and he was absolutely brilliant. He even got the accent just right.’ Indeed Margate proved to be a great hunting ground for undiscovered acting talent, a proof in point being Delroy Moore, whose flawless African accent in his role as schoolteacher Jethro belies his Cockney roots. ‘He did a session with the voice coach and we knew from that he had an extraordinary ear. In fact when my editor saw the rushes, he thought Delroy was African, and asked me where we’d found him!’ reveals Penny. Another real local find was Anthony Johnson, who plays Moses’s brother Aaron. Although the local rapper had never acted before, he had no trouble either learning his lines or controlling his nerves, even though his first day’s filming was in front of a crowd of 10,000 people.

Despite such successes, Penny’s open-door policy to casting Exodus was not entirely popular with everyone on set, and led to a few discussions with her assistant directors. ‘The ADs came from a much more formal background, and were slightly horrified. Some of the extras were smoking weed, and the ADs wanted me to sack them and put up ‘no smoking’ notices. But I knew that wouldn’t work, so my assistant Lisa and I talked to the lads and asked them not to do it as it was causing us problems. If they wanted to smoke, we asked them to go outside on their lunch break!’ she says laughing. ‘I suppose professional extras are used to behaving in a certain way, but what you get with local people is something much more authentic and interesting.’

Penny’s belief in taking leaps of faith when filmmaking, and her passion for telling stories from the margins in a ‘truthful and humane way’ have positive effects both on screen and off. ‘We also had a large group of local adults with learning difficulties working with us, and again, initially the ADs were not keen as they thought we would have to look after them specially,’ she admits. ‘But I wanted to treat them exactly the same as everyone else. And actually they were fantastic and they didn’t require any extra help. And it was great, because as a result of being in the film they got a grant to have a drama group of their own.’

Similarly, Penny’s decision that the exiled in her film should include both asylum seekers and the impoverished people who might resent them was ‘amazingly transformative’, as she recalls, citing one particular incident. ‘When we shot the scene of people being driven into Dreamland there were two boys and a black guy in the queue, sort of trapped together because of the filming. The boys had actually shouted abuse and thrown objects at the man a few days earlier in the street, and he confronted them about it in the queue. They had a big talk, and the boys apologised and said, “Next time we see you, we’ll say hello”, and by the end of the shoot, they were friends with a load of the young black guys.’

While Penny is touched that her film brought people together this way, she is under no illusions as to the extent of such problems, and points to the opening of Exodus as an example. The scene, shot by four large cameras during a day of public filming, sees the Pharaoh disclose to a large crowd his plan to exile ‘people nobody else wants’ from the Promised Land. Before filming began, the scene was introduced off-camera to the watching public as part of a film being made in Margate. Yet, as Penny confesses, ‘For weeks after that speech, people would come in to the drop-in centre we had in the town, where they could sign up to be extras or help build the sets, and ask if we had forms so they could join the Pharaoh’s political party. Of course I tried to write the speech in a way that was quite persuasive, but I didn’t want to actually persuade anybody.’

This was not the first time that Penny’s dramas have been mistaken for real life. When her gritty tales of life in Leeds, Tina Goes Shopping and Tina Takes a Break, were first broadcast, phone calls flooded in from outraged viewers demanding to know why people taking drugs and stealing cars were being shown on national television. Such reactions suggest that Penny achieves what she strives for in her films, whether works of fiction or documentaries: authenticity.

Where this quest for the real will lead the director in her future endeavours – an opera about the Manhattan Project with The Death of Klinghoffer – composer John Adams, and a musical about gangs in Birmingham – we shall have to wait and see. What is certain, however, is that as someone who has never pandered to convention, Penny Woolcock will continue to rip up the filmmaking rulebook.

Exodus receives its UK television premiere on Channel 4 at 10 p.m. on Monday 19th November 2007. The DVD will be released through Soda Pictures on 26th November, and will be available through all good retailers.