Features

When you described Romeo Brass to me a year ago, you described it as a portmanteau movie about the different people who live in this room. Where did it change?
"It all changed in rehearsals. It was really funny because what started off being an auto-biography just became biographical, but not a true representation of what had happened. I'm not one to tie things down. Unless I think it's absolutely paramount, I just go with whatever happens with the actors. I do that quite a bit. I'll talk about an idea and it starts off being a cookery show and then ends up being a f*ucking Taiwanese sado-masochist piece (he is referring to the film 'Lies' that is appearing in the London Film Festival at the time of our interview). I was going to bring it down to the LFF, but I thought him having a print of his here, I'd leave mine at home. Sado-masochist hamsters, Bertie and Bert."

How autobiographical is this then?
"It's completely about me and Fraser (Paul Fraser, his co-writer), but at the same time it's completely about childhood. I think it's that kind of mix, really. From a filmmaking point of view, I think a lot of people will notice there's less obvious camera movements and poetry with the camera this time. There are moments in the bedroom, but there is a lot more handheld. I tried to make it feel as natural and as timeless as possible.

"The key thing really was that I realised, much later in life, what my and Fraser's friendship meant to me. After leaving him in a bedroom, you know, I went off, hung around with kids much older than me, and was stripped of quite a lot of my childhood. Things that I should have been discovering at a much slower rate, were f*cking injected in my arm, almost. When I went back to Fraser, I was envious of him. The things that he would say and the simplistic way that he'd come out with them, I wasn't there anymore. That hurt. It really f*cking hurt."

Tell me about this amazingly funny and scary character, Morrell.
"We never, ever needed to know anything about Morrell, because that's how you see people when you're a kid. Certain key pieces of information were left out on purpose so that when Morrell changes from being this jolly, almost Norman Wisdom-style character at the beginning, you have the same lack of information as the children. You also then go, ‘Hold on a minute, where the f*ck is this guy from? I mean, who is this guy?' The penny doesn't really drop for Romeo until he goes round and Morrell turns on him. But at the same time, Morrell rather redeems himself for me somehow. I don't know how that happens, but I think you end up liking the first part so much with him, that when he's sat on the bed, by himself, after Ladine's gone, you actually feel really, really sorry for him."

Morrell is dangerous but he is also a victim of sorts, because of his relationship with his father.
"Exactly. And I'm glad that people really go with that because there are chances being taken. TwentyFourseven, you know, at the end of it, especially when we went abroad, people were clapping at the f*cking end. I would sit there and think, 'What the f*ck are you laughing at?' They completely missed the point. You'd just think, 'God almighty'. With this one, though, you really don't get that. At the end, when he gets the Dad and swings that hammer round and stands over him and tells him to get down on his knees, at that point it really does seem that people are holding their breath a lot more. Obviously Joseph then turns up and cleans up the situation. But I think from Paddy's performance point of view, his presence grew and grew and grew in the rehearsal, and I realised that his importance, he was going to be the catalyst for the film."

You mentioned earlier that Fraser still had a sort of innocence that you had lost. Was there an element of wish-fulfilment with this film, a sense of going back and recovering something that you lost early on?
"Completely. The thing is with me I did manage to rekindle it but not quite as easily as Romeo. If you make a film completely as events happened, they become boring. We've all seen too many of those 'This is how it was and this is my vision' things. But yeah, I think so. I think that Romeo basically gets to the stage where it's almost a jolt. He gets a f*cking electric shock. You can't amble through friendships like that. He's just realised for the first time that you can't f*cking tread on everybody. And he was the dominant force in that relationship. You must realise that this guy's Dad's probably been leaving him and messing him about for the most part of his life, so he's replaced that with an arrogance and a dominance and Knock Knocks has always needed him. But that operation, like Fraser's operation, once it's over and they've got a state of independence, Fraser would live without me and Knock Knocks has to live without Romeo and it's Romeo that needs to put his hand out and ask to be forgiven. I think that that's such a sweet moment, and I think that is such an adult moment. It's almost like they meet in the middle."

Looking back, was there a defining point where you can see you lost your innocence, and then how did you get the mindset where you were able to rekindle it?
"I think for me it was like hero-worshipping. I dragged myself out of it, I didn't ... I think, as a kid, it's a real common experience of never wanting to be the age that you are because you have all these restrictions. Once those restrictions are lifted, you can just jump on a plane, you can go in a casino ... you know, you can f*cking ruin yourself. Then you spend the rest of your life wanting to be back where you were. I think that, from my own point of view, I was always like hero-worshipping. I looked up to the older lads round my area, and that was like part of life where I was from. You know, you really did look up to the older kids.

"I suppose I always had a way with me that made them like having me around. I was like the little mascot, if you like. So when Fraser was in bed, I'd start jumping on a bus with them and bang off forty miles, go to the seaside for the weekend. I kind of had an older head on my shoulders and so they kind of didn't mind having me around. But what I didn't really realise at the time was that they're having different styles of conversation; they're not talking about the new Action Man figure, they're talking about women. I had tattoos done in a shop when I was eleven. I sat in a f*cking shop when I was eleven with a fake note that one of them had done from me Dad. Just shit like that."

What are they of?
"That one's just like a simple one with my name, and that one's like the classic sort of bulldog face. They were the only ones that I had done. But I had them done when I was eleven and twelve and I'd go to school and there was like no other kids in the school with a proper f*cking tattoo. The teacher went, 'Where did you have that done?' and I thought, 'F*cking 'ell, they're going to ring me dad and grass me up.' I just went, 'Blackpool, sir'. He says, 'It's a f*ckin' good job that is, isn't it.' He wanted to know where it was because he fancied one. It was dead mad.

"I was only an eleven-year-old kid, but because my dad was covered in tattoos, and I idolised my dad something chronic, what could he say to me? Obviously he wasn't happy, but at the same time my dad was level-headed enough to know that he couldn't sort of sit there and smoke a fag and then give me a real pasting if he caught me smoking one, because he knew he was showing those things to me."

But was there a defining moment?
"The defining moment for me was when I saw a lad get beaten up, and it had all kind of come about from me wanting to see a fight. I convinced this guy that I was desperate to see it and all that and so he beat this guy up. It was f*cking horrific. It was really bad. That's where the scenes of violence and the harshness and the coldness and the single f*cking single-shotness of the end of the film, where the camera's just there and it's moving back and it's not on a steadicam and straight and neat, comes from.

"That scene where the guy walks out of the shop and Morrell beats him up, I'd in my own way experienced that. But I actually was responsible for it because I wanted to see it. I kind of drove it. 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, I was handed a big bag of f*cking guilt emotions that I should never have been given at that kind of age. The same as many kids whom maybe when their parent’s split up, they take on so much responsibility that it actually affects their childhood. Like kids who are trapped between two parents and being used like a little f*cking tool. In my own way I kind of took on too much. I wasn't ready for that, you know? At twelve years old that is not the kind of thing you need to be seeing or you need to feel you are responsible for. And so from that point of view, I kind of realised that I was out of my depth.

"Getting out of that is a different story altogether, because you're part of that community. When I was 14 or 15, I really went back into it; I was doing the things that most 18 or 19 years olds were doing. For me, though, the sad part really was this 11/12 year old stage. I think most kids at 14 or 15 now are going to parties and drinking and taking drugs, and I think all that is commonplace. I think at 11 years old it's too much. But there are kids, in the town where I come from, who are 11/12 years old, and I don't know whether they're on smack, but I know they're doing E. Eleven years old, man, it's just f*cking unbelievable. Smack and Crack! F*ckin' 'ell."

There was a piece in British Screen Finance recently that said that very few first-time directors in between 1993 and 1995 had gone on to make a second movie. Out of 100 there was only something like 18. How easy for you was it to get financing for this film, especially as you were working with kids and unknowns.
"I think the critical success of TwentyFourseven meant the door was open, really. I'm not finding it a problem at the moment. I think critical success can really, really help. I don't think I realised the power. When it didn't makes masses at the box office, I thought I could struggle. But the overall critical opinion, you know the sort of thing, Great White Hope and all that, there was a lot of doors open to me and a lot of options. I chose to stay with one person and it all went through really smoothly."

Last time we spoke I compared Darcy and Morrell and we agreed to disagree. But you said at the time that what separates people is their drives. I wonder what drives you because I know that when you started movies, you got into it to meet girls. One assumes that it's changed since then.
"Of course. The absolute original start point, because I had never made a film I didn't know what my capabilities were, so it was mainly just down to chicks. I think - it's the strangest thing really and I don't really understand it myself - if you spent a week living with me you'd see that I'm f*cking appalling at every single thing patience-wise, except filmmaking. The minute I start to make a film, I'm almost like a completely different person. I don't know where it comes from, my patience with actors, because I've got no patience with anybody. I'm very impatient, very quick, always on the move. If I'm having a meal I want to finish and pay the bill. I'm always like that. But when it comes to filmmaking, I can sit for days and days and days and edit for days to two or three in the morning.

"The only way I can describe it is that I care about people. And because I care about people, and because I remember so much about people, if there's been injustices and things like that done to people, it just stays with me. It's a lot like that guy Robert Lindsay played (Wolfie Smith) in 'Citizen Smith'. You know, 'Power to the People' and all of that. I do like working with characters many people do not give a chance to. Darcy was like that, an outsider, and Morrell's an outsider in the same way."

Some commentators have tried to lump you, Lynne Ramsey, Tim Roth and Gary Oldman into a new pack of British neo social realists. Do you see yourself as part of a pack or working in a tradition?
"No, not really. The way that things have spurted and grown in the industry in the last sort of two or three years, I'm definitely a beneficiary of all of that. 10 years previous the world probably wouldn’t have accepted me in the same way, or I probably wouldn't have had as many opportunities, so I have probably landed at just the right time. 10 years ago I think I'd have been making television pieces. TwentyFourseven would probably have been a screenplay and one kind of a job, you know what I mean? So I think I'm part of that renaissance they were talking about a couple of years ago. But no, I don't think so. I think those four probably couldn't be further away from each other. Lynne, although she is probably committed more visually than I am, is probably the only one that I would associate myself with. I did think Nil by Mouth was a fantastic movie though. I really liked the fact that it was so uncompromising."

Where do you think the realist tendency in British filmmaking comes from?
"If you look at American telly and at American people when they talking on f*cking shows, there's no humility. It's a film no matter where they are or where they're talking. The President's in a movie: when he talks it's got to have a beginning, middle and an end. The whole thing is just one big f*cking farce. This country, because of our reserve, we do, I think, like looking at the reality of ourselves and telling stories about ourselves.

"America, I have actually begun to believe, canned laughter, that whole thing, the only decent thing I've ever seen in the last five years that I can remember is 'The Sopranos'. I thought that was fantastic but even that was a sub-culture, it wasn't the American. I think all the shows that have come out of America, the whole thing is just like a movie culture and their movies reflect the fact that they don't want to look at themselves in real terms. Some films do, but they don't have a general appeal.

"Some people here make the Action-y style thing, but in general we're looking at ourselves and people still seem to be interested in it. It was there in the Ealing films, and then in the Sixties and Seventies it was far more realistic with the kitchen sink style, and through the Eighties it was your sub-cultures, like your Asian families in My Beautiful Laundrette, all the sort of Scala and Palace films. Now, in the Nineties, you have the fact that they can look good but they also feel real as well. It's always a case of looking back on ourselves, and that's kind of what I'm up to as well. I'm looking at myself and I'm looking at the people around me.

"Whereas Americans work in genres a lot, I don't see myself doing that. I can't classify TwentyFourseven. I can't classify Romeo Brass. They are stories from the heart. I think you get a lot more people in Britain who make that kind of work."

So where do you see yourself going?
"I'm going to continue to do it. I'm completely working on instinct. I'm sure there's bound to be projects that people think aren’t me or whatever, but I know for a fact that I certainly won't make anything that isn't me at the time. I’m going to continue working as long as I've got the drive. 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, and it's impossible.