Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/610353
36 P E R S P E C T I V E | N OV E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5 Both Ronnie and Reggie are played, with the help of visual effects, by actor Tom Hardy. Maybe because of where I was at the time, I had an image of them as sharks, never stopping, constantly moving…always hungry. The script made no moral judgment on them, but showed their influence expanding from the East End of London of the 1950s to the West End of the 1960s and all the way to the top of the establishment. The narrative presence of Frances, Reggie's short-lived wife, was a triangular counterpoint to the twin's brutal gangster world, but ironically, she was inevitably seduced by the gloss and glamour, the surface prosperity of their clubs and lifestyle. Brian portrays the Krays "through the prism of Frances, to whom they are larger than life." It's a subjective portrayal, defiantly not a social realist one. Wherever possible, I tried to show frames within frames, each laden with period detail, revealing the overlapping worlds of gangsters, business and politics. It was a time of rapid transformation in British society and the challenge was to reveal this through the changing material culture. The world of the twins had to be simultaneously both attractive and repulsive, a world of memory and a London urban legend that is still living, a nightmarish glossy dream. I tried to show that Top: The Blind Beggar pub where Ronnie Kray, enraged at being called a "fat poof," walks in and shoots rival gangster George Cornell in front of a room of witnesses. Curiously enough, when the police asked around, no one could remember seeing anything. The part of the Blind Beggar is played by the Royal Oak on Columbia Road in Shoreditch. Center, left to right: The Krays lived on Vallance Road in Bethnal Green in London's East End in a modest two-up, two-down, as seen here in a presentation sketch by Ms. Soode. Mr. Conway's Photoshop ® study of the sweetshop where the Richardsons try to kill Reggie Kray; it was built into the East End street location shot in Waterloo. Above: Both of the Kray twins are played by actor Tom Hardy, seen here with one of the left-hand-drive American cars like the Krays actually drove.