The Criterion Collection

Quadrophenia producers Bill Curbishley and Roy Baird chose Franc Roddam to direct the film after seeing Dummy, an award-winning 1977 movie he made for British television, about a deaf and mute teenage prostitute.

Quadrophenia was made in 1979, at the height of the British punk movement, and the filmmakers contemplated casting a punk musician as the lead, to lend Jimmy an authentic air of rebellion. They considered Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols for the role, but the film’s insurance company refused to allow him to be cast. Rotten apparently would have turned down the role anyway, saying he didn’t want to “live out any of Pete Townshend’s fantasies.”

Actor Mark Wingett was only sixteen years old when he was cast to play Jimmy’s friend Dave. At one point, he wanted to quit the film, but Roddam enticed him to stay by giving him a vomit-stained T-shirt once worn by his idol Sid Vicious, which had been given to Roddam by Johnny Rotten.

Wingett and Phil Daniels, who ultimately played Jimmy, were reunited a year after Quadrophenia came out, in Brian Gibson’s 1980 cult film Breaking Glass, starring Hazel O’Connor as a singer in a new wave band struggling to get to the top. The film was coproduced by the future boyfriend of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed.

John Bindon, who plays Harry, the gangster, was just as colorful as his character. Before he was cast in Quadrophenia, Bindon did security for the 1977 Led Zeppelin U.S. tour, and he was tried for murder in 1978. He allegedly had many links to the London underworld and was even mixed up in a scandal involving Princess Margaret.

A post–World War II glut of airplane wheels prompted Italian motorcycle manufacturers Vespa and Lambretta to design smaller recreational motorbikes that made use of the surplus parts. These stylish and affordable scooters became the de rigeur mode of transportation among London’s mod set.

During the initial shooting of the riot scenes in Brighton, some of the professional extras (the only paid ones in the film) cast to portray policemen were seen laughing as the cameras rolled. Roddam was not pleased, and before the reshoot, he instructed some of the mod extras to really attack the “police.”

Director of photography Brian Tufano had worked with Roddam at the BBC, filming documentaries. And his work on Quadrophenia resonated so much with young filmmakers Danny Boyle, John Hodge, and Andrew Macdonald that they hired him to shoot their nineties films Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.

One of the film’s shooting locations was a neighborhood called Frestonia, in the Notting Hill area of London. Frestonia was a community of squatters that attempted to secede from the United Kingdom in 1977. The Clash recorded their album Combat Rock in Frestonia’s Ear Studios.

Beachy Head, the headland on the coast of Southern England where the final scene of Quadrophenia takes place, is surpassed only by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the Aokigahara woods in Japan in number of suicides that take place there.

Susan Arosteguy is a producer at the Criterion Collection.