Three ‘Red Riding’ films pursue one killer

It all began with a lonely man in Japan. David Peace was an English teacher in Tokyo in the mid-1990s, searching for some decent crime fiction. Having made his way through the one English-language bookstore’s supply of James Ellroy, Walter Mosley and George Higgins, Peace was so starved for quality reading material that he began writing his own book, born of the memories of his Yorkshire childhood. The result -- “Nineteen Seventy Four” -- is a sort of anti-love note to the north of England, clammy in its intimacy.

The “Red Riding” quartet of books -- each one devoted to a single year and the search for the elusive Yorkshire Ripper -- were Peace’s attempt to re-create, in the landscape and argot of his youth, the ripped-from-the-headlines familiarity and claustrophobic intimacy of Ellroy’s L.A. quartet. The story was not precisely faithful to the story of the real ripper, who murdered 13 women before being captured in 1981, but was exceedingly true to the feeling of the times. Now the Red Riding quartet has been adapted into the Red Riding trilogy of films, with a mammoth, three-part script by Tony Grisoni (“In This World,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”) and directing duties parceled out among Julian Jarrold (“Red Riding 1974”), James Marsh (“Red Riding 1980”) and Anand Tucker (“Red Riding 1983”). Originally made for British television, where it was well received by critics, “Red Riding” is being exhibited on the big screen in the United States. The trilogy opens Friday at the Nuart in L.A.

Following a series of protagonists, played by actors including Mark Addy (“The Full Monty”) and Paddy Considine (“In America”) and an enormous cast of secondary characters, “Red Riding” follows the convoluted efforts of various crusading outsiders -- ambitious young journalists, honest cops, disaffected lawyers -- to uncover the identity of the serial killer stalking the north of England in the era of Thatcher and punk rock.

The result is a British stab at the particularly American genre of film noir, importing the free-floating menace without any of the other identifying marks. “It’s not just one person who’s responsible,” observes Jarrold about “Red Riding,” “but there’s this creeping corruption and dark atmosphere that permeated through the institutions, the landscapes, the buildings, and it’s created this world.”

Like another recent serial-killer film, David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” “Red Riding” privileges the hunt over the solution. It is a crime story that reflects the disappointments and ambiguities of real life -- even the false leads and mistaken conclusions.

Nonetheless, “Red Riding” holds out the hope of closure, of understanding; a character observes early on in “1974” that “everything’s linked, Eddie -- show me two things that aren’t,” and the remainder of the trilogy devotes itself to honoring that sentiment, even as it offers red herrings and incorrect solutions by the barrelful.

Taking a page out of the book of “Zodiac,” “Red Riding” accentuates the discomfort of investigation. This is not a movie where one clue leads effortlessly to the next.

Instead, each investigation derails just as it begins. Marsh ( “Man on Wire”) sees “Red Riding” as paying homage, in its locale and style, to past British crime films like Nicolas Roeg’s “Performance” and “The Long Good Friday.” “Each screenplay was strong, and it felt like they were real movies set in England as opposed to the Guy Ritchie kind of crime film that feels very cartoon-like,” Marsh says.

Three-way filming

How do you tell one story with three directors? The process would seem to require an enormous amount of careful planning and coordination -- or, as the case turned out, a single dinner where everyone involved agrees to go their separate ways.

“One of the great appeals of this is that we were given complete freedom,” notes Marsh. “Choose your collaborators, your actors, your designers, your [director of photography], and make the film that you want, and let’s see what happens. It’s an unusual experiment, and we all embraced that freedom.”

In fact, in all three films, only one shot -- a menacing establishing shot of the approach to the town of Fitzwilliam -- recurs by design. “We made a decision up front -- at that dinner, in fact -- to go away and do our own thing,” remembers Tucker (“Shopgirl”), “even to the point that if there were locations that were shared, Julian [Jarrold] and I actually chose different locations to be the same location.”

The stylistic differences are immediately evident. “1974” is hallucinogenic and disorienting, an acid-rock freak-out in fluorescent colors. “1980” is the relatively calm middle ground, and “1983” is the weak light at the end of the tunnel, its jagged rays of sunlight and carefully framed landscapes offering a belated beacon of comfort.

After agreeing on casting, each director was given the authority to shoot his film as he pleased, to the extent that each “Red Riding” is shot on different film stock: “1974” was filmed on Super 16-millimeter, “1980” on 35-millimeter, and “1983” is shot digitally.

Still, the coordination was complex and required nimbleness and patience: “David Morrissey [who plays a police officer] sometimes was doing a scene for ‘1974’ in the morning, he would do a scene for me in the afternoon, he would do a scene for Anand in ‘1983,’ ” says Marsh, “all in the same day.”

The relative lack of pre-planning can be credited to the confidence of Andrew Eaton, whose Revolution Films co-produced the trilogy, and to the effort of Grisoni, who devoted 2 1/2 years to bringing Peace’s vision to the screen even though Peace describes “Red Riding” as “almost anti-film.”

Like the legendary conversation between Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner during the production of “The Big Sleep,” Peace could not always untangle the threads of plot for his screenwriter, occasionally throwing up his hands in genuine confusion. As a result, the plot of “Red Riding” is hardly linear, but the mood -- a shadowy atmosphere of thwarted ambition and horrific violence -- is sustained.

Having overcome the enormous hurdle of production, “Red Riding” (being released in the United States by IFC Films) faces another daunting task: distributing three interlinked but separate films to an increasingly fractious audience.

“I’m not quite sure how they’re going to be consumed,” says Marsh with a laugh. “It’s an interesting challenge for the distributor to figure out if we show them all at the same time. . . . Not my problem.”

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