Helen Mirren and Touching Cloth star Pete Postlethwaite have joined the cast of Rowan Joffe’s remake of Brighton Rock.
Sam Riley and Andrea Riseborough are already on board the Sixties-set movie, with Riley taking on the role of Pinkie, a seafront psycho who seduces Riseborough’s waitress, Rose, after she witnesses him committing a murder. The story then hinges on the twisted relationship between the two, against the backdrop of a changing world in which organised crime was thriving, despite the threat of the hangman’s noose.
Mirren will play Ida (Hermione Baddeley in the John Boulting-directed 1947 version), while Postlethwaite will take on the role of Phil Corkery.
Joffe, the son of Roland Joffe, has written the script for the movie which seems to be based primarily on Graham Greene’s original 1939 novel, rather than Boulting’s movie, for which Greene also wrote the screenplay.
“We're making Brighton Rock as contemporary as we possibly can because the story feels 'modern'. It's too alive, too vibrant and too relevant to be contained in the late thirties,” said Joffe, in a statement.
Filming on Brighton Rock, the first to be financed by Optimum Releasing, in conjunction with BBC Films and the UK Film Council’s Premiere Fund, starts – in London and, as you might have guessed, Brighton – on October 18.