ABSTRACT
Ten years after Caryl Phillips’s novel1 The Final Passage was published, he adapted it as a two-part serial for Channel 4 television, which he co-produced with the director, Sir Peter Hall. It was shot on location in London, St Lucia and Trinidad, and its budget of £2.7 million for two seventy-five minute episodes made it one of the highest-budget dramas commissioned by the channel. In it a West Indian couple, Michael and Leila, join the mass migration to Britain with their baby son Calvin. The serial was first screened on Channel 4 on two consecutive nights in July 1996. This interview took place as the film was being shot.
