Willy Russell Why?

"When I got there I said to Lewis, 'Look, I've come to see you, but I don't know whether we should be taking as Columbia are interested in the script, and I haven't really thought of Rita as a movie.' Lewis just said to me. 'I think the whole of the plot is in there. Every single character already exists in the play, even though they're not realised on stage.' So in the discussion I got out of the idea of the unity of the single room and started to think of the unity of a campus. I started to get excited, as I could see all the possibilities that I'd been too lazy or too resistant to see!"

However, Russell's enthusiasm was quickly dampened. "I came back to earth because I then remembered that Columbia had expressed this interest," says the playwright. "But Lewis said, 'That's fine. I'll make it with Columbia. Let's phone them now!' So he phoned Columbia, they talked and things seemed to be acceptable. So initially, we began with the play being acquired by Columbia, with Lewis directing it for them."

Lewis Gilbert had already directed a number of successful films for Columbia dating back to the late-Fifties, among them The Admirable Crichton and HMS Defiant. The fact that his last two films had been two of the most successful James Bond films ever - The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker - can't have been lost on the executives at head office either. That said, Gilbert, who also produced Rita, ultimately made the film independently through an outfit called Acorn Pictures.

In the meantime there was the not-so-small task of preparing the script for the screen. "We used to meet each other a lot and discuss how we'd open the film out and that sort of thing," says Lewis Gilbert. "So we worked quite closely on that, as we also would on Shirley Valentine." Even so, Russell still had his reservations as to whether the play could be successfully opened out. "Now I'm not somebody who's precious about the play. I wanted it to be as truthful to the medium of film as I'd been to the medium of theatre. I didn't want some art-house thing. So you constantly have to ask yourself why you want to make a film of the play. For my own purposes, once I'd realised that the campus was the centre of the film, I was away and there was no problem for me."

Educating Rita was Willy Russell's first screenplay and consequently he had to get used to a very different way of working. "Initially what happened was I spent five days with Lewis in Paris," says Russell. "It was very odd for me, as I'm not used to having a director dictate to me! All the films I'd written previously had been for the telly, where, like the theatre, the writer was absolutely the top nut and everything was dedicated to serving the text. So for those five days Lewis would say, 'We want to have this from the play and we want to have that from the play, but we don't want to have this because it won't work.' I just took notes, and after about three days I thought, 'I can't write a film like this. There's absolutely no way!' but Lewis was a sweetheart and the dinners were nice," Russell laughs.

"So I just kept my mouth shut and made the notes, knowing that when I got home I'd just sit down and start writing the film," he continues, "In fact, I did just that. I'd got the first 26 pages done when Lewis phoned to ask how things were going on. I said, 'Terrific! I'm really pleased.' Then he asked, 'Are you following the schemata/' to which I replied, 'No, no - the Paris thing, I'm sorry, I've chucked it in the bin!' Well, he went ape-sh*t! But again, it was the thing of me not bending. You need all the arrogance you can muster if you're going to survive in films, especially if you're going to be involved in translating a work that has been so successful on stage. So I said that there was no way I was going to follow those notes. At the end of the conversation Lewis was somewhat shattered and said, 'Look, send me what you've done so far.' I told him I couldn't because it was in longhand and he wouldn't be able to read a syllable. So I said I'd get on a train the next day and go down to London and read it to him. And God love him, at the end of it he said, 'Carry on!"