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This Is Meadows

2007-04-27 00:00:00

Shane Meadows is without doubt the most successful film director ever spawned by the city of Nottingham. Despite not being born here, he moved to Nottingham and was inspired to start making short films in and around the Sneinton area during the early '90s. After making a series of short films and documentaries, he found backers to finance his first full-length feature film Twentyfourseven and the rest is now history.

In this exclusive interview for Nottingham's NG Magazine, Shane Meadows talks about his early career and more specifically about his forthcoming release This Is England.

Meadows’ films echo the styles of cinematic realism that were popularised by directors like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, mainly in his use of untrained actors and improvised acting. Nottingham still informs his work in a major way and he insists on shooting the majority of his films locally. What a star!


Having won an array of awards and accolades for films including the phenomenal thriller Dead Man’s Shoes and the poignant A Room for Romeo Brass, Shane Meadows has firmly established a reputation as a trailblazing regional filmmaker; a true rarity in a country that seems to be obsessed with forging a London-centric British film scene.

Even the man himself agrees that when he first started making films, the idea of setting them outside the big smoke was not easy: “Obviously the film world ten years ago, when I first kicked off, was a very different landscape. Meeting anyone for a job on the crew, and on the cast, always meant a trip to London for me. But it’s changed quite dramatically. You can’t completely exist outside of what’s down there, but things have changed massively. On a technical level, I can edit at home. And on a casting level, now I have five films behind me, I have this team of people I can rely on and work with again and again. And it was a big moment when I met Mark Herbert from Warp Films, because his idea was to make their base in Sheffield. So I found a kindred spirit in Mark.

Stephen Graham as Combo in This Is England

NG: Surely after amassing a considerable collection of trophies and substantial critical acclaim, it’s now a lot easier to have your whims indulged by eager financiers?

SM: Completely. I’m obviously first and foremost a British filmmaker on a global scale, but when it comes to narrowing it down, I really feel like my voice is in the Midlands and outside of London. Obviously when you’re raising money, you have to go down there and play the game. But it feels quite different. You do feel independent. In London, there must be thousands of people in the business of making films whereas in Nottingham or Sheffield, you’re probably talking about below a hundred. So there aren’t thousands of people scrapping for the same money and for the same jobs.

NG: Is Nottingham still close to your heart?

SM: I love it. I went out in Nottingham the other night and there’s a really beautiful community of people who are really supportive. It’s not this back-stabbing thing with high-rent, high-costs, high-tension. Up here we are independent filmmakers and there’s a lovely sense of camaraderie.

NG: Your films are all set in Nottingham and the East Midlands but the stories are not limited by this setting. Do you think that the scope of your films has broadened over the years?
SM: Probably more than any of my films to date, This Is England is the hardest to place anywhere. I’d made three Nottingham films, but This is England and Dead Man’s Shoes have become less specific and less identifiable. This is England, just in the title, is a much bolder film. I knew there would be big themes running through this, but I couldn’t lose the characterisation that’s gone through all my other films. I did know right from the beginning that this would be a step-up. It’s not that microcosm anymore. It’s probably the closest thing I’ll ever make to a political film.

This Is England explores life in 1983 from the perspective of 12-year-old Shaun Fields (the name is deliberately similar to Meadows’), an isolated youngster desperately seeking a sense of belonging. It deals with the breakdown of communities and political fallout of the Thatcher era, as well as other major issues like the Falklands War. These events certainly did not pass the young Meadows by and they are held up on screen for all to see, like a damning vision of his own adolescent hell. What is his opinion on the political climate back then?

SM: As an adult, I look back at who led the country up to that point. But when you start going through this footage from the 1980s, Thatcher was the first to be media savvy. Turning up on working class estates, going into a classroom of kids and playing on a computer…I don’t seem to remember anyone before doing that. She did embrace that. When you look at the footage of the Falklands and see the campaign as the unemployment figures hit 3.5 million, it does make you incredibly suspicious as to what paratroopers were doing fighting 16-year-old kids from Argentina.

Thomas Turgoose as Shaun at centre of skinheads in This Is England

NG: Do you see any parallels between the Falklands War in the 1980s and the situation in Iraq now?

SM: The Falklands was an incredibly suspicious war, in the same way America and the UK got involved in Iraq. People can see that now. Obviously there were more people against going into Iraq than there were going into the Falklands…but the shame I carry as a British resident, was that it was a war handled in the media as if it were a World Cup summer. Ultimately, I was privy to footage from ITN archives that weren’t shown on television of the people we were fighting, and it was shameful. How could we have been proud of winning that? So that was always running in the back of this film – the root level of that horrible racism, that bullying and violence that exists in someone can also be inherent in a nation without us knowing it.

NG: The most virulent racism in the film emanates from the character of Combo, but he also makes a stand against the war. Did you find it hard to reconcile this irony?

SM: Like a lot of those people, Combo is affected and damaged by his own life. What tends to happen with characters is that they’re not fleshed out, but in my films people tend to bring their own stories to the film. Stephen Graham, who plays Combo, has a mixed race heritage. He has a Swedish grandmother, a fully Jamaican grandfather and brothers who look black, but Stephen is just very fair skinned. When I offered him the part, he rang me one night at one o’clock in the morning, and he was beside himself. He said: “You’ve asked me to play this extreme right-wing character. But I need to tell you that my dad’s black.” And I didn’t have a clue.

NG: That’s incredible! You had no idea that he was mixed race?

SM: I had no idea. Because he wasn’t as dark skinned as his brothers, he was never quite sure if he fitted in. And I thought it was very brave of him to bring it forward and use that complication for his character. So if you watch that scene with him and Milky at the end, knowing that, that that’s what he was thinking, you can see jealousy in his eyes – he’s jealous the guy is black.

NG: The film is told from the point of view of skinheads and how their culture was also appropriated by the political conflicts that were going on at the time. Do you get annoyed with the stereotypical generalisation of skinheads as ignorant, violent yobs?

SM: The violence in the film isn’t down to them being skinheads. The violence at the end is about personal torture. Ultimately, the skinhead side of the film is what I wanted it to be, which is to show skinheads as they really were and as I saw it from the inside. So you could see how easy it was for kids to slip through…people who became skinheads didn’t understand where it came from. They thought it was always a racist thing. The eighties was still a time when the skinheads I hung around with understood where they were from. They knew they were second wave skinheads and they knew they weren’t original 1969 skinheads but they wanted to be true to that. Everyone thought the working classes were fucked, but we were really proud of being working class and were going to wear the equivalent of work-boots, jeans, a white shirt and some braces, which we can all afford, and are going to create an image of something so powerful. It was political but it was never extreme, one way or the other.

Shane Meadows and producer Mark Herbert on the set of This Is England

NG: We’ve already said that This Is England is about a young boy trying to find a culture that he belongs to. Do you agree with that?

SM: Yeah. I think it was about that idea. Every kid comes to a point in his life, where you listen to your dad, but then you go into the street and you start listening to the views of other people. You’re looking for role models. It’s like that moment when you step out. Obviously Shaun is more invested in looking for a father figure because he’s lost his own father. The core of the film is Shaun by himself, beginning and end, and then in the middle with these two very strong and very different people. Woody has a really good heart and Combo has a massively complicated heart. As much as he wants to help this kid, he’s far too fucked up himself to be able to do it. And he ends up damning him.

NG: What’s it like directing a child actor? Is it any harder than working with an adult?

SM: Thomas Turgoose (Shaun) was pretty much flawless. The only thing I had to do with Tommo was make him believe. Like he hated wearing all the really wank clothes at the beginning as there were girls standing around watching, and on a personal level he found it really embarrassing. So I had to chat to him saying, ‘For the transformation to work, you have to look like a dweeb!’ So bizarrely it was the most different actor-director relationship I’ve ever had. It was basically like working with myself at that age.

It serves as an incredible testament to Nottingham that a volunteer at the local Intermedia centre can go on to become one of the UK’s most successful film directors. This Is England has already bagged the British Independent Film Award for best film and the special jury prize at last year’s Rome film festival, but it promises much more for the indie director who deserves increased mainstream recognition for his work. Will his new film manage to achieve just that?

Interview: Michelle Dhillon

This Is England opens on April 27th. Go to The Diary for more information on where it is showing in Nottingham.

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