Shane Meadows makes films unlike
anybody else's, in a manner that is wholly his own. Untrained, the Midlands-based
wunderkind works almost entirely from instinct and gut feeling, pouring
his heart into personal projects, which, because of their honesty, humour
and emotional truth, appear to connect with audiences wherever they
play. His second feature-length film, A Room for Romeo Brass, is no
exception.
Like 1997's award-winning TwentyFourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass is
deeply rooted in Meadows' memories of his own childhood, and in particular
of his relationship with the film's co-writer, Paul Fraser. It revolves
around two twelve-year-old boys, Romeo Brass (Andrew Shim) and Gavin
Woolley (Ben Marshall), whose friendship is tested when the latter is
laid up with a back problem. Instead of sticking by his pal, Romeo gravitates
towards an eccentric man-child, Morell (Paddy Considine), little suspecting
the danger that lies behind the damaged interloper's comic facade.
While he insists that the boys in the film are not himself and Fraser,
Meadows admits that he also embarked upon a rite of passage when his
best friend was confined to bed.
"I went off and hung around with kids much older than me and I
was stripped of quite a lot of my childhood," he says, ruefully.
"Things that I should have been discovering at a much slower rate
were f*ckin' injected in my arm, almost. I seized it all with both hands
- I smoked pot, all that kind of caper."
Meadows hero-worshipped the older boys, who made him their "sort
of mascot". And of course, he wanted to be just like them. Lifting
his shirt sleeves, he reveals two tattoos he had done - illegally, with
the help of a forged note supposedly written by his father - at the
ages of eleven and twelve; his name, Shane, on the left arm, a bulldog
on the right. His teacher thought they were great, and asked where he
had them done because he fancied one himself. "It was dead mad,"
Meadows exclaims. "I was only eleven."
Although he was quite grown up for his age, Meadows now realises that
he did not fully comprehend what was going on around him, how different
the world was that he had entered, or what it was doing to him. The
moment that shocked him back to reality, and practically erased the
last vestige of his innocence, inspired one of the most shocking scenes
in A Room For Romeo Brass.
"I convinced this guy that I was desperate to see a fight,"
he says sadly. "So he took me somewhere and beat this lad up. It
was f*cking horrible. I thought it was going to be kind of like you'd
see in the films - throw him about a bit, hit him in the tummy, hit
him in the face, hooray, hooray it's over. But seeing someone stamping
on someone's face and feeling responsible for that, suddenly I was handed
a big bag of guilt emotions that I should never have been given at that
age. I realised then that I was out of my depth."
When he returned to Paul Fraser, though, he suddenly discovered how
far they had grown apart. "What I hadn't realised was that the
older lads were having different styles of conversation; they weren't
talking about the new Action Man figure, they were talking about women.
When I went back to Paul, the things that he would say and the simplistic
way that he came out with them, I was just not there anymore. That hurt.
It really f*cking hurt."
Meadows is not only close to the emotions which make 'A Room for Romeo
Brass' such an affecting, sometimes disturbing experience, but also
the community within which it takes place. Like the bulk of his rapidly
expanding oeuvre - he is only 29, yet he has already made in excess
of 30 shorts - it reflects his deep affection for his working-class
roots and for people who do not usually have a voice in the cinema.
It is this second factor, he feels, that has seen his reasons for making
films shift in the last few years. When he started doing shorts - using
a camcorder, a handful of friends and a collection of comedy wigs -
he was driven by the desire to meet "chicks". But then he
discovered filmmaking was the only activity to which he was able to
apply himself with the utmost patience.
"If you spent a week living with me," he says, "you'd
see that I'm appalling at every single thing patience-wise, except filmmaking.
The minute I get out and I start to make a film, I am almost like a
completely different person. I think it is probably because I care about
people and remember so much about them. If there's been injustices and
things like that done to them, it stays with me. I guess I just like
working with characters that many people don't give a chance to. Darcy
was like that (Bob Hoskins character in TwentyFourSeven), an outsider,
and Morrell's an outsider in the same way. I'm making a film about an
elderly couple next, before I do one about a bare knuckle fighter (instead,
he's making his long-gestating Western, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands)."
Thereafter he is going to play it by ear: "I'm going to continue
working as long as I've got the drive," he says. "And the
drive is that I can see imperfections in both my first films. You keep
wanting to do it again because you want to get it absolutely perfect
this time. I know that is impossible, but it is what keeps me going".
