Set among the privileged elite of Oxford University, The Riot Club follows Miles (Max Irons) and Alistair (Sam Claflin), two first-year students determined to join the infamous Riot Club, where reputations can be made or destroyed in the course of a single evening.

The Riot Club is based on Laura Wade’s play Posh, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2010 before transferring to the West End.

Before the play opened, film producer Pete Czernin read it and was hooked on the story from the moment he read the first 30 pages.

He explained that it was “the combination of wit, entertainment and substance that I liked, with an underlying, interesting, topical part to it all that really defines the class system and how people go about their lives in the UK, for better or for worse”.

Wade began working on the play in 2007, when she began a research project into young, wealthy people living in London. During the course of the project she became interested in the Oxford and Cambridge dining societies that were made up of very wealthy young men, and explains their exclusiveness, rituals and traditions.

The film’s producers were challenged by the idea of a woman director helming a story about English upper-class boys

“The idea that a major tradition would be to have a huge dinner at the end of each term, and that one of the clubs in particular had a tradition of smashing up a restaurant where they held their dinner, and paying for the damage afterwards, was the story that I really got hooked on, because it felt like a really interesting metaphor for something bigger.”

Wade herself wrote the screen adaptation, and the changes from stage play to the big screen are substantial, having to go beyond the play’s basic premise of ten guys sitting around the table.

The film opened up the possibility of getting out of the room and introducing the characters in more detail, the dynamics of the relationships among them and the establishment of the club itself. In the meantime, Danish director Lone Scherfig was approached to direct the film.

Not only were the film’s producers challenged by the idea of a woman director helming a story about quintessential English upper-class boys and their bad behaviour; Scherfig had proven she understands the inherent concept of Englishness with her critically-acclaimed direction of An Education.

The Riot Club stars a roster of up-and-coming actors Max Irons (son of Jeremy), Sam Claflin (currently starring in the Hunger Games franchise), Douglas Booth, Sam Reid, Ben Schnetzer (who was on recent release Pride), Holliday Grainger, Jessica Brown Find-lay from Downton Abbey and Freddie Fox.

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