Story of the Suburb

Amid the sumptuous surroundings of a suite in The Dorchester, Sandra Goldbacher prepares for a day of non-stop interviews.

She may have written and directed Me Without You, the excellent new British movie set for release tomorrow, but none of the media darlings in hospitality seem to be interested in talking to her. They are eager to meet the film's stars Anna Friel, Trudie Styler (Sting's wife) and Michelle Williams (Jen from Dawson's Creek) who are silently sitting behind closed doors elsewhere in the corridor.

Goldbacher, a tiny, softly-spoken woman, looks younger than her 40 years. Like many of the best directors, she is publicity-shy more interested in making good films, than in money or celebrity.

"I have had a few offers to go to America but I'd rather have a mansion in Primrose Hill than Hollywood," she said before adding that she was happy in her current home in Clapham.

She grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb in a house her parents still live in and spent seven years working on a script based on her childhood there in the 1970s and 80s, which was to become Me Without You.

The film is about a Jewish girl called Holly (played by Williams) and her best friend Marina (Friel) who lives next door. They make a pact to be best friends forever, but over the years, the relationship becomes insufferable.

"It's only partly autobiographical," she said. "I did have a very intense friendship until I was 16 which was very exciting, very exhilarating, not the kind of friendship that would have sustained over the years. I wanted to tell a story of a very close friendship that did carry on. I wanted that to feel absolutely real, so I used worlds that I knew, like the Suburb, or my idea of what Hampstead Garden Suburb is."

In the film, the Suburb seems to be the ideal place to live, but lurking beneath the surface is claustrophobia and intense unhappiness, a place that Holly wants to escape from. Curiously for filming purposes, Hampstead Garden Suburb was a road in Epsom, Surrey.

"We tried to get permission to film there (HGS), but it was very difficult," she said. "Also it's changed a lot since the 70s and actually we found this road in Epsom that seemed absolutely untouched.

"We needed two very specific houses next door to each other, one a bit flashy, with a swimming pool in the back garden Marina's house, the other had to be more traditional Holly's."

Other parts of the film are also based in places she knows well. When Holly goes off to university, the setting is Sussex University in Brighton, where Goldbacher went. In the fourth year of her degree, Goldbacher decided she wanted to make movies. She spent a year studying film and video at Middlesex University's Cat Hill campus where she made some short films.

She then went on to make documentaries at the B B C for an architecture series called Building Sights, and made two documentaries about boxing for Channel 4. She also directed television advertisements for the likes of Baileys, Evian and Philips.

"But I always wanted to do drama and fiction," she said. After two years she managed to get financing £80,000 for a short film called Seventeen for BBC2's Short and Curlies series.

After that she was in a position to finance her first feature-length film, The Governess. This story of a young Jewish girl in 19th Century Britain starring Minnie Driver, was released in 1998 and was a moderate success in the UK and the States.

"It took us a while to get this one Me Without You financed," she said. "It wasn't high concept, it didn't fit in a particular genre. What sort of film is it? I think it's a film that appeals to audiences.

"I'm quite proud of it. I'm usually pretty hard on my own stuff, I think the acting's great and Michelle's performance is really believable.

"It's been doing well at the London Film Festival, it's had a very good critical response so far. Audiences do seem to enjoy it, so fingers crossed."

Me Without You is showing at cinemas across London.

November 22, 2001 12:01