Stars Joel Edgerton, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Writer Tim Firth, Director Julian Jarrold, Producer Suzanne Mackie
Shoe manufacturer Steve Pateman
The film is inspired by the real life story of Steve Pateman, who comes from a traditional craft led Northampton family shoe manufacturing business. With his business struggling to survive, Steve, like Charlie in the film, turned his back on tradition and started to produce kinky boots for the niche market demanding women's footwear for men. It must be strange for him to see what is in some ways his story up on the big screen.
Pateman: It's mind blowing just to see all these stars playing out part of my life, it's very emotional. There are a lot of differences obviously between what happened in real life and what happens in the film, but there are certain things that really brought it back to me, like when Charlie has to make people redundant. That was a very heart wrenching moment. It's hard enough to do that to anybody anyway, but to see someone else play it out in a film, when you've gone through it in real life, is quite an emotional thing. There were tears flowing on my side, I must admit.
In the film the workers have considerable reservations about the change in the factory's policy. How die Steve's workers react in real life?
Pateman: You have all types of people from all walks of life, all levels of intelligence, all different attitudes working in a factory, so something which means one thing to one person will mean something totally different to the next. I drip fed it to start with. With the shoe manufacturing process it starts in the pattern room and it gradually works its way through and it's not until it gets down to the lasting room that you see a sole and a heel coming together. That's when the attitudes start to come out and people start saying, "I'm not touching that", as though it's got some intrinsic sexual tendency. But because we were already producing a lot of high fashion footwear for pop stars and such at the time, so there were always different styles of footwear going through the factory from winkle pickers to creepers and steel capped boots, it was just another type of production. A single factory can't survive on one style of footwear. That was our strength, which my father had had the vision to diversify, so when the idea came through for the kinky boot range, it was just another thing and the workers really got behind it.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Lola, the cross dressing cabaret artist who is the designer and inspiration behind Charlie's new footwear range. The same week as "Kinky Boots" opens, he can also be seen playing an interestingly complex villain in "Serenity", while the previous week he was seen in another villainous role in "Four Brothers" - a whole year's work in three very different roles hitting the screen inside two weeks.
Ejiofor : It feels very good. I'm really proud of all the films that I did in that very short space of time last year. They're all very different but it wasn't just their difference that attracted me to them. Individually they're all really interesting parts and good projects. I went off to do "Four Brothers" a week or so after wrapping "Kinky Boots" and there were certain things I was taking with me, like waxed eyebrows! That took a bit of explaining, plus getting some fake eyebrows made up. My own took about three months to grow back.
Beryl Reid and Alec Guiness always used to say that they got their characters from the way they stood and what they were standing in. How did the exotic footwear you wore in the film inspire you or hinder you?
Ejiofor : From reading the script and from the title itself it was obvious an important part of the role was going to be walking around in these boots, which I hadn't done before, so I knew it would be pretty difficult, but you've just got to dive in. I ruined my floor at home walking round in them. The floorboards were just destroyed by those heels making holes in the wood. And they were agony to wear. It was all challenging, an unknown challenge, which was one of the things that excited me when I was reading the script. I was just very grateful to the whole team of people that worked on the film. The design of the film in terms of the wardrobe and the make up and the choreography and all the encouragement they gave me and by the time all those things came together and we were doing the stuff in the club, it was really happening. A lot of the background artists in those scenes were drag queens, so there was an authentic feel in the air and we just had great time in this club for a few days.
Producer Suzanne Mackie did a lot of research into the shoe industry while preparing the film. Enough to turn her into a bit of a shoe-a-holic?
Mackie: Yes, I have a bit! Right from the very beginning of this idea I and Peter Ettedgui and Nicholas Barton, my fellow producers, thought it would be lovely to see the whole shoe making process on screen, because it's very sensual and there's something very compelling about the dexterity, the utter commitment and concentration of the people making the shoes. It's a very sensual thing, the smell and texture of leather and all that. We wanted that world to be almost as erotic in its own way as the more overtly erotic world of Lola and the club.
Australian Joel Edgerton plays the role of Charlie, for which he adopted a very convincing Northampton accent. Towards the end of the film his character makes a bit of a mess of demonstrating how to walk in the flamboyant footwear. But early in his acting career he had another experience of wearing high heels.
Edgerton: I did a very esoteric play ten years ago in which I played an English comedian who masqueraded as a French woman and I had to wear red high heeled shoes every night for four weeks, so I became quite adept at doing it. So when the day came for me to put the boots on in the film, I realised it was like riding a bike. The first challenge with the role for me was the question of whether I should be here at all playing a lead role in a British film and I got over that one by reminding myself of the constant cultural exchange of actors between Britain and Australia. The next hurdle was if I was going to do it, I'd better try and do it right, particularly with the accent. Some accents in the past I've found if not exactly easy, easier than this one, so I had to put a lot of work into it. And I didn't have a lot of time, so a lot of the work on the accent was done out of pure fear. One of the first scenes I shot was standing up in front of the whole factory and delivering a speech to the workers, after my father has died, and I was sitting there thinking, I can't do this, I'm not ready. Then I realised that the fact that I was so nervous about it was probably the right thing for the situation.
Director Julian Jarrold has an impressive track record in television, including a BAFTA winning episode of "Cracker" and the serialisation of Zadie Smith's novel "White Teeth". "Kinky Boots" is his first feature film.
Jarrold: Suzanne rang me and said "It's Pedro Almodovar meets Ken Loach" and that was pretty intriguing. I loved the collision of the two worlds, Charlie's cosy old-fashioned Northampton world of shoes with the glamour and glitz of London's Soho and the fact that the humour was coming very naturally from a very truthful place. Obviously there's lots of fun to be had as a director with all the cabaret scenes.
Co-writer Tim Firth was also one of the writers on the hit film "Calendar Girls". Does he see any similarity in the themes of the two films?
Firth: Not really. In between the two films I've written a family film and a film about a homicidal jester (no details as yet available) so I've sort of got the English comedy thing out of my system! I'm very attracted to English stories - not the navel scrutinising type though. I'd only be really attracted to a story that I felt would make sense in another country and I felt that with this. In a sense the movie is a modern Ealing comedy with a twist and I also was excited by challenge of trying to make a film for Disney with a transvestite as one of the main characters.
Mackie: We producers pitched this project to Disney about three months after they'd said yes to "Calendar Girls", so the two projects ran simultaneously. This took five years to develop; "Calendar Girls" took four years, so this is not as a result of "Calendar Girls" success. In fairness to Disney they got it immediately, what had excited us, which was the collision between two worlds. We were worried they'd censor us a bit, particularly in the Lola world but we just pushed and pushed and it's worked out just how we wanted it to.
As far as the role of Lola is concerned, it's a gift to an actor, a very complex character, who is a bloke in a dress, but not a camp personality. There is also no indication in the writing that the role is written for a black actor. It could have been played by an actor of any ethnicity. Chiwetel Ejiofor just happened to be the best man for the job.
Firth: That's exactly the case. I'm very uninspired by waspish comedy and I wasn't interested in that and consequently I didn't write any of the lines as poisoned darts. So when I came to see the film, I was very pleased with Chiwetel's very different portrayal. It would have been very easy to make this film with somebody who looked like Julian Clary and had that kind of note as a character. It's much more interesting for everyone the way he's played it.
Jarrold: Chiwetel was the only one who turned up in wig, so he got the part.
Mackie: The casting director said to us right at the beginning, when we got the green light, it's going to be very hard to find an actor who can inhabit the soul of Lola and that's what we were always looking for. When Chiwetel came in, put the wig on and gave the most amazing performance, that was it. Julian came rushing up and said "I've found Lola". It was a very exciting moment.
Is this a step nearer to a more non racially specific casting policy in the industry generally?
Jarrold: That's exactly how it happened, so in its own little way, yes, because it's a film in which the major issue is to do with small mindedness and bigotry and overturning that. The emotional heart of the film is the arm wrestling match. But race itself isn't an issue at all in the film.
The arm wresting match referred to there is between Lola and Don, played by Nick Frost, a factory worker, who is more than somewhat bigoted against a bloke who wears a frock. Is there any danger that audiences will share Don's bigotry and stay away from the film?
Ejiofor: People go to see or don't go to see films for thousands of different reasons, so I guess that's a possibility, but you just make the best film you can and hope people want to come and see it.
Jarrold: It's not a drag queen film and it's not a film about a shoe factory. It's about the collision between the two worlds and what these two very different men have in common. Hopefully it will appeal to everyone.
Carol Allen
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