Rye Lane has captured attention thanks to its depiction of a south London rarely seen on screen.
It all started with a drunken chinwag over a bucket of fried chicken. Actor Nathan Bryon had starred in a BBC Three TV comedy pilot written by Tom Melia, with the ominous title of Fail (the show did not get picked up for a series). After the pilot’s wrap party, the pair ended up at a KFC, “yelling at each other over a bucket of chicken that we should work with each other,” remembers Melia.
They met up, soberly this time, at London’s Picturehouse Central cinema, to talk about potential writing projects they could collaborate on. “Tom loves romcoms,” Bryon remembers. “I liked romcoms but didn’t love them, because I hadn’t seen myself in them.”
Bryon and Melia (both Screen Stars of Tomorrow in 2023) were disenchanted with trying to make their own TV projects happen, after several near misses. “The thought of going back and doing one of those chilled our bones a little bit,” Melia recalls. “It seems mad now that we decided instead to write a film. I’m sure our agents were thinking, ‘If you think TV is hard, wait until you try film.’”
These 2018 conversations steered them towards penning their own romantic comedy feature reflecting the London they saw around them, foregrounding the early days of a relationship between two Black Londoners — a departure from the archetypal British romantic comedies that have populated screens to date. “Even though I look more like the protagonists in Four Weddings And A Funeral or Notting Hill, that’s not been my experience of London, and that’s not my experience of falling in love,” Melia says.
By 2019, they had a script for a film called Vibes And Stuff that was somewhat different to the Rye Lane that came to fruition. Initially, Bryon and Melia set the film in Camden, north London. “Camden provided endless canals, turns and roads down which you can just walk and talk,” Bryon says. “I’m very happy [director] Raine Allen-Miller moved it to Rye Lane, because of what it meant to her as a place, but Camden too has a magical realism energy to it — it’s rough and ready, you never know what’s going to happen.”
An early idea was for the film to take place as a conversation between a young couple, in the vein of Richard Linklater’s Before film trilogy but shot in a single take — which Philip Barantini has since done with Boiling Point.
The writers started touting the script and got it to Boxing Day and Blue Story producer Damian Jones, with help from a family connection between Bryon and Jones. “I was very taken by it,” Jones says, who agreed to come on board. BBC Film joined at the development stage.
Top Boy producer Yvonne Ibazebo had been speaking to Jones for years about collaborating and, even before she had officially joined the project as a producer in October 2020, she read the script and suggested Allen-Miller be approached to direct.
Producers often lament the years of development gridlock they can get stuck in when firing up a UK feature. For Rye Lane, however, the script was in development for around a year, with BBC Film development executive Sophie Meyer helping the creative process. The British Film Institute (BFI) then came on board, along with BBC Film, to fund production. Another studio (which the producers have respectfully declined to name) was keen to co-finance, but were outbid when Searchlight Pictures heard about the project. The overall budget for the film was around $3.8m (£3m).
Asked about how they hustled through the development period so quickly, Jones says: “There was no great revelation — we had good writers who took good notes, and the director knew what she wanted.”
Laugh out loud
A Screen Star of Tomorrow in 2021, Allen-Miller had worked successfully in commercials and music videos, and buzz was building in the industry after her debut short Jerk premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2018. She had hoped, however, that her feature directing debut would be from a script she had written herself.
“So much of what I do is about creating a world, and being in charge of all of that,” she says. “The concept of directing something I hadn’t written wasn’t really on my radar, but if I’m sent something I normally read it because I’m nosy. I read the script, and it made me laugh out loud on the train.”
Jones brought her the project with the guarantee she could put her own twist on it. So Allen-Miller got to work, ditching the title Vibes And Stuff, which she found “a bit cheesy”, giving the female lead the funnier bones and bringing a sense of surrealism to the aesthetic.
A major change Allen-Miller introduced to the project was using south London as the backdrop to the blossoming bond between the two young strangers as they meander through the city. Allen-Miller, who was born in Manchester but moved to Croydon and then Brixton in south London aged 12, felt the film lent itself to being set among the vibrant streets of Brixton and Peckham she knew so well, but had not seen properly represented on screen.
“Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese’s New Yorks are two different New Yorks, but they are so authentically that version of New York. For me, I felt like that hadn’t been done for my London,” explains Allen-Miller. “I definitely saw my London on a bad day, growing up on council estates, which can be a bit like Top Boy. But there can be really good days. The south London world isn’t always greyscale and ‘gritty’. The film’s first scene, with two men fighting in a toilet cubicle, was key to this. I wanted to show the south London film you think you’ll see, and then it goes [in a different direction].”
“Nathan and I have more connections to south London than we do Camden,” Melia says, both writers having also lived in south London. “So when Raine mentioned it, it was the easiest yes in the world because we pretty much had to do zero research.”
Casting director Kharmel Cochrane, whose credits include Saltburn and Saint Maud, was tasked with finding the film’s stars. Allen-Miller was clear about her vision for who should lead. “At the beginning people were talking about [casting] famous people, and immediately I said, ‘No, this needs to feel like new people,’” she notes.
“We were very fortunate with our financiers,” adds Jones. “They just wanted the best people for the roles.”
Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson (the latter a Screen Star of Tomorrow in 2023) were the standout favourites to play the central couple, Yas and Dom. Both were new to feature films, although Jonsson’s star was rising from the hit TV series Industry.
The budding leads were balanced out with familiar faces in cameo roles, including comedian and social-media name Munya Chawawa; musician and chef Levi Roots; Fred Ferrier, an original cast member from reality TV series Made In Chelsea; and, most memorably, Colin Firth as a burrito seller in a Brixton Market food stall named ‘Love, Guactually’.
“The biggest thing I was excited about was having a Richard Curtis-style dude doing something really ridiculous. We initially thought of Hugh Grant selling CDs,” recalls Allen-Miller, whose partner coined the food stall’s cheeky Love Actually riff. She grins, “I wanted to have a little nod, or [give] a cheeky middle finger, to Richard Curtis.”
There was one cameo they did not manage to clinch. “We tried to get [‘You’re Beautiful’ singer] James Blunt at one point to do karaoke, but he said no,” Allen-Miller says. “Wait for my next film — we’ll get James Blunt in that.”
Irresistibly good
While the romantic comedies of Curtis were a touchpoint, and Rye Lane has a few nods to his work, including Firth’s cameo and a Bridget Jones-style bunny girl in the background of a scene, Allen-Miller does not want her film to be perceived as the heir to Curtis’s work. “I like Richard Curtis films, they’re irresistibly good. But I wanted to make something that’s a different thing. I can tell you now, Rye Lane is a good representation of what the area is like. I don’t think Notting Hill is representative of what Notting Hill is like — it’s totally gentrified, but there are still Black people there.”
Instead, Raine-Miller says she takes inspiration from the work of Steve McQueen and Scorsese, but her central Rye Lane reference was “the best show ever”, Channel 4 comedy Peep Show. She animatedly discusses the show’s method of filming characters looking directly at the camera, “where their eyeline is not quite down the barrel, it’s just above it, so you’re in their head but you’re not breaking the fourth wall. There’s so much creativity in that show that people don’t talk about, because it’s just straight-up funny.”
Shooting on Rye Lane began in April 2021, and Allen-Miller recalls the “huge support” she was given by Eva Yates, BBC Film’s then-commissioning executive, now director. “There were days on set when I was shooting, and people were looking over my shoulder going, ‘This [set-up] is looking quite unusual.’ I would call Eva Yates and she’d be like, ‘You’ve got this.’ Eva has been over every element of the film, and she’ll be over every element of my future films, I hope.”
Further executive-level support came from Kristin Irving (then BFI, now BBC Film), and Peter Spencer and Katie Goodson-Thomas at Searchlight. “They were all incredibly trusting. I felt like I’d won a prize to do whatever I wanted on this film.”
One of those things was location, and Allen-Miller was explicit about where she needed to shoot. “Our location manager didn’t know south London,” she reveals. “The production designer, Anna Rhodes, lives in Greenwich, and I’ve grown up in south London, so we were quite hardcore about where we wanted to shoot.” That included Brixton Market, the Peckhamplex and Ritzy cinemas, Brockwell Park, Brixton’s Windrush Square with its faded Bovril sign, Nour Cash & Carry and, of course, the film’s bustling titular street.
But getting to shoot amid these hives of real-life activity was not easy. Rye Lane itself looked like it would be off limits during the five-week shoot, as the Covid pandemic was still raging. “The local authority was a bit worried about us shooting on the street, but in the end they changed their mind. That would have been a disaster,” producer Yvonne Ibazebo recalls.
“There’s a wide shot on Rye Lane when [Dom and Yas] come out of a gallery. Everyone in Peckham always wants to know what’s going on. They kept asking, ‘Are you shooting [UK soap] EastEnders?’” Allen-Miller recalls of a particularly tricky scene to film. “There’d be a lovely wide shot and we’d nearly get it, and there would be someone walking by with the biggest, ugliest mask ever.”
“The biggest challenge was the masks [worn by regular people in the background of scenes],” Allen-Miller adds. “Our post-[production] house, Untold, was so generous. We never had the budget to do face replacements, but we got a few face replacements in there because we just didn’t want to see the masks in the film.”
Rye Lane grossed $1.5m (£1.2m) in total at the UK and Ireland box office following its March 2023 theatrical release. Outside the UK, Searchlight’s parent company Disney sent it straight to streaming, on Hulu in North America, on Star+ in Latin America and Disney+ in other international territories, including Canada and Australia.
Rye Lane scored 16 nominations at this year’s British Independent Film Awards, marking it as 2023’s most nominated title — it won the breakthrough performance Bifa for star Oparah and best original music for composer Kwes.
Given Rye Lane’s warm reception after its Sundance world premiere, the Bifas attention and Bafta momentum, particularly in the outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer category, it is perhaps unsurprising Allen-Miller is staying south of the Thames for her next feature, in the works at BBC Film.
It was initially plotted as an Oxford-set heist. “I tried writing it, and then I thought, ‘No, I need to go back to south London,’” she admits. “There’s so much here I want to share.”
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