SHANE MEADOWS

Self-doubts begone – with work like TwentyFourSeven, This is England and The Virtues, Shane Meadows is one of the finest British directors working today. So to mark the rerelease of his 2004 drama Dead Man’ s Shoes, Total Film sits down with Meadows to discuss how his troubled youth infuses the personal and political nature of his work, and how he’s now entering a new chapter. ‘A full stop got put on something,’ he says.

‘W HEN YOU’VE NOT COME THROUGH THE EDUCATION SYSTEM OF FILM, YOU HAVE AN IMPOSTER SYNDROME’

INTERVIEW JAMIE GRAHAM

SEBASTIEN VINCENT/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

Shane Meadows is a talker. He doesn’t talk at you, he talks with you, a down-toearth, ebullient guy who enjoys trading stories, information and viewpoints. And while he loves a bit of banter, he doesn’t hide behind it – amore open and honest man you could not hope to meet.

And meet him Total Film does, twice: first, in June, in a West End screening room, and again on Zoom in July, with a cheeky phone call sandwiched in between. There’s a scintillating 27year career to talk through, and eight pages of the Total Film Interview to fill. ‘If you don’t have enough, I’ll send you a picture of my beer belly,’ he grins.

Really, it’s not hard to see why actors love Meadows, eagerly signing up to spend many months in his company and to experience his process. Meadows, you see, is not one to meet his actors on set on day one of the shoot, and to film from a finished script. He instead spends months casting, improvising and rehearsing, with whatever series or movie he’s working on finding shape as it’s pushed and prodded from every angle.

‘I’m shit at filling in forms and I’m not very good at writing,’ he says by way of modest explanation for his workshopping methods. Truth is, he’s found something that yields special results, a process that adds to the honesty that comes from ransacking his own background to fill his frame. Mostly set in the Midlands and often mashing genres because life, after all, offers every flavour, Small Time, TwentyFourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England, Somers Town, Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee and The Virtues are all informed by events and people from his youth in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire.

The son of a father who was a longdistance lorry driver and a mum who worked three jobs (one in the local chippy where Shane scarfed deep-fried jam sandwiches), Meadows signed up to a performing-arts course at Burton College at age 18. It was there that he met Paddy Considine, who would go on to strikingly star in three of his films. But Meadows is in fact a self-taught filmmaker: ‘I really liked Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Stephen Frears,’ he says, ‘but Alan Clarke [Scum, Made in Britain, The Firm] connected with me in the same way that some of Werner Herzog’s films did… and Scorsese. Clarke was incredibly gifted at getting human beings onto the screen; human beings like I’d grown up with.’

Clarke’s DNA can be seen throughout Meadows’ work, and now Dead Man’s Shoes – which was filmed 20 years ago, in the middle of 2003 – is being screened at BFI Southbank alongside Clarke’s Scum, as part of the Acting Hard season that explores working-class masculinity.

‘There’s something in the veins of Dead Man’s Shoes,’ Meadows says, grappling with the reason why so many viewers have identified with Considine’s brutal avenger over the years, just like many people pinned up posters of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. Well, there’s something in the veins of Meadows’ work, period. Let’s tap into it and place it under a microscope…

Dead Man’s Shoes is part of the BFI’s Acting Hard season, also featuring films by Alan Clarke, Stephen Frears and Ken Loach. How did you discover their work?

Stephen Frears directed Walter and Walter & June. I remember Walter being on TV the first night of Channel 4, and I can remember that pushing me back in my chair. Ian McKellen played the lead, Walter. Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain was, for me, a post-apocalyptic version of Rebel Without a Cause. I needed to escape at that particular time. [Tim Roth’s teenage skinhead, Trevor] became this antihero for a lot of kids. It was that forgotten generation, seeing someone on the precipice of prison – the last gasps of someone trying to hold on to you before you finally hit the adult prison system. That made an enormous impact on me.

The work of those directors grew out of the British kitchen-sink dramas of the late-50s. Did you also watch those films growing up?

Yeah. I was living not too far from Nottingham as a kid, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was shot in Radford. I definitely appreciated those films. But I think the 70s needed to happen. What happened in America in the 70s – Travis Bickle’s journey around that fricking brothel with his gun, and all the red – allowed those films to almost be retold by other people, in a way that actually smacked you straight in the stomach. [Pause] I loved the wonderful madness of Channel 4 in the 80s. I loved Peter Greenaway: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Derek Jarman and Sebastiane. It didn’t have to just be working-class things.

Your latest TV series, The Gallows Pole, is about the Cragg Vale Coiners, whose counterfeiting scam threatened the economy. It’s set in the 1760s but holds a mirror up to our troubled times…

When I first started it, things weren’t as mental as they are now. Obviously we were finding comparatives, but I can’t lie – Ididn’t have a crystal ball as to how much more dramatic those comparisons would become in the next 12 to 18 months. It really does feel like we’ve taken an enormous step backwards to that kind of politics. There’s like six people in the world, and the rest of us can’t afford to pay our basic bills. The series became more relevant. As there always has been in my stuff, there’s inequality. You’re looking to a time when those canals had to be dug out and the people who were digging them out were being thrown in and thrown out like pieces of meat. That reflects a lot on now.

Do you see a throughline with This Is England?

I’ve never been someone to spout politics because I was always at the bottom end of it. My mates around me were always talking about Thatcher and she was almost like a cartoon character, like a baddie, some Dastardly and Muttley. Growing up, I didn’t really understand the net result of what was going on. What I did see was how incredible human beings are that are on the breadline. You’re looking at crime but I couldn’t help but see a genius quality in the fact that people were on their arse, but would somehow survive. And would share. It’s really weird, but people seem to become nicer, more generous and giving, the less that they’ve got.

‘SOME PEOPLE HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO STEAL FOOD TO EAT’

Do you see the Cragg Vale Coiners as Robin Hood figures?

There’s usually a reason why people commit crimes. Some people spend their lives being criminals, but some people have no choice but to steal food to eat. I loved the idea of looking at that community and telling a story about what leads people to… I know for a fact that if I couldn’t put food in my child’s stomach, and they were screaming and crying and possibly going to die, I’d do whatever it took to feed my child. The throughline to This Is England is that you’re looking at a community that’s suffering the net result of something that they have no control over. It’s being done in London, hundreds of miles away. So I suppose it’s political but I’ve not come at it with a view of politics, more looking at it from, ‘How would I survive?’

It’s odd watching the original This Is England film now. A lot of what Combo and Lenny say is similar to the rhetoric we heard in the lead-up to Brexit…

Yeah, it’s crazy. The only time those things ever seem to get traction is when times are really hard. When I was growing up as an 11- or 12-year-old kid, what started out as this joyous journey with a fantastic group of skinheads in the summer, listening to Trojan reggae – it felt like within 12 months or 18 months, this right-wing faction came in. It’s incredible, the similarities. It’s slightly more guarded [now] but it’s basically the same rhetoric. And it just goes to show you that if people are scared that they’re not going to be able to put food in their mouths, or they’re made to feel like that… They can very quickly have their heads turned round.

It’s terrifying.

[Nods] And obviously, this time round, a gigantic thing unfolded off the back of it, that we’re still suffering the consequences of, and there’s no end in sight. But the similarities… You need a minority. You need someone that you can blame. And although that person, or that minority, may change from situation [to situation], it tends to be: ‘This is threatening what we’ve got. This is threatening our standard of living. And this is what we need to do to protect it.’

Stephen Graham is one of several great actors that you’ve discovered. And now he’s twice worked with one of your heroes, Martin Scorsese!

Paddy [Considine] and Vicky [McClure], I did their first projects with them. I can’t take credit for giving Stephen his debut – he’d been in Snatch – but I think in terms of him having the chance to show what he could do in a real, central role, Combo really woke people up to the strength of his ability. The camera adores his face. If he’s angry, he’s like a shark. There’s nothing there. And if he’s sad, it’s like a cavern of pain. To have both of those abilities is incredibly rare.

Your early films Small Time and Where’s the Money, Ronnie? were based on people you knew, weren’t they?

Yeah, definitely. Small Time came about, I suppose, off the back of watching some of Scorsese’s early work, things like Mean Streets, which were small-time crooks. De Niro as Johnny Boy seems to just blow a bin up for no reason. I can remember going, ‘I’ve got mates like that.’ I can remember the Lottery being launched, and someone from Uttoxeter having the ingenuity to somehow create a fake ticket to get themselves in the newspaper, as though they’d won it. The local boozer put on a party for them. Even though no one had a pot to piss in, they seemed to find these ingenious ways of small-time crime.

Your full-length feature debut, TwentyFourSeven, was also personal…

Stephen Woolley, who exec-produced it, and Imogen West, who was the producer, they watched all of those early short films of mine, and I was so lucky because they were adamant that I should make a debut feature based on something that I grew up knowing. I was in this boxing club as a kid. I remember when that shut down, a lot of the kids ended up getting into trouble. You’re back on the streets. And then also this guy set up this football team in Uttoxeter. This team was hilarious. I don’t think we ever let in any less than 20 goals. We got banned from every league, and ended up having to play at prisons.

How was it working with Bob Hoskins?

I look back and realise just how lucky I was. If you’ve got someone on set who’s been there, seen it, done it all, and been to Hollywood… Working with a debut director, he could have chewed me up and spat me round the other end. That first week, I was properly shitting myself. Stephen Woolley had pulled together £1.5 million to make the film. It was a big leap from £5,000, making Small Time. Bob was doing this really, really clever thing. He could see that I was in puke mode for the first couple of days, so he had a chat with the first AD and the producers, and they said, ‘Let’s just do tracking shots. Let’s get some people walking through…’ You know, really lighthearted stuff, so I could get into it slowly.

ALAMY, BBC/©ELEMENT PICTURES (GP) LIMITED/OBJECTIVE FEEDBACK LLC/DEAN ROGERS

That’s smart. And generous.

Also, Bob did it for basically pennies. They got him a little trailer, and Bob’s door was always open. He had a little cappuccino machine, and all the actors were always in there. So that set a tone, that he was obviously saying, ‘I believe in this kid. I think it’s going to be good.’

You’ve said you felt, growing up, you were headed for prison. Did making these films feel like a lifeline?

Yeah. Before Small Time, I got caught, basically, pinching a breast pump, because Dena [Smiles, who lived up the road from Meadows and plays Kate in Small Time] needed a breast pump. If I was going to go to prison, it would have been for the shittest stuff ever. I’d pinched a breast pump, some chicken-tikka sandwiches, and a bottle of raspberry crush, because I think, ‘If I’m going to nick something, I might as well eat.’ And I’d been pinching tapes to make shorts on – Werner Herzogesque, taking it from the man. Anyway, I go to court, and they sentenced me to 12 months in prison. And then, at the end of it, they said, ‘Suspended.’ So I avoided going to prison, but if I’d been pulled in for anything else – like, even a parking ticket – I’d have had to serve that sentence.

Moving on to A Room for Romeo Brass, did it surprise you just how good Paddy Considine was? You’d been mates for years, but even so…

When we were growing up, I appreciated that he was a million times better at acting than me, and anyone else I’d ever met. But obviously I wasn’t a filmmaker. Me and Paddy both had aspirations to make films, but we never really fitted in on the film course. We didn’t have that academic love of French Renaissance... So he goes to Brighton, and I end up getting chucked off my degree course in Nottingham, and I start making these shorts. Paddy came back after he’d completed his degree. And I said, ‘I’m doing this film. I really feel like you were the best actor I ever knew. But now I actually know how to get performances out of people [by] improvising, the way that you used to do it.’ So I showed him all of these short films. I used to love watching Paddy do his characters, but I thought it was just kids’ stuff. But then seeing it [on A Room for Romeo Brass]… it was crazy. Absolutely remarkable.

‘I GO TO COU RT AND THEY SENTENCED ME TO 12 MONTHS’

You followed Romeo Brass with Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. It was your first taste of negative reviews…

It was a situation where we were struggling to get finance, so I had to adapt the normal way we would do things. I ended up in a situation where I was making changes to a script I wouldn’t normally have made. The mistake I made was my desire to make another feature film overcame my desire to be myself. It all felt a bit wrong. I didn’t feel like I was serving the actors the best way I could. They all turned up wanting the process, but there wasn’t enough money or time. I learned, ‘You’re much better off making nothing than making something that’s half-arsed, or isn’t quite you.’

Has that informed all of your work since?

Some opportunities have come in – for quite a bit of money, more than I’ve earned on three or four films – to go and do a couple of weeks shooting on a big series in America. Just one hour of a big series. And having felt I’d let the actors down, and let myself down, I’ve kind of gone [pulls sour face]. I don’t think I’d be good at being rich anyway. I go home to Uttoxeter more regularly than I ever have, and honestly, it’s like medicine. And if I went back there and people thought I’ve turned into an idiot, it would wound me.

You came back strong from Midlands with Dead Man’s Shoes. People really connect with that film. Do they share the anger of Paddy’s character?

I think there’s something about Dead Man’s Shoes and the honesty of the darkness, the brutality of the darkness. When you’re growing up, the first time you see that level of brutality in another human being… When you see someone, and behind their eyes, they’re not seeing you as a fucking human being, they’re seeing you as a kind of victim that they can abuse and play with, almost like someone putting a finger on an ant… I think most of us have been through an experience where we’ve looked into the eyes of someone else, and they’re not looking at us like we deserve to be there. And most people know of one story of a bullying thing like that that went horrifically wrong.

You witnessed some horrendous bullying, didn’t you?

I was 12 years old, and one of my mates was getting picked on by 16- and 17-year-old kids. To this day, I just wish I’d gone in, and had my head smashed in, and stuck up for him. But I was so scared, I didn’t. Dead Man’s Shoes appears to be a genre revenge film. But at the crux of it, the level of bullying that goes on, I think touches a nerve in people.

You said in an interview with The Guardian that your TV series The Virtues stemmed from an older boy sexually abusing you when you were nine. It was a memory that you’d repressed for many years. Do you think you were subliminally working through that with Dead Man’s Shoes?

Yeah. It was leaking out. When you look through my work, it’s really mad how many of the situations have that overpowering, out-of-control aspect. Bullying plays an enormous role. Obviously Shaun [played by Thomas Turgoose] in This Is England was me after that experience. This little, shaggy-haired kid, wearing baggy flares, needing to sign up with an army of people that could protect me. Nothing made sense when I struggled a bit with my mental health, when it was starting to creep out of my system. But then when you actually get to the bottom of it, everything made sense, because you realise why you would want to go and become a skinhead, why you would want to hang around with people that look as hard as nails, and to feel that protection.

The Virtues deals directly with repressed sexual abuse. Was it cathartic to make?

It was. I wasn’t quite as far along the healing process as I thought I was. Some of it was quite tricky. And then my mum died of cancer during the making of it. So it was a brutal time. I suppose what I’m saying is, had I realised where I was at with all of that experience, I may have left it a bit longer. But, yeah, it was massively cathartic. I’m very, very glad I made it, and I do feel like that autobiographical side of my work can take a step back, for a while. Like, you look at The Gallows Pole – it isn’t based on my life. A full stop got put on something, I think.

Has the British film industry changed a lot since you started out in the mid90s? It was unusual to have a regional filmmaker then.

I think things have improved and are improving all the time. I’m connected to lots of people – BBC, Channel 4 – and what you notice is… Obviously the BBC moved [from London] to Salford, and Channel 4, I think, have got a huge hub in Leeds. A lot of things have changed at a fundamental level. I remember, when I was doing Small Time, the pomp and ceremony of travelling down to London. When I first landed in St. Pancras, in the mid-90s, it was almost like Victorian England. There was something absolutely beautiful about that. Going into Channel 4 was like going into Hollywood, for me. But what you realise is that it was all way, way too centralised. That’s all been repaired now.

Apart from your documentary The Stone Roses: Made of Stone, you’ve stuck to TV for 14 years now…

I think TV has taken over from film. [When I started out] everyone wanted to make a feature. Now, film has very much tipped in the favour of the distributors and the cinemas. I’m talking financially. And the people who spend two or three years making films very rarely prosper. Two of my most successful films, I had to give money back off my wages to be able to make them. It’s just how it is. I think TV is much fairer. There’s a huge, huge demand now for content. So people want longer-form things. But you can’t get away from the magic and mystique of film. It was so exciting in the 90s. And then there was that huge crash, where everyone who’d set up a studio or an office here went home. But I feel it’s definitely blossoming again. Fingers crossed.

Will you go back to films? You’ve done some fabulous TV work but it feels like a loss to cinema…

Yeah. I’m sitting down to talk to some people. I’m yearning to go back to make a film. What’s really mad now is that my television stuff, especially the BBC ones, are not really far off features in terms of length. [The episodes] are all creeping over an hour. So weirdly, I’m making sort of featurettes. This will probably sound a bit mental, but a feature would feel like bloody light relief! There’s a few stories… I’m trying to get the rights to a book at the moment. I can’t divulge, but it’s something I’ve been interested in for a while. And that’s a feature film all over. I’d absolutely love [to make it]. There’s a prestige to cinema. There’s something about it that you can’t recreate at home. I miss it.

‘YOU CAN ’T GET AWAY FROM THE M YSTIQU E OF FILM’

And will you ever team up with Paddy again?

Oh God, yeah, completely. I probably shouldn’t say this, but this project I’m looking at, Paddy’s very much in my head for one of the key roles. The problem that me and Paddy have got is because of the couple of things we’ve made, if we put our names to something, the audience wants to see something special happen. So it needs to be the right project. This film I’d love to get off the ground, Paddy is very much a part of it. I’ve not even told Paddy [laughs] because I don’t want to do that thing of ringing up and saying this and then not being able to get the rights. He’s an incredibly unique talent and I miss working with him enormously.

A final thought: young filmmakers now look at you how you looked at Clarke, Frears and Leigh. How does that feel?

Amazing. It’s hard, because obviously when you’ve not come through, in a classical sense, the education system of film, you have an imposter syndrome. But there’s nothing more joyous, nothing nicer, than someone saying… [peters off] Dead Man’s Shoes is 20 years old now! It’s insane because that’s got a life of its own. You don’t have to have been 18 in 2003. You could be 16 or 18 now, and people seem to still be getting it. It makes me really proud to think that people might look up to my work in that way. But I hope it’s as much because I did it without that classical training.