‘You see that dormer window up there?” says Mitu Misra as we stand in an alley behind some shops in Bradford. “When I was a lad I used to climb out of that window late at night.” After he had climbed out of the second-floor window, little Mitu would shin down a drainpipe, jump on to a toilet roof and then hit the ground running to the nearby cinema.
“At school, I was beaten up regularly and called ‘Paki’. Growing up, most of my friends were Pakistani immigrants. We were all quite poor. Cinema, be it Bollywood or Hollywood, was my way out.”
Half a century on from those night-time flits out of his bedroom window, the 58-year-old millionaire businessman has used the money he made from his double-glazing empire to bankroll his movie-making debut. In 2013, Misra floated Safestyle UK, the company he had built up from nothing into a business with an annual turnover of £100m. That money helped to fund Lies We Tell, a film written and directed by Misra and starring an impressive cast of actors, including Gabriel Byrne, Harvey Keitel, Gina McKee and Mark Addy.
Misra’s PR people are billing it as a “northern noir” in the vein of Mike Hodges’ Get Carter and Mike Figgis’s Stormy Monday. It is also a British-Asian culture-clash drama in the tradition of Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss ..., Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic or Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East, but with the twist that, for once, it is a Muslim woman’s story that is front and centre.
How on earth did, with all due respect, a pair of cinematic nobodies manage to get such talent on board? Misra and the film’s producer, Andy McDermott, laugh at the question. “We come from a business mindset where if you don’t ask, you don’t get,” says McDermott. “We asked and, being Yorkshiremen, weren’t put off when people said no. We just kept asking. And then people started saying yes.”
Their biggest coup was securing Byrne, star of The Usual Suspects and Miller’s Crossing, to play a leading role. But why would a Golden Globe-winning actor agree to appear in a film made by a double-glazing tycoon with no film-making experience? “We contacted his agent and sent the script, and we got a meeting,” says Misra. Byrne invited Misra and McDermott to meet him at a pub in Howth, near Dublin. “That was a tough meeting,” laughs Misra. “He went through the script with a fine-tooth comb, getting me to explain each character’s motivation until he was satisfied the story held up and we knew what we were doing. And then he agreed to be in the film.”
But Misra didn’t know what he was doing. Not really. “That became clear on the the first day of the shoot,” he says, laughing. “You see, I’d done screenwriting courses in London when I was 45, but nothing about how to actually make a film.
“So, on that first day, somebody was waving something in front of me. I said: ‘What’s that?’ It turned out it was a boom. You know, the big mic? Gabriel heard and I got summoned to his trailer. When I got there, he had his shirt off and was marching up and down. He said: ‘Have you never been on a set before?’ I said no. He said: ‘Why the fuck didn’t you do a course?’ ‘Arrogance,’ I said. That made him laugh. I think that’s why he didn’t quit.”
Another reason Byrne stayed, presumably, is that by the time shooting began on Lies We Tell two years ago, Misra had surrounded himself with accomplished movie professionals, not least his director of photography, Santosh Sivan. The Indian cinematographer makes Bradford look unprecedentedly glamorous in Misra’s film. For those who know the city from dowdy-looking British films such as Billy Liar or Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Sivan’s Bradford will be a sumptuous revelation.
Once Byrne agreed to be in the film, Misra and McDermott used his name as leverage to get other stars. McDermott says: “We would go to casting agents’ offices in Hollywood and they would say: ‘For your film, you can have actors off this shelf, but not the top shelf.’ And I’d ask why, and they’d say: ‘Because you haven’t made a film before.” McDermott started his career writing radio scripts and later worked as copywriter for Misra’s company. “But through sheer persistence we got actors from that top shelf.”
One of them was Keitel. The actor, who has worked with Scorsese, Tarantino and Ridley Scott and now appears in an insurance ad on TV, met his match in Misra. “Harvey’s a passionate guy, I get that,” says Misra, over tea in the movie room of his sprawling home on Bradford’s outskirts. “But when we met Harvey to talk through the part we wanted him to play, Demi [a billionaire boss who dies, leaving a compromising video of him cavorting with his mistress], he wanted to change it. So I lost my temper.”
What happened? “I said to him: ‘I know you’re from Brooklyn or the Bronx or wherever, but I’m from Bradford, understand?’ What he wanted was unacceptable.”
In the script, Keitel’s character was supposed to be disporting himself half-naked on a sofa while his mistress, Amber, performed a sexy dance. The 78-year-old had other ideas. “At the meeting Harvey started doing this dance, shaking his chest saying: ‘You want some of this right?’ But I didn’t. So we had a huge argument. At one point I said to him: ‘I’m not going to let you fuck up my film!’ I thought he was going to walk. But he didn’t. After we sorted out our differences, he came right up to me and said: ‘Me and you are friends. We’ve earned it.’”
After Misra tells me this story, his daughter Aarti shows me photos on her phone of Keitel chilling in Bradford. In one, he is helping the Misra family prepare dinner in the kitchen. In another, he is on his hands and knees in the hall romping with their family dog, Meg. “He’s the sweetest man you can imagine,” Aarti says.
For all the famous names Misra wooed for his project, though, it is a relative unknown who steals the film. Sibylla Deen, an Australian actor who appeared in the soap Home and Away, plays the film’s heroine, Amber. “Amber’s typical of a lot of young Muslim women in that she has to have about seven identities to survive,” Misra tells me. “One for the home, one for work, one for her lovers, and so on.”
When we first meet Amber, her billionaire lover Demi (Keitel) has died and his driver Donald (Byrne) has one last task – to destroy any evidence of Demi’s relationship with his mistress, notably that compromising video of her with her non-Muslim lover. But in trying to do so, Donald gets dragged into her world.
Amber’s backstory, as imagined by Misra, is that she was sent to Pakistan at 16 to marry her cousin, KD (an oleaginous villain superbly realised by British actor Jan Uddin), before returning to Bradford where she realised her new husband was a local gangster. He raped Amber, prompting her to get a divorce. To play Amber convincingly, Deen learned a Yorkshire accent with a voice coach, spent a day with Bradford West MP Naz Shah, and hung out with local families. “She found that very upsetting, meeting girls who were happy to imagine themselves having arranged marriages yet having no career,” recalls McDermott. “The narrowness of their lives shocked her – and it would, given she divides her time between Los Angeles and Sydney.”
McDermott and Misra now want to make more films. Misra has written three more scripts. One, Mona Lisa, is about a road trip across India, another is a Coen-Brothers-esque caper called Johnny Fuckall and another is intriguingly entitled Why Hasn’t Gandhi Died Yet?. “That’s a remark made by Winston Churchill when Gandhi was on hunger strike against British rule. “I’d love to make that,” says Misra. “Everyone thinks Churchill was a hero. He was a racist and that needs to be shown.”
How do Misra and McDermott think Lies We Tell will be received? “I don’t expect it to be taken seriously because I’m a first-timer,” says Misra. He is pleased, though, that the film has survived its first ordeal – its Bradford premiere. “I thought I’d get lambasted because I’m a Hindu.” But he didn’t. “Actually, I’d say 99% of the Muslim women at the screening were supportive. The men, not as much. We even had people coming up to us after the Q&A to say thank you for showing what our lives are like.”
• Lies We Tell is released on 2 February
