Film director putting down The Marker for city’s film industry

The 104 bus used to take teenager Justin Edgar from his Sutton Coldfield home into Birmingham, to watch Taxi Driver in the The Electric cinema and indulge his love of gritty crime films.

30 years later, he’s back at the Electric with his company 104 Films at a showing of his crime noir film, The Marker. It was filmed in Birmingham and the West Midlands and stars John Hannah and Cathy Tyson, alongside leads Frederick Schmidt and Ana Ularu.

“I love noir, I love classic noir like Raymond Chandler,” said Edgar. “I thought if I can try and transpose a Raymond Chandler-esque story onto the streets of Birmingham it will be really interesting.

“But I knew I had to do something that was a little bit different. I had this idea of the femme fatale as a ghost. She’s a ghost of the conscience, she’s a ghost of guilt. I thought that was really interesting, almost like he is possessed by this woman.”

The dark, fast-paced thriller follows Marley (Schmidt) as he seeks to make amends for a gruesome killing of Ana (Ularu), which left her young daughter alone. On his release from prison, he sought to put things right and extricate himself from the quicksand of gangster life – all while being haunted by the presence of Ana.

Edgar acknowledges “a conscious effort to step up in terms of casting” from his previous films, with Hannah and Tyson providing recognisable faces to British audiences while Ularu is a star in her native Romania and last year appeared in Dan Brown’s Inferno.

He said: “Across the board I didn’t want to cast people with the broken noses and the usual suspects that you would usually see in a gangster film because I wanted to get across this sense of its horrendous all the time.”

Edgar wrote and directed the film, which he described “not a redemption story, it’s a revenge story”. It is a very different production to his first three films, which were all comedies.

He said: “I always wanted to do a crime film and I sat down and did a list of all the things I wanted to see in this crime film, like cool, Irish hitmen and scenes in strip clubs and things like that. I knew I wanted all this stuff and I ticked them off my list as we were writing the script.”

His next film will be another departure with plans to do a biopic of a West Midlands rock star – “I can’t say which, I’d probably get sued, it’s at very early stages at the moment”, he said.

Digbeth and the Jewellery Quarter form the backdrop to the action in The Marker, with Edgar focusing on the less salubrious parts of the city.

“The spiritual home of the film is Digbeth because when I was growing up and I’d go down to the late night boozers and the lock-ins, there’d be such amazing characters that were on the fringes of this criminal underbelly in the city,” he said.

“I grew up in the late ’80s coming into the city to watch films and it would have two kinds of spaces – the concrete spaces, the brutalist spaces, of the Bullring and underpasses, but at the same time you had the dark Victorian spaces.

“We did a scene underneath the railway arches at the Custard Factory. I just find those little dark spaces in the city that you don’t normally see, that aren’t the postcard tourist shots, are really interesting. That’s where I felt this story should take place.”