The set that Jack built (original) (raw)

Mary Anne Nichols, known to one and all as Polly, lies in a pool of her own congealed blood on a cobbled Whitechapel street. Her throat is slit, and her filthy green dress is hitched up to her knees - but not so far that you can see the gruesome horrors that her infamous killer, the serial murderer Jack the Ripper, has perpetrated beneath her undergarments. A gaggle of dirty-faced, poverty-stricken onlookers stare down at the bloody mess. Suddenly the crowd parts as the police arrive, allowing Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp) and his able partner in crime prevention, Sergeant Peter Godley (Robbie Coltrane), to examine the corpse.

As Abberline kneels down beside Polly's stiffened body, directors Allen and Albert Hughes, who previously made the violent urban tales Menace II Society and Dead Presidents, spring from their seats behind a bank of video monitors some 20ft away and yell "Cut" in unison, before jogging over to Depp and Coltrane to fine-tune this pivotal moment. Allen discusses motivation and dialogue with his two actors, while Albert, who looks after the technical aspects on set, confers with the camera team.

This hellishly bloody vision of London's East End circa 1888 comes near the beginning of From Hell, the latest film to delve into the murky world of Jack the Ripper, the murderer of five Whitechapel prostitutes. From Hell was originally a successful graphic novel by Alan "Watchmen" Moore, and the book's illustrations of late Victorian London have been re-created on a muddy field just outside Prague. The set for the movie, the work of Shakespeare in Love's Oscar-winning production designer Martin Childs, is spread over 9,000 square yards, and is modelled on a 300-yard section of Commercial Street, London E1. It includes a scale replica of the famous (now defunct) Ten Bells pub, numerous shops - among them a Hughes Brothers Dairy Creamery - and a near full-size duplicate of Spitalfields' Christ Church (minus spire, which will be added digitally at a later stage).

Unusually, many of the buildings are more than just facades and have actual interiors while, underfoot, real-life antique cobblestones, on loan from the streets of the Czech capital and now covered in horse shit after weeks of night shoots, add to the authenticity. "It's convincing until your nose actually touches it," says Coltrane of the set, which took just 12 weeks to build. "It's fantastically thorough."

Childs says that the decision to film in Prague was dictated by the fact that not enough 19th-century London locations remain. Initially, he explains, Prague's picturesque streets seemed to offer a suitable alternative, until it was realised that "none of it looks like London when you begin to examine it; it just looks old". So Childs went back to the drawing board. "I drew this plan of how we could do all of the streets in one set," he says. "Because the plan was so tiny, on the back of an envelope, everybody thought the set wasn't going to be that big. Then we started building it and marked it out on this field, and everybody thought, 'Fuck me, what scale did he draw it to?'"

While it was impossible to position the sites of the five murders in their exact geographical locations, Childs did manage to build them into the set, and says they have been re-created down to the blood marks on the walls and the posture of the bodies. "As far as the crime scenes go, they're probably as accurate as they're going to be, and definitely more accurate than any movie that's been done about Jack the Ripper before," Allen Hughes says. "As for the women, same names; but in order to breathe real life into them we felt like we had to take great actresses and have them create [the characters]. But the technical aspect is probably as accurate as you're going to get." Not least in terms of duplicating the weather conditions. "The myth when you're dealing with Jack the Ripper in London is fog," continues Albert. "In reality, there was no fog during any of the murders. They mainly took place during summer, except the last murder, on November 9. We're sticking more to the reality of what really went down back then. It was more mist and rain."

In the years since, the Ripper murders have taken on near-mythological significance. Numerous conspiracy-drenched theories as to Jack's identity have been put forward (in fact, From Hell takes wing from two of the most popular and controversial: the royal conspiracy and the masonic connection). Hundreds of books have been published on the subject, and numerous films have been produced featuring Jack's exploits; there are even daily Ripper tours starting outside London's Tower Hill tube station. So while Alan Moore was not the first to tackle this subject matter, his interpretation remains one of the most detailed thus far. "What Alan was doing was using the Ripper murders as a backdrop for reflections on the end of our century based on the end of that century," says producer Don Murphy, who optioned the movie rights to the comic back in the mid-1990s and persuaded the Hughes brothers to direct.

Allen and Albert recall that they first heard the name Jack the Ripper as kids, from the mouth of Leonard Nimoy, whose TV show In Search Of... was a favourite of theirs. One week it covered the Whitechapel murders, and the boys were immediately hooked. "I still don't understand why everybody is still fascinated by it - including myself," Allen notes, "but the fascination was always there."

To some in Hollywood, the idea of the Hughes brothers directing an English period movie, even one so gruesome and violent, seemed an odd choice. Barely 20 when they directed their explosive debut Menace, the brothers have spent the intervening years trying to shake off the "black film-maker" tag and to prove there's more to them than guns, ghettos and gangsta rap. While shooting From Hell, the brothers liked to joke that they were still making a ghetto movie, just in a different ghetto. "It's anti-Merchant Ivory," Albert declared.

"We kind of liked the idea of these guys who had done a contemporary urban movie doing a period urban movie," Murphy explains. "We weren't thinking of them as black directors, we were thinking of them as people who would get the material and work hard to get the film made." But From Hell's journey to the screen was a long and tortuous one. Two Hollywood studios put the project into turnaround before it finally ended up at Fox. Initially, the film-makers were looking at Daniel Day-Lewis to play Abberline, then, when Sean Connery expressed interest, retooled the part for an older actor. Then Connery passed and they reverted to a younger figure.

They subsequently met with scores of British and American actors, among them Brad Pitt and Jude Law, before casting Depp - with whom they had once talked about making a Howard Hughes biopic. "He was really into the material and he really wanted to do it," says Allen. "He has, like, 70 books on Jack the Ripper."

In its journey to the screen, From Hell became more of a whodunnit than had originally been written, with Jack's identity kept a mystery until the very end (Moore gives it up in the first 10 pages) while Depp's detective became an amalgamation of the real-life policeman and the famed psychic Robert Lees, turning Abberline into an opium addict whose drug- and absinthe-enhanced visions help him and Godley hunt down the Ripper.

But perhaps what's most surprising of all about From Hell is the violence. Or, rather, the paucity of any gratuitous bloodshed. Sure, there's one particularly nasty throat-slashing, but considering both the grisly state that Jack's victims were found in and the problems the Hugheses had with the US ratings board with their first two films, From Hell is positively restrained. "We didn't want to make a gory film," says Allen, "but it's a dark film, I can't get around that." Then again, it may be due to the fact that Jack didn't use a firearm. "It's a little weird to do a movie like this because we're not doing it with guns," Albert says. "We've always relied on guns, even doing music videos: always guns, always guns. And when we did this movie: 'Fuck, where's the gun, man? Where's the gun at?' It's strange. So you've got to come up with new ways to do things. It's almost like Hitchcock."

From Hell is released on February 8.