'Get Carter' Garage to be Demolished

The parking garage featured in the 1971 movie 'Get Carter', Gateshead car park outside London (above), will be demolished.

About selecting the location, director Mike Hodge says:

Having drafted the script I spent weeks combing the area for locations. That's when I saw the Trinity Centre. You couldn't miss it – a monumental example of Sixties British brutalist architecture which, along with the city's vast cast iron bridges stretching across the Tyne, seemed to capture the nature of Jack Carter himself.

As I wandered alone through the upper structure, I realised how the different levels would allow me to reveal the hunter, Jack Carter (Michael Caine), and the hunted, Cliff Brumby, simultaneously but without either being aware of the other – thereby increasing the suspense. When they eventually collide on one of the cement spiral stairwells, the method of Brumby's demise quickly became obvious.

In regard to the violence in 'Get Carter', where his character, Jack Carter, is depicted throwing a person to his death from the Gateshead car park, Michael Caine says:

I always regarded film violence as sort of pornographic when children would watch someone get smashed in the face 30 times, then see them come to work the next day with a tiny piece of plaster on their face. We wanted to get the idea across that one punch took out seven or eight teeth. Or maybe if the guy had a ring out, blinded you in one eye.

So when you see Carter, the violence is absolutely out of the blue, and very realistic. And the bit where I throw the guy off the parking garage and he lands on a car below, killing a family inside it, that’s because I thought ‘Well they always land on the ground, don’t they? What if he landed on a car with some women and children in it, and they get harmed as well?”

I have a philosophy in life and that is once you make a mistake, it will spread. This falls over, that falls over onto that, that catches fire and then the hotel burns down.