Director David Farr: ‘Fears about raising my children in the city inspired film’

The director of a new psychological thriller starring Clemence Poesy and David Morrissey says the film — set in London — was inspired by his own concerns about raising children in the capital.

The Ones Below by writer-director David Farr, which premieres at the London Film Festival tonight, is about two couples living in the same Islington building who turn on each other after one loses a child.

Farr told the Standard: “The film is based on the strangely solitary feeling of raising a child in a big city like London. There’s enormous numbers of people around you, but you can feel as if you’re on your own.

“Having a kid is somehow exaggerated by being in a city. You may not have the support to call upon that people do in other places or other societies. So many people in London are living on top of each other now.

“Both the couples in the film are middle-class and have means, it’s not the economics, but the psychology that I’m interested in.

What happens when people you could call on for support are pitted against each other? How well do you know your neighbour?” Farr, former artistic director of the Gate and Lyric theatres, was raised in Guildford and has two teenage children.

He said the film was very much a London story and about Europeans living in the capital. As well as French-born Poesy it stars Finnish actress Laura Birn and Briton Stephen Campbell Moore, and was filmed on location in north London.

Farr added: “There’s something about the uniqueness, the strangeness and the wonderfulness of London … people from all over the world fleeing war or poverty or just coming here for economic reasons.”

The Ones Below goes on general release early next year.