Shane Meadows: Thank you. Oh thank you. Oh Gordon Bennett, I'm a bit wobbly watching that. Wow, thank you so much for turning out on this cold and frosty evening. It's, yeah, it's an absolutely incredible honour. I got the e-mail about doing this talk, it kind of blew my head off and you know, obviously I think I'm sure some people before me have felt like maybe they don't warrant it, but when you get that chance, it's something I wouldn't have turned down in a million years. I've even written some bullet points and I've never planned a speech in my life and I've got some bits semi improvised. Obviously I want to thank the David Lean Foundation and BAFTA for putting the event on and going above and beyond. Abi put this incredible scene together and all the things you saw on screen and Dan put the trailer together and everyone on the team has been so helpful getting me and my crew down here and yeah, it's so much appreciated. So thank you very much.
Right, get the--that that really wobbled me that Dan, you pig.
[Laughter]
So what I was hoping to do is cause myself and Miranda are going to have a chat and what I really wanted to take the opportunity to talk about by myself in a semi improvised fashion was to talk about how I got started, because I think if there's young filmmakers or not young any filmmakers in the audience who get to see this, I kind of want to talk about the period at which I feel like the work would benefit those people the most. The work that got me started and how I got started in the business. I remember coming to watch Scorsese's a few years ago and obviously the thing that I took most from that was from his early work things and the inspiration of Mean Streets was huge to me because everyone was going on about Goodfellas and talking about these epic films he'd made, but Mean Streets was about people he’d kind of grown up with and people he'd seen rather than these big gangsters. And I took much more from seeing his work, thinking I could maybe aim there, never get to Goodfellas, but maybe with something like Small Time I could one day arrive at Mean Streets. So I'd love to talk about that first year when I when I made shorts and how I kind of learned to make shorts in a slightly unconventional way and get up to the first feature film. And then afterwards myself and Miranda sit down in my mum's front room and talk about the later work and then obviously give a chance to speak to people to ask questions.
So I have to begin, really, my heroes, of which there are many, they've all got the most amazing first cinema experiences. You know, whether it be sort of, you know, in Times Square in New York at some midnight screen in, you know, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, you know, in these incredible cinemas watching these incredible films and mine was in my mum's front room in Uttoxeter, you know? And I didn't have this kind of cinematic experience. Our local cinema it wasn't open very often, but when it was open, every film that it showed had the number three at the end. So Police Academy 3, Mad Max 3, Jaws 3D, and so I was never going to develop a passion for cinema going to the elite cinema in Uttoxeter, I used to go bingo instead.
So what first started out, the first time I can remember connecting with film would be on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon when it was raining. And you wouldn't go out with your mates and you'd be sort of sat inside and a film would come on like an epic war film, you know, maybe something from one of the greats, like David Lean, Hitchcock, Michael Powell, watching those come on the TV screen on this television no bigger than that little fella over there. And then when--So I’d watch films and be kind of moved by films but in a sort of escapist way. There was this real joy of me and my mum sitting together with a packet of salt and vinegar Chipsticks, watching a film for a few hours together. And then it became important in a different way, because with the advent of VHS, you know, I mean, you could rent films on VHS. And obviously, I'm from Uttoxeter, everyone pirated VHSs. There was a Hell's Angels friend of my dad called Chris, who had the biggest pirate collection I've ever seen. And he had a secret department for Westerns and only very select people were allowed to look in that room and he was good friends with my dad and my dad's a huge fan of Westerns and I think that was the first time I fell in love with film was watching Westerns, sorry, with my dad and because he worked away a lot and fucking hell Shane, come on baby. Sorry, I'll move on from this quickly, but yes, I watched them with my dad and we would watch these films and there was something about--because Uttoxeter was like the Wild West to be honest. It was kind of like obviously there was 80s tracksuits wandering around, but the saloon bars, you know, the odd horse was possible. And so there was something about that and my ambition was to be, to fall off a horse, to get shot with an arrow, fall off a horse, get my foot stuck in the stirrups and get dragged through a town. That was honestly what I wanted for my life. So I had dreams of being in films, but I can remember something about the Western, a stranger comes to town. I look now and suddenly my films some like dude wanders in and changes things.
So basically I saw these things, I fell in love with them, but I never really ever felt like it was going to be a world that was open to me. It was so far away. You look at the work of David Lean, you know, and Hitchcock and those people, you know. And I had no access to Scorsese's work or the great really sort of ground-breaking work that, that that happened in the 70s. But, you know, I'd fallen in love with those things. And then I was very lucky to be, you know, brought up in the 80s where some incredible films were shown and series were shown on TV with the advent of Channel 4 and obviously with BBC and ITV. Things I remember, like John Jarvis, One Summer, some of Derek Jarman’s work, Peter Greenaway. And obviously, Loach, Lee and more importantly to me, Alan Clark, they showed me that the world I was living in was worthy of being on screen. I wasn't seeing it in that escapist way I was seeing the spaghetti Westerns, but I did think that my life had some kind of value on a screen, but never thought I could kind of get there.
And so you roll forward. I came out of schools, I went back to Uttoxeter recently and someone told me they were doing forensic science at GCSE level. I was like, you know, I couldn't even get near a paintbrush in the 80s. Honestly the things that you can do now I do wonder whether I’d have found film earlier, the choice was literally the only artistic exam you could do was art and there was no drama. I went to Burton Technical College where I met Paddy Considine on a drama course and we messed around on various courses. Long story short, I found myself needing, I wanted to go to do a degree in photography and I found myself needing some GCSE's to be able to get in and Film Studies came up as an option and so I sort of that little voice in me re-awoke and I went and joined this class. And I remember we watched the Jean de Florette the classic French film with Gerard Depardieu in and, and I'd never been in a film class. I'd never been in anything like that, you know. There was the chance in this group to get to make a short film, that was the lure. And the first week they go around the class and pick the people's responses to that. I didn't understand half of it. I understood a bit about the esoteric connection to the French Revolution and you know the stuff that was coming out of people’s mouths I couldn't, I didn't think we'd seen the same film. And the way that they broke down, they were breaking down shots and the didactic nature of this. And they got to me, how did it make you feel? I said I wanted to climb into the telly and strangle the two people that killed Jean. And I kind of weirdly put it to bed, and I was like, it was never going to be for me. And to be fair to the guys in there, they used to come in with sketchbooks this, you know, this deep 15 sketchbooks with storyboards. I can't draw. And so you’re kind of going if I can't get past stage one cause everyone looks like playing football at the park on mine, I'm never ever going to be able to get into film. It seems so far away.
And obviously the video camera and the technology wasn't there. So I put it to bed and I went on and did this photography course. And I was the first Meadows in our family gene line to go to a university since 14 BC, so it was big news. And so when I got to the end of that first year, I'd worked for the first time in my life. I actually worked hard to get these qualifications and at the end of the first year, I’d worked really hard on the course, but I'd also sort of, I don't think I was sleeping. I think what I was doing was working really hard by day and then going and meeting my mate Dean at the Beetroot nightclub by night and just living in there. And somehow accrued a lot of debts over the course of the year. I’d never lived in a city, don't live in this big city, and obviously I was like Babe Pig in the City just engulfing all kinds of lotions and potions and got in a right mess and on the last day of term of the first year I got told I got asked to leave the course.
And that was--I always walked off things, you know, people who finished with partners, they don't finish with them. I got finished with and I didn't like it. And so they basically said your work’s good enough, but you've got until this day, unless you can pay by the summer it's kind of over. And I was walking back and I remember this trip walking back. I walked the same way there and back every day for a year and I walked down this little St. called Heathcote St. in Nottingham and lifted my head up and just saw a film crew on this street. And, you know, I approached them like a lot of people do when you see a camera, you have a little nosey. And so I stood by watching and there was this guy showing people how to run, set the white balance or something on this camera. It was obviously like a lesson. It wasn't someone doing a news report and I got talking to this guy and his name is Graham Forde and he's here tonight. Graham had the unfortunate opportunity of me walking off this course and finding him in the street straight afterwards, and I started talking to him and I was like, how come I've never seen anyone with a camera? I walk up here and back every single day of my life and he said we've just moved here. The government have set this new initiative, they're pooling these resources. They've set up a course for people that don't aren't represented in film and TV and it's moved here. We've got this, like explained everything about the course and I'm like, can I get on it please?
And he said, well, you know, obviously there's enough white lads in the film industry already and it's for people that haven't, you know, haven't got that opportunity. And he explained to me that he could do me some special rates on equipment and I could, you know, there's three layers we've got. You know, we're a bit of a charity, so we could give you the bottom layer. How much have you got? I said minus 6,000 pounds. And so he offered me this opportunity to basically work there as a volunteer cause they had this lighting that they wanted to put in. And he said to me, if you help me for two weeks at the end of the two weeks, I'll lend you a camera and you can shoot something and I'll come in on the weekend and I'll set you up in a little edit suite and you can basically knock something together and we'll go on our merry way, you know? So I worked with Graham for a couple of weeks. I didn't tell him I was scared of heights and the job was this, like kind of it's like the scaffolding tower being pushed around in the studio with this scared bald man on it. Just think I'm going to get a camera, I'm gonna get a camera, you know, and after two weeks, true to his word Graham lent me this camera.
But obviously over the course of those two weeks, the people I was living with who were still on the course next year had all gone home. So I go back and I've told him I'm, you know, I'm going to be a filmmaker and I've decided that's my new life and there's no one in the in the flat with me. So I've got this camera, I kind of get it out and there's a tripod and he gave me, like a nice automated one, so it was fairly straightforward. And I thought, what the heck am I gonna do on my own? And so I decided to make this film basically, where I played all the characters and set the camera up.
Now by complete accident, you obviously, you know, you obviously start to learn things because you're having to actually think about the process of it. So one I went into that film lesson, the Jean de Florette one. But apart from that, I'd never really--and Graham didn't tell me what to do, he just enabled me with this equipment and so anyway, so I shoot this crazy thing on my own when I'm in the flat, walking around and trying to come up with little shots. And it was pretty bad. But Graham taught me to edit over a couple of days and he basically watched what I put together and I think he saw something in it.
And he’s like have you done this before? And I was like, well, no, I haven't. That's my first time kind of doing it. He said it's pretty awful. But you've got a knack for editing, and I was kind of why does that look really weird when I'm talking to myself? But I'm like, one of me looking up there and then the other version of me looking down there, and he's like, that's an eye line, you know? And he started explaining the technical side of filmmaking just a little bit, just enough to learn for the next time. And then he came up with, I think there was enough in there, he said. OK, look, I'll make you a deal. I'll give you a year as my volunteer cause I'm a bit overrun here. We've got all this new thinking and I'll give you a year to work for me. And if you work hard, once a month, I'll lend you a camera and you can make a film. And at the end of that year you could have twelve films. And if you haven't got a good one by then, you're in trouble. And so this, this relationship started and I started working and piece by piece, the second one I made, no one was back from uni yet, so I did--that first one was called Where's the Money Ronnie? One. And then the second one was called Where's the Money Ronnie? Two and that had me in it again a lot. But I suddenly got wigs and moustaches and little hats. And so the character changes in the first one I have the same shirt and I just had, like, a motorbike helmet on my head. And in the second one they were rubbish but I learned from the first one to the second one a bit about eyelines, and how to set up the camera. You know, I was making a mistake, moving forward and then actually correcting that mistake on the next one. And then my friends come back from their summer holidays in Oxford and wherever they'd been, Dubai and all these wonderful places. And I showed them these rubbish two films and they sort of half liked them and wanted to be in the next one. So then the third film I made, so you get to September they're back and in September we're making the first film I've made with a cast and they're all friends off the course. And that was called The Datsun Connection and was about a farmer from Uttoxeter tracking down a man that's going around stealing underpants off washing lines, told in the 70s cop style, quite a sort of niche market.
But and then what started to happen was from film to film, I was led by the accidents that were unfolding in front of me. And so, you know, and this is, you know, to say to people, anyone out there because within the first three or four months, I did reach out to a few local funding bodies. And because I was no good at form filling any idea that you know, I get it with The Datsun Connection. Obviously that's not a good pitch and I get why they threw me out of that one. But fundamentally, this concept that I was making steadily by being enabled, I'd been allowed to make these little mistakes and but from each mistake I was kind of learning and I would show it to Graham and show it to people and revealing it to the audience and being allowed to make those mistakes was the best thing that ever happened to me.
And, you know, even now, you know, I know so many young film makers kicking off, starting out who are in these endless development cycles trying to get shorts off the ground and they start off with a DOP they've been working with on three or four films that they've been doing at home. And they get told you can't use that DOP, you can't use your friend as a producer. And they get literally before they've even made their first funded short, they get whittled down to nothing.
And so I wasn't doing it on purpose, but by the fact that I'd been given this opportunity by Graham to almost--a bit like these stories about the BBC in the 60s and 70s, people just sneaking off with cameras and making things it was it was like that for me. And the reason I've ended up loving working with people with no experience the most is because I kind of realized that, cause I can't act, I wanted to be an actor. You imagine being on a drama course and Paddy Considine is on it in Burton. I mean, you know, it's like I didn't even get to dream for a day. He just kind of comes in, improvises, like Al Pacino rolls into Burton on Trent, but honestly, it was just really annoying. I was like, what am I gonna do? I went and did a band, and then I met Gavin Clark. It's like frigging hell, what's Shane gonna do?
But because the thing I found out that I'd love to pass on to anyone out there that wants to do things is this idea of I realized I could act. I'm not a good actor, but I was a lot better when I wasn't scared and I wasn't nervous. And that film sets are incredibly scary places and make people incredibly nervous. And so because I was sat in this room on my own and all that was on telly was Wimbledon, and I don't think who I wanted had got through, so I was making this film on my own. I was able to do stuff, you know, the stupid shit you can do by yourself at home. I sort of realized that if I could make other people feel like that, other actors feel as comfortable as I'd felt, that they could act. And every single time someone came through the door--these weren't people with acting ambitions, they were friends on a real wide range of courses at uni. They were coming in and knocking it out the park.
And so you realize the problem. You know, there's all of us are capable of acting, but are we all capable of acting with a big fat thirty-five mil camera in your face and a guy with a boom going ‘go again?’ You know, ‘land on that. Do this,’ you know? And so that's what I started to learn is I started to actually realise that confidence was everything and that ‘No’ or ‘it's wrong’ is not actually possible. When we do anything on ours, I mean, yeah, there's the odd real bogey one, but generally if people are trying for you and they're taking risks, there's no wrong, it's just well, that was amazing, can we try it? Let's try when we do this and let's try when we do that. So I think because I've been forced to do it by myself, I stumbled across this happy accident that people are capable of far greater things if they aren't scared. And so from--one of the guys, so this I'm living on this road in in Nottingham in this little borough Snenton, and people start moving in. It's a really weird summer, everyone that moves in either has been in acting school or wants to, and a lady up the road moved in and had been in this local acting workshop and she was eight and a half months pregnant just about to give birth to her second child and her husband came. We were short on numbers for The Datsun Connection, he came down and then the next month when I got the camera the baby was here. So I went up and made a documentary at the house. And it was whatever unfolded at the time.
And so you roll forward to, I don't know, five or six months and each time I'm making these films, I'm saying to Grant, I want to send this one into a competition. He’s going ‘that's not good enough. That's not ready. That's nearly there, but a bit too stupid’ you know? But having that somebody strong behind you and also, you know, not making sure that I was also doing the work I was meant to be doing. And after about six months of making these films. I decided it was time for the Big Three and we got Where's the Money Ronnie? back out, but with this cast of people that I’d you know built up, this little unusual film company. And with everything I kind of learned I said to Graham, because high eight cameras are kind of cool but they're, you know, the quality isn’t that great. I said look, these interviews I want to do in Where's the Money, Ronnie? And he lent me a much better camera to do these studio shots. Going to get some water, the old mouth’s drying out. So we shot Where's the Money Ronnie? I say we shot Where's the Money Ronnie?, we started shooting Where's the Money Ronnie? and I was halfway through filming the outside, the street stuff, and I went round to the shop I was living on these packs, five packs of noodles for a quid and I'd put pineapple chunks, sweet corn and peanut butter in them and would make a wonderful satay type dish. I was fairly puckish, I went off forgetting that the camera was in the front room on a tripod right by the window and Snenton’s a really lively place. I've only gone buying these noodles for about thirty-four seconds and I come back and the doors off its hinges and the camera's gone. And so that's a great woo. He's up there! No, he's behind me. And you know, Graham's equipment was literally like you were borrowing it from, like, one of his great grandparents. It was like a family heirloom. His equipment still to this day still works from that place. Students who borrowed it never dared break it. So I've had one, I think had one camera dropped in the entire time it was open. And I had one stolen. And so I walk in and I'm like, you know, and I go and explain to Graham my rushes are still in the camera. So the filming I've done, anyway, so, you know, when you think your dad's gonna get really mad at you, but then they do the complete opposite. He was like look accidents happen and I was like, well, that went better than I thought it was going to go, and he gave me a camera straight away. And he said, well, don't leave the house and leave it, you know, don't leave it without the camera in your hand. And so I was taking it to bed with me. And then I got lazy, didn't bring it up the stairs. And the night I didn't bring it upstairs, it went. They broke into the house quietly this time with a credit card in the lock, took that, took the TV, the video player. My copy of Mean Streets.
Now that was a different conversation cause I think I went in there, I left the house age twenty-one and when I got to Graham's office, I was 144. It was and that was the point at which you know where someone is well within their rights to kind of bail on you. It was around the time I had been done for pinching the breast pump. So everyone else that was working at Intermedia was saying no one has too pinched, that dude's dodgy. He sold a camera. He's obviously iffy. And, you know, I know these conversations were kind of going on and I'd like I'd shot the film twice, and someone got that in their house. You know, someone somewhere got Where's the Money Ronnie? Three twice. And he lent me another camera against everyone's wishes. He didn't only not fire me, he lent me this third camera. But there was a few restrictions. It was like people go to London in Minder where they’ve got a handcuff on a suitcase. There was like a Graham on me all the time. But he was having to come out of his house on a Sunday to collect things. But he got me to the end of it and when I showed him the cut of it, the most beautiful thing came out and he said that's the one that you send in, that's ready. And you know, and that's such a thing because every film you ever make that's horrendous or horrific or as the most worst experiences tend to has a chance to sort of do OK at the box office cause it was so hard for some reason. And so there was a competition on the wall, £5000 top prize, seemed too good to be true, sent it in.
And it was like, you know, we sent it out to the universe, put the number of Intermedia on it, and waited and waited. And nothing kind of came back. And anyway, so sort of long story short, I didn't hear back from the film competition. And I sort of looked back and I thought, what I've done there is I've kind of you know, I really put some effort into Where's the Money Ronnie? I used the others, almost like artists’ sketchbooks, you know, rather than thinking of short films of, I've got to have a calling card. I need them to be financed. The idea that we're kind of using them like an artist would have a sketchbook, and I'll draw the apple in that light. And that's a rubbish one. And then I'd found something.
So I sort of set about, again, going on this next journey for the remaining three or four months that I had and came across a character that I'd grown knowing, a bare knuckle fighter from Uttoxeter, called Bartley Gorman. And I was making some crazy stuff with my friends as well, but I went and did a little short with Bartley and built a bit of confidence with him doing this documentary and I went back for the second time and made this one in black and white that was that was a bit better and it had a bit more character. And then this thing got launched, so the film competition's kind of gone, and the film, sorry, Channel 4 launched this little competition for ten minute documentaries. And I had made this short with Bartley, and I was trying to fill in the application form. So in the end, rather than filling in an application because I just couldn't, I wasn't good at putting myself on paper, we took the pilot instead of the application form to Channel 4 and showed it to them and they commissioned it on the day in the room based on the fact that. So if I'd had to write about it, there was no chance on Earth I was going to get that commission. But if I was able to present work they and they could see it, they somehow were sort of confident enough to give us the money.
And so at the same time Graham told me about this amazing new camera that come out, like they were still shooting Doctor Who on this up until about five or six years ago. I think this Digibeta launched and we had enough money to actually use a proper camera for the first time. And what was beautiful about having your first Commission is that it's about a character from where I grew up, my mum did the catering and we lived with this incredible character for a week shooting and I got to work with Graham for the first time. And so at that particular point, I'm obviously thinking I've made a number of documentaries and at that particular sort of point, I thought, you know, that's the one for me. I think I'm going to end up doing this kind of maybe this documentary sort of thing. But an answer phone kind of came back one, I think two or three months later, there was an answer phone message from someone said this answer a message for you from America. And anyway, I listen to this message and this voice come on, you know: ‘Hello, my name is Imogen. I'm in the United States. I'm making a film with, you know, with Neil Jordan’. And I was like, who's this? Thinking it was one of my friends, you know, messing around and I listen to about five times. You can hear, like, New York horns in the background and I was thinking who's done that, you know, how have they got that sound effect?
But anyway, so I rang it back and the same voice--I was thinking was gonna be like the Midnight Cowboy hotline, $250 a second--but this woman answered and so this this tape had sort of… Stephen Woolley, it was real. Imogen was a producer Stephen Woolley was about to launch. And Stephen had been making a film, Michael Collins, in America. And the short had landed, he hadn't watched them for months and they sort of delayed everything. So I just thought I’d not got through and Stephen Woolley had watched this short film Where's the Money Ronnie? and they wanted to talk to me about it and have a have a bit of a chat and so long story short, I won this £5000 prize and they were coming back from America and wanted to basically talk to me about developing a feature film. And so it sort of it was almost a year to the day where I started working with Graham and had just made this first Commission, hadn't been on TV yet, and this Where's the Money Ronnie? had kind of gone off out into the world and for whatever reason Stephen Woolley was going crazy about it.
And there was this serendipitous thing going on in that he'd been mentoring this lady Imogen at the same time as I'd been kind of building up this body of work. But what the original thing was and the reason why the shorts were so important, is because Stephen, you know, being a savvy producer said, you know, we probably should get you an Imogen to do a short film first, just to see if this was a fluke or, you know, whatever. I really love it, but. And I was like, if you need to see more I've made a couple more and it's like I've got like twenty-five. So sent this kind of tape over and ultimately watched these tapes. And if the, you know that first year had been doing a degree, the next year of my life was like doing a kind of masters and a PhD in a year. And you know, I mean, I wouldn't have survived doing that first feature film were it not for having made so many mistakes along the way. But the leap from making films where literally the cost of the tape is the budget into a 35mm project is absolutely gigantic and I'd be lying if I said I did, you know, sort of really well at it. I, you know, I almost had to start learning on the job again at that point.
And so what I'd love to do before we--I've got a little bit of a summary drafted but what I'd like to do before we start to talk about the later work is to show you, before we did this and when I got asked to do the talk, I really wanted to focus on that early period because I think the things that I learned could maybe be--other people could maybe take value from that and the idea of I've always fantasised about running that mad year of mine as a sort of film course for people, people in the margins, people who don't fit the mould. You know, what about if you're sixty-five and retired and you wanna be a filmmaker, why aren't you allowed a chance, you know? And the idea that if you've got people that are prepared to actually work and prepared to work hard and they could be enabled in some way given the equipment or a little bit of technical advice. What's the worst that can happen? You could end up with twelve films in a year that you were never going to make. And so in honour of that kind of process, that accidental film course that Graham created for me--and like I say, I went back and I did a little montage covering that year of work. You could definitely tell when Graham comes in. But, but yeah, it's a little montage and it's got a clip, at least one clip from everything, some of them are pretty bad. So beware. So yeah, and I just want to share it with you. Like I say, it's 1994, the budgets were low, but I thought it might be a quite a nice thing to share with you.
[Clip plays]
[Applause]
Thank you. Should have looked at my notes. I've sort of yeah, I got some bits slightly out of order, I was showing that a little bit before, so I should have looked at them babies, but I didn't go too far ahead of where I wanted to get to. But I was meant to talk about the tape landing now, there was going to be this tension. But anyway, so off the back of that and going out and having that, and that being the most beautiful full stop to the year I'd had with Graham, I'd had this this call and I'm not going to talk too much about my, you know, my sort of later work and want to move on to talk to Miranda.
But I'd just love to get to the point at which I see film rushes for the first time and so what--this idea of I'm pushing the sketchbook thing really massively, but what's really wonderful about the fact if people can see you in what you've made, then there's you that they want to protect. So when you've got Stephen Woolley and Imogen the first time producer and you showed them this body of stuff, load of it's awful. But they why on Earth would they know… I'm going to them ‘you know, why don't we do something with Frank Spencer?’ I'll make a feature about anything you know just to get a camera in my hand. And they were going ‘no, no. You need to come up with a story.’ These seem to be about you or your mates or about your mates or where you grew up, you have to tell something about that. And that came from them watching this crazy tape.
So I start to say, well, you know, feature film idea wise I think a lot about this time I was in a football club with my best mate Paul Fraser and it was like the worst football club in the world. It was called Oasis FC. We got thrown out all the leagues and were having to play lifers in prisons, no one else would play us. And Stephen said like stop there. Football films just aren't great, you know. Is there a sort of another sport it could be? So obviously Raging Bull is one of my favourite films of all time and I said I absolutely adore Raging Bull and I was in a boxing club that got closed down. I said, but the character who ran our football team was so unique. He was, he obviously I know now obviously years later he was probably suffering with quite severe mental health issues. But he had this belief in this crazy football club, took loads of criminals who were smoking on the pitch and smoking all kinds of things. And it failed, really miserably but there was a really beautiful man in there and it was through working with the brilliant producer and executive producer and Stephen Woolley that they kind of could see that there was enough of me and me caring in there. And there was enough of a cinematic story to try and sell to somebody.
So the question came up then, you know, have you written a script? And I said literally everything you've seen of mine I've never written a word. And I think for Small Time, I wrote like a pretend script or something. But I had never written one, so you know they said we're not--they showed me the truth, the reality of getting into the film business, you know, it's I was very lucky to get that leap. But at the same time, I wasn't gonna be able to work how I'm working now. That's taken twenty years to be able to get to the point where you can improvise as freely. So we had to sort of go down a more conventional route. So they said to me ‘Do you know any writers?’ And I did. I knew an award-winning writer, Paul Fraser, from next. Door. No, and I wasn't lying. He had won an award. But I wasn't even lying to try and make it sound better. I was really impressed. But he was 12 when he won it, won the Chamber of Commerce award for East Staffordshire for a poem he wrote about because he was trapped in bed with a bad back and it--well, I shouldn't tell you this, he was collecting, collecting Pepsi cans in a pyramid in his room, and the sun came up through the crack and the curtains went across his Pepsi collection. And he wrote a story about it.
And so Stephen--and this is where some of the really magical things of like the cinema that I never thought I could attain started to happen, where money starts to turn up and people are going ‘Do you want a laptop?’ And they were booking us holidays. So they obviously think I'm going away with Fraser who’s maybe won something through the BFI and we go away to Wales and they've got this faith in us. And it turns out, Fraser’s actually really good at writing, and so you know, while I'm drinking Tia Maria and playing crazy golf in the flat, he was busy writing this script. And I think about a week into it, they asked us to send it out in case they'd spent their money unwisely. And we sent those pages in, and Fraser had written these really exquisite lines. He got the guy that was based on it's called Nashy. And Fraser had got him, he sees people in such a different way to me, you know, he sees the sort of loneliness in people in a really unique way, but writes it in such a beautiful way. We honestly, without Fraser on that, there was no way… He gave me this kind of not believability, credibility of a script that the financiers would back and then through Stephen and Imogen having faith in that script and me sort of say, you know, I mean it's a big ask for a debut director to get to make their film in black and white.
But that's again where you end up with a producer that maybe believes in you and is backing you and has a bit of sway. As Stephen said, look for us to get to make it in black and white, I know you want to work with all your mates, but you’re gonna have to find a star. If you want it black and white a star, if you want it colour, maybe not a star. And he was really honest with me and explained the reality of it. And he said, you know is there anyone that reminds you of Nashy. And I said well he's literally Bob Hoskins is his double and he's like, I know Bob. I've worked with him. A week later, I'm in a theatre in London with Bob drinking red wine. And he just had done a play in London and he'd watched the shorts and read the script that Fraser had written and signed up to do the film, which meant we could shoot it in black and white.
So I've got my--it's obviously not Raging Bull. It's a very poor boxing club but and so when that started to happen, what I'd really underestimated massively was that that leap from, you know, I think the most I ever spent we did, we had the ten-fifteen thousand pound commission and I spent about five grand on Small Time, but there was never a crew, you know, it was like you would recognize it as a news crew if you like. And when I first walked on to set, I remember the first day I walked on to set and I honestly, I mean, I think I had an ulcer at the time, I made myself that ill and I walked onto set and I couldn't see and my mouth was dry. There was people sawing things and building things. And like, you know, horses wandering, you know what, where am I, you know? And like a crew of seventy or eighty people. And Bob Hoskins had seen me walk past his trailer a few times, like, you know, trying to get a taxi out of there because I was so out of my depth. You've got fifty or sixty people, when you've got a group of mates who believe in you, you know hanging off your word and you're the kind of you're the guy that knows what he's doing in there.
But in that situation I knew nothing, and Bob Hoskins took me to one side and said, look, I know it's your first day and you’re a bit nervous, he said. I know we're planning to do these scenes and would you mind if we swapped it around? I think he almost made an excuse like he wanted a bit of time to get into it, but what he was doing was changing some things around so that for the first part of that day, I wouldn't be doing any dialogue, it would be tracking shots because he knew they’d have to build track. It takes ages to build track and basically Bob for the first two or three days protected me away from being exposed as someone, you know, who had no idea what they were doing. But he believed in me and he knew I could kind of get there. And I've been on a few jobs where, you know the atmosphere hasn't been great and I know how that can kind of be. And I've got a lot of friends who are actors who've been on jobs where the atmosphere is awful and I know how bad that can be and so. I'm well aware that, you know Bob being there, you know you're talking about a guy who, you know, worked in Hollywood, been all the way to the top, but basically protected me for the first three days. Like I’d had a lobotomy wandering around like ‘yeah. OK.’
And little by little over those two to three days, he somehow must have spoke to the first AD. Never actually asked him about it afterwards but I think he must have spoke the first AD and said Shane’s head’s gone, like Gazza, get him off. And he did it. And I tell you that when I came to, I had a good afternoon, so we start on the Monday and on the Wednesday I actually had a good afternoon and I was able to start. I was able to start putting me into it rather than just being scared of all the equipment and the cost of every reel. I had a decent afternoon. Then someone said the rushes are back. First rushes, you know, these things are getting sent off to London. It's very different now and we went to the Broadway cinema where I'd set up this little festival when we were showing all of our early stuff, went back to the Broadway and they projected it. And when you get your rushes, a lot of people will know, but some people maybe don't that your sound wouldn't be put together with the rushes. They come silent. And so all I've ever seen is these High 8 and very luckily the Digibeta which stands up well. I've never ever seen film projected like anything I’d made projected. And I sit into this room and that experience that I said I missed at the beginning of this, where I got my cinema through that, suddenly this screen came on and these images were projected. And I cried. It was like absolutely mental. But the thing that was brilliant, all the cast were there and there was no sound. They were expecting to see their performance of this little mad scene where they’re around a tree. And they started, they remembered what they said so they were they were dubbing themselves over the thing which made it really light, but honestly it's and I've seen this in Thomas Turgoose’s eyes when we went to watch This is England in Rome, you get one of those in your life as a filmmaker or as someone that participates. You get that one time where you go Holy shit, I'm connected to that in some tiny way. I've had something to do with that filling that gigantic space up there. And that was a real game changing kind of moment. And what I'd love to show you, this scene isn't one of the best scenes from Twenty Four Seven, but this I've got this little scene to share before Miranda kindly joins me on stage, which was those first two days where Bob was getting people to set up tracks to help me. And this was the rushes that we watched on that evening. So I’d just love to watch that just as a memento and then we'll call Miranda up while it's on, if that's OK? So thank you very much.
[Clip plays]
[Applause]
Thank you. Hi, how you doing? Hello thanks Miranda.
Miranda Sawyer: Hi everybody. Oh alright, sit down on the lovely sofas. That's nice.
SM: Yeah, it's lovely.
MS: So before we start into the kind of main part of your career, there's actually a few questions that I wanted to ask from your talk and from the lovely shorts that you've shown.
SM: Of course, yeah.
MS: In between in the first montage of all these different things that you did, there were a few little adverts, weren't there? Do you wanna talk about that? Because I read that you had set up, while you were making these films, that you'd set up a kind of Film Festival. Cause no one would show your films. And so you thought, right I'm gonna set up a Short Film Festival, get some people to bring some short films in. And nobody brought any there was only you.
SM: I think there was a couple of submissions, but there wasn't the six needed for a festival called Six of the Best.
[Laughter]
Yeah. So I came up with the title Six of the Best New Voices. Before we got a venue I went to again, this whole thing of film snobbery, which you know still exists in its own way today in some capacity. I went down from Broadway, you know, we were never gonna get the main screen at the Broadway, they didn't have many screens at the time. And I went down to this film club and was like, you know, look, I'm putting on this show, Six of the Best and all of that and he said, OK, what format’s it on, you know? And is it eight mm, sixteen mm or thirty-five? And I said it's High 8. Is that the same as eight mm? He said no, that's video. And he basically laughed me out the room, would never show anything that wasn't, you know, wouldn't look at the tapes. And so Broadway had taken over this, I think it was an old, small, pornographic sort of cinema which had about fifteen or twenty seats in it and they were going to turn it to like an educational side arm for them. And so that we got given that. But then a lot of tapes didn't arrive that I was expecting to arrive. And so I ended up, I'd made a few, but I had to go out and make a few more to fill the gaps and made some adverts to come. So like the friends I was living at the time, Morag and Matt, they just came in and Graham let us go in the studio with like some sort of classic, you know what they call like a pedestal tripod and we're doing the most rubbish commercials you could imagine.
MS: Is that the bit where it says drills and eyebrow?
SM: Yeah, eyebrow help centre and all of that. Yeah. Yeah. So it was kind of, but it was that thing that was, you know, by that point, you know, obviously you realize that there's always this sense of people have got the keys and ‘I've got the keys to that cupboard. Sorry, you can't have them’. And so it's like you started to actually go well, actually, don't we just like you keep your cupboard and I'll go and get some other keys and open another door. So you know, it's like we'll find somewhere. And we did. And that festival carried on for--I only, I think we did the first couple and then this guy Robin was an editor I'd worked with who edited King of the Gypsies, he carried it on for years, and it kind of kept going and in the end it, you know, it moved to Broadway after a few years. Yeah, but it was like, it was just that, you know, that passion to get it seen and probably the needy artist in me wanting people to see it. Really was happy, probably hid submissions, like ah we’re missing loads, I’ll put all mine in.
MS: With my adverts as well!
SM: Yeah!
MS: And then I wanted to talk a little bit, we just saw that really beautiful clip from Twenty Four Seven with Bob. You described really, you know, literally how you felt when you were walking onto that set. It's a massive, massive deal because you basically moved from Small Time, which cost about five grand?
SM: Yes. So the winnings from Where’s the Money Ronnie? were five thousand, and they paid for Small Time. Small Time wasn't really classed as a feature, cause it was only sixty minutes. But it was a, you know, a long form thing. It was five thousand pounds, a minibus and food from ALDI.
MS: And you've now basically you're working on like one and a half, two million pound film.
SM: Yeah, it would be about five or six million today. The same films are being made for about five or six million now.
MS: That is absolutely huge. And so I mean, obviously no wonder you're feeling kind of panicky. What I'm interested in is like where you found the, you know, you say that Bob was helping you. That's absolutely great. But actually it's where you find that confidence to then do it, because that's an amazing thing to have.
SM: Yeah, I'd be lying if I said if I've not been given that leeway at the beginning, I, you know, no one's beyond being crushed or having their confidence crushed. Nobody is. So I think little by little with that bit of support and everything I learned at my time at Intermedia. Yeah, you know I think it came in fragments and it's like anybody, when people start to see the rushes and the things that they like the most in the rushes are things that you've changed slightly from the script, people are actually starting to gravitate more to the improvised material coming through. It was a really slow, slow process and I wasn't--so I would say I set off making my first three films, not really how I've ended up making them.
I had to, like I said I had to fit the mould. And you know, I love the, you know, all the films you work on you kind of love in different ways. And that was a very gradual growth on Twenty Four Seven. And what started to happen, the gang was lovely because Bob's like so down to Earth and him and the guys, there was a bit where we went out to the Peak District and they were doing this, they're like they're all like twenty-two but we're doing these like really stupid toilet games where someone would be sort of sat somewhere and someone would just go and do a big fart on their head in the countryside. Like, you know, real sort of like four year olds. But someone, because everyone had the same waterproof coats on and the same hats, someone didn't know it was Bob Hoskins did a great big fart on his head. And he loved it and just like he was really happy to be one of the boys and he kind of admitted later he sort of said when they farted on my head, I felt like I fitted in and so I would say around the middle of the shoot, it went from me almost not doing what I was told but starting to you know, just little moments of improvisation, little bits and pieces, and it was gradual. When I got to Romeo Brass. I was certainly much further along, but with Twenty Four Seven I was learning this new game, you know?
MS: Romeo Brass was the next one and your improvisation ideas were coming through that because I know Paddy Considine did a lot of kind of improvisation, didn't he?
SM: Yep.
MS: Especially there's a--because I love Romeo Brass and we've watched it at home with the commentary on and there's bits where you and Paddy are talking about scenes, there's a particular scene where he comes in and says ‘get a load of that lady’. And yeah, that's that was entirely improvised, wasn't it?
SM: Yeah, he had like a little small pepper pot. Yeah, he had like a you can say erection, can't you still?
MS: You can say erection, yeah.
SM: So he had like a, he had an erection and thought it would be a good idea to come in with like a sort of lounge thing on, like a lounge sleeping coat and open it up and obviously Paddy’s looking to find an erection the big peppercorn area. I sort of went oh no, that's your erection right there.
MS: This pepper pot will do.
SM: But you know, what happened on Romeo Brass, me and Paddy had been messing around, so we had this shorthand and it's a short hand you're never gonna with anyone else, from being sixteen or seventeen with somebody sleeping on their floor when you're in a band with them. We had this proper mates shorthand and so having Paddy on there and his ability being so extraordinary in improvisation, people were watching his rushes and they were just going do more of that! At the end of the day if it's improvisation, they going, how are you going to put that together? I mean, there's some scenes I could show you, some improvised scenes, it's incredible for a first performance, he did the voice so much. He’d be with his girlfriend and be Morell. He was like proper Daniel Day Lewis, but he lost his voice really badly so they forced him to sit in a charity shop for two days with, like this breathing apparatus. It was putting like, sort of lavender fumes into his lungs and because he’d never acted--when we were at college and stuff like that, he never got the proper role in the play. It was always, you know, just basically it was, you know, he was just so quick witted, he couldn't stick to scripts. And so, you know, I remember this two day period where he'd spoken so much he wasn't allowed to talk. And he looked like the saddest human you've ever seen. You know, I need, I need the love and the joy of speech, but his ability was really set Romeo kind of to one side. So the things that he was doing with Vicky McClure in there in her debut, you know, you've got these kids that had actually had proper training, Ian Smith, you know, the television workshop in Nottingham and had come through this workshop and so they'd got, you know, were really good improvisers, but they knew stuff. And so between them this magical concoction happened. With Paddy, if you can sort of wind him up and let him go and he knows who he's playing, it's literally the greatest script machine you've ever come across in your life. He can inhabit a character, if he gets who it is or we can think of someone like it, he can literally turn into them in that instant.
MS: Yeah, it's amazing. And those three, so those three first films kind of were building your reputation, weren't they? And then we, we get to Once Upon A Time in the Midlands and I want to talk about that particularly, because we were talking about it a little bit backstage and what it is, is it's a film that was considered that it didn't quite work. That it didn't work for you. And what you learned from that, because I know you learned a lot of things from that. What was considered, not, it's not a failure, but it was not considered to be as successful as a as the first three.
SM: Yeah, I suppose if I think about what Imogen and Stephen were trying to get me to protect on the first one, what those things they were telling me not to sort of maybe go towards is what probably happened on that one where that you know the overwriting of scripts. I mean, you know you have you have unfortunate things. But I mean I look back now and it had to happen for Dead Man's Shoes to happen and then that sort of change, you know, those things wouldn't happen without it, but it was, it slowly but surely got strangled to death, but over a really long period of time, and this is how you get caught up in the script development world.
MS: What was strangling it then? Because there's a lot of kind of stars in it, wasn't there?
SM: Yeah, there was, yeah, there was. There was I and I, you know, and I do to this day feel bad that I kind of let them down and I didn't get to really let their talent show cause it was the most unbelievable cast. Incredible. And they would have done anything for me.
MS: Robert Carlyle, Rhys Ifans, Kathy Burke.
SM: Yeah. Ricky Tomlinson. Yeah. Shirley Henderson. And then brand new, you know, Shimmy came back in, who'd been Romeo and Finn Atkins, it was a debut. You know, it was like it was, believe this or not, it started off much more like the story of Dead Man’s Shoes and so Dead Man’s Shoes was actually me going back to the first day of Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and going everything I did after that I got wrong. I want to go back to the kind of original idea which I know seems when you end up with comedy cowboy music on there and all of that is pretty hard to believe. But it's like there was a few things. I think the combination of me and the producer, me and Andrew get on OK, but it just wasn't a very good working relationship, like it's just it's like a rhythm thing. And it's like, you know, that drum kit was pretty broken. You know, we never knocked out a good beat together. So, you know, you've kind of got two people pulling in slightly different directions and then, and I think also working with execs who aren't happy with the script and then I remember getting to a point about six months in maybe. I reckon we rewrote that about fifty times and you don't know what it even is anymore. You know, but the mistake I made was is I've never really dropped what my dad would call a bollock. I've never, I've never done that yet. Everything I've done so far, although none of them had made any money, they were getting good praise, you know, and I'd never… So I had this quite egotistical thing that, you know, I'll do all the rewrites that they want. And the thing that really broke its back was that we changed--this is a crazy--most boring anecdote ever. But we were we were getting insurance from film financers who were a legendary company here. I had no idea how powerful an insurance company is on a film, and so I've worked with this company twice. And on Romeo Brass when I was sending in lots and lots of Paddy improvising, there was lots of film being used. They weren't scared because they'd seen Twenty Four Seven come back together. So yeah, about, I don't know last minute we changed insurance companies to save a quarter of a percent on the fee. And it was a company that had its base in America, and this is the truth, I got called into a meeting and it was light shining in my face it was like 1942 in Berlin. And they said you've got to take thirty pages out the script. I said it's like ninety-two long. That leaves you with an episode of Heartbeat. But the thing was my, my arrogance at the time, well, there was two things. It was part of what my dad was on the job as a driver and I didn't want to let him down. But mostly 99% of it was my arrogance thinking I'll prove you wrong cause up until that point, I'd not really made a massive mistake, and so I thought in that first week I'll get so far ahead that those pages can be pulled back in.
And so you've got the script that's been written forty-five trillion times and then in the first week, you know when the rhythm is wrong in the drum because when the rushes came back, you know, it's like usually a Tuesday or Wednesday night on the first week and then rushes come back and someone come in and went I'm really sorry, but none of the rushes from these days have worked. What's happened? The indoor lighting rushes have been put in the outdoor lighting canisters and in them days that's a massive thing. It's not like now you could possibly fix it in a grade. So we had to claim on the insurance in the first week.
MS: Oh shit.
SM: And so not only didn't get ahead, I was about five days behind. So it was one of those. And so there was never a chance to get back on top and you know, obviously, you know, a lot of the responsibility’s mine and, you know, other people might hold hands up and but looking back it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
MS: Because you learned from it.
SM: Massively. Yeah. There's no better education than failing. When you go into film festivals and people like stuff, it's amazing. But when they start saying things like oh those red shoes were interesting choice. You’re like God.
MS: Like it's all gone wrong.
SM: Yeah, because you know. And I remember Paddy coming to the screening, you know, and like, you know, people are like looking and that follows you and you have to go and promote it. I was doing it, I tried to lie about how I felt about it when I was in America for the first half, I got somewhere halfway across America and stopped lying. And then you know, and then two cities later, they brought me home because obviously it's a very not done thing. You know, I should have been more professional. I wasn't going, I wasn't bad mouthing people, but I was just patiently going you know, it isn't very good.
MS: You're gonna be watching this, it's not my best!
SM: Yeah. So, but honestly, the pain of that, it's very character building, yeah.
MS: Yeah, there's there was also something that I and that I read that you learned from that film, which was to do with pay and actors’ pay and the kind of community of making sure that everybody is on the same pay.
SM: Yeah.
MS: And that came from out of that film, as well?
SM: Yeah, because what sort of happened is, and I don't wanna sort of put, you know, names to figures and stuff like that, but obviously there's always levels, you know like if an actor has been in the game for say someone comes on this and they've done four series they'll be on certain rate, if someone’s coming in… So say for instance if someone's in five of six weeks and they’re working five of six days and someone else is in one of one week then there's got to be, you know, everyone can't have exactly the same money, cause maybe they’re not doing the exact same work. But when you've got obviously people like Rhys and Kathy and I'm going around to these people and meet them and trying to get them on board. And I'm saying to them, say whatever the number was, like forty grand a person, blah, blah blah. But then obviously their agents then do what an agent is meant to do and try and get more, and people in the back rooms struck the first few deals at what had been agreed with, and I won't say who agreed and who didn't. And then one person turns up on set and says I got three times that and I didn't know it had happened.
And then, and obviously actors talk and then trailers start turning up that are like slightly bigger than the other one. And all because once you light that touch paper, once you actually create competition, you know that then there's no end to it, you know, because ultimately, if you if I've been told if I'm getting paid less than someone else for the exact same job and I got promised by the director, you know no one held it against me. I think they knew kind of what had gone on but it created this real disparity and alongside the you know the broken first week and the four million rewrites it did, you know it's a miracle that something came out of it. To be honest.
MS: Yeah. So you came out of that, out of Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and actually what you've got then is kind of few sets of rules, haven't you? Like you know what you need to make a film that's gonna work for you and Dead Man’s Shoes is that film. From Dead Man’s Shoes onwards, I mean I'm kind of aware of time so I feel like I'm kind of like zooming around but I want to talk about themes that are in your films or kind of techniques. So improvisation is obviously one and you mentioned that when you were talking about how what you want to do is make sure that people feel safe and happy and confident, and then they can improvise. I'm always interested in kind of techniques. What are your techniques for doing that?
SM: Yeah. Well, I mean, just to briefly say, just so I can mention Mark Herbert, I retired after Midlands. I went to live in a farm and just literally wandered around in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and Mark came to see me in this strange ranch and to try and buy some short films that I'd made, wanted to release them on Warp. And so Mark actually brought me out of this weird retirement home, watched these short films and it was Mark who actually was the one that the conversation—it was Mark that put all of it together and kind of went, you know you need to be able to feel like you're making your short films with your mates. My job is to make no one scared who was giving us the money and it was Mark that really put that together.
MS: And then you had the person to work with.
SM: Yeah. Yeah. So you kind of got this person that was able to kind of go, I need to make you feel like you're making a short, whereas in actual fact, you know, he's getting, like, they’re shining the light in his face in Berlin, not mine. But yeah, but some of the things, some of the techniques, I think right back to maybe Romeo Brass with, with Vicky and Shim and Paddy and all of the actors we started these long really quite long form rehearsal periods. And the one thing that that stayed true throughout all of them, which I could give as a tip to anybody, is no matter how obviously you know someone that's passing in a street and walking into a chemist doesn't need a back story. But the fundamental characters, the interaction of those, what I found obviously I wasn't doing back stories on the shorts I was showing, but I started to do it on Romeo Brass.
So everyone would do loads of rehearsals and mess around, but there would always be one day where we kind of did the circle of truth where there'd be a chair in the middle, high pressure environment. You'd have had a day or two to write your character’s back story. Now that can go very wrong with actors because they always want to have really cool coats on and stuff, but yeah, that's it. Yeah. Really big glasses. But generally the people I work with are brilliant because, you know, the ego goes out the door and they'll talk between each other. So say Woody and Lol, you know when we did This is England they you know… So This is England the series only exists because of the work that Vicky did when she was writing her character of Lol. And it was through, and Stephen Graham, when he wrote about his back story cause Stephen rang me and told me he didn't think was gonna be able to do the part on the way into This is England and I was like, why? I've said this publicly but he said, look, my dad's black, you know, and I'm mixed race and I'm doing this part. And I think you're probably so authentic you want me to be this. And I was like, mate, I've been so worried about that character but that's actually what it needs because what's going on in him, that conflict. And so Stephen wrote and brought a lot of his own life to that and it and it, it made not only This is England work, it made me actually go when you look. So these people have sometimes written eight, ten, fifteen pages and they all worked.
So Gadget knew he didn't used to like Harvey and Class 3 and all of this history is built because I really feel for actors wandering onto a set, you know, throwing on a set of clothes, being told to land on a mark you're not quite in the light, there was a train, there was a plane, you know.
MS: Do it again.
SM: Yeah, you know, it's like so, and the people you've not maybe met that day. So the concept if you're trying to get people to believe that this is a community, then you can't create twenty years of life in five weeks. What you can do it, you can do something pretty decent with it. And on all of those Dead Man's, we’d do this thing where these people have written, we've all discussed what's written, so no one gets caught out and everyone gets fifteen to thirty minutes in the hot seat and anyone in the circle that isn't answering questions can ask any question they want. And you weedle out all of the tricky things. And it's brilliant as a writer cause, you know, you can sort of, you know, if there's a conflict or little thing, so we found all of these exquisite things of Stephen Graham, you know, how him and Lol had got together, all of these things were found in that moment and by people being in that pressured situation. It's like being in a job interview for the most important job of your life. They seem to find answers. I don't know where they pluck them from. And that's the day like after we've done that you can then walk on set. And then when you're improvising, if someone throws something in someone will pull someone and go ‘You were doing this on the playground, you've been doing this for thirty years’ and they kind of had this lovely heritage built in through that and that that's definitely a technique that's never changed in maybe you know sort of twenty-five years.
MS: I'm aware that somebody's waving up there because it's going to be a Q&A for the audience soon, but I'm gonna ask one more question first. Have a think about your questions because it will come up. I just really quickly wanna talk about music because the importance of music in your films, obviously you did The Stone Roses documentary, which I know was incredibly important to you as well as a huge Stone Roses fan. I remember interviewing you around that time and you told me you used to go to, that you went to a kind of like a Stone Roses, you know, acid housey vaguely kind of thing, a club with quote, red dungarees, a blonde wedge on your head and a moustache.
SM: Yeah. Yeah, it was like a gingery moustache. It was a cataclysm of strange ideas. Yeah, I thought I was on the drama course around that time so I think I got a beret. I think I've got like an 80s, I'm not joking, I had like pink dungarees cause they'd faded. I've got eyeliner on one eye, a ginger moustache. Like I've got, like, a wedge that people wore like sports jackets. It was a real combo. And I because I couldn't grow Ian Brown's hair, I've never had hair, so you know, I couldn't become Ian. But yeah, that was very, very low fi. And it was Uttoxeter, it couldn't just be an indie place. It would have to do indie and rock and punk and some Smiths and all of that.
MS: But I just really quickly wanted to touch on that as well because the Stone Roses documentary I know for you in terms of cameras and it was a big deal, wasn't it? Because it's like if you look at your career, you're moving through, This is England and you know and from Dead Man’s Shoes into all these things, you get to the Stone Roses and actually you're using like loads of cameras, you've moved from, it's moved into another kind of world, hasn’t it?
SM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that that was again, I think where having a producer that kind of--I think Mark could probably see, he knew it was going to Heaton Park, but he knows enough about me to know if I knew I was gonna have sixty-eight cameras in a venue and 75,000 people wondering, I would not have signed up for it. Yeah, but you know, that sort of any great producer will go let's just go up to see the Roses in the Rio, so we go up in a little van with just one camera. You know, oh they're doing this little free--So it was like, you know, and but again it it's all that thing, it's that impostor syndrome I've always had. And I've still got it to some degree that you're almost like I'm not deserving of that. How could I take on a concert film? But then if you do it in those little incremental stages, so we did, you know, we went and started, it's like this little acorn that started to blossom. And once you actually realize when you've got an amazing team of people, you're not having to think about it.
Cause I'm relating it to my short films, I'm trying to do everything or, you know, trying to manage everything but actually realize that you know, if you've got sixty cameras, you need this many operators and you need… And so it was all built piece by piece, so when we actually got to--And what that did for me has been so liberating for everything else because I now don't really use any less than five cameras in anything that I do. Because improvisation and live moments, what you can learn from concert films is you know you maybe only get one chance to catch that. And my works a bit like that sometimes, you know, if you ask actors to go to the very extreme edge of performance, something that might really be quite volatile for you know, be sort of a really triggering experience, some difficult subject matter. You don’t want to be going ‘there was a plane, can you just go again?’ You know, yeah. And so that concept having done, to go when you've done something with maybe fifty or sixty cameras and a helicopter and the Roses manager’s going ‘get that bird out the sky,’ you know ‘it's blowing John's hair away’, you know it was like, it was amazing because coming back to five, suddenly you know. So I went, you know, I think the journey from the beginning is one classic film shoot, one camera all the way up to Dead Man’s Shoes and then This is England I finally got two and then you know This is England the series there was two and I was operating one that Sony had lent to us and then right up until This is England 90 was the one that broke it where Lol is doing the scene around the dinner table and I knew we were gonna get one shot at it. And so we were begging and borrowing and we had eight cameras up for that. And then The Virtues was the first one where I realised the magic number was about five. Because if you've got eight, it's like there's no room, you can't put anyone anywhere, and that probably so you're talking about a fifteen year, twenty year journey to actually sort of find that final magic formula.
MS: OK, that's great. OK, look, I think you've all been sitting really politely and there you all are. Hello. OK. So we have some time for some questions for Shane. Who has a question? Straight in the middle. We have microphones right there. We have I see this lady in the middle here. Can we get a microphone over? Yes, it's you.
Q: Good evening. Thank you very much for the very nice and genuine lecture, Shane. My question is for you, so you mentioned imposter syndrome. So what's your relationship?
MS: You can see it right there, wave.
SM: Oh yeah, sorry, I just spotted you. Oh, I've got you now. Sorry, I didn’t want to not be looking at you.
Q: So you mentioned imposter syndrome. And so my question is what's your relationship with self belief? So if you ever doubted your talent or skills and if yes, how did you manage?
SM: Yeah, I think the confidence of youth starts to sort of run dry in your forties where kind of the minute someone parks outside your drive, you're not quite sure who it was, they seem to have left the car there all day, you're bothered about it is round about the same time that when someone rejects your film, doesn't want to make the idea that you're like, I'm not doing it. I'm just gonna go and, like, work in a school and just like teach kids to use iPads. You know, it's, it's that awful thing that I kind of, I think I'm OK and I'm OK with rejection and all of those kind of things. What it is, to me, that first failure was so brutal, because I’d not believed my own hype, but I thought I was somebody, and when it was dragged from underneath you, you know. When you're coming in, you go to a film festival and maybe I was winning prizes with things you know, and it's like I just got the up bit. I get right to the top of this lovely crest and honestly the phones in in hotels in like America, you’d go in and be like how many flashes? Yeah people were ringing from American companies going ‘has Shane got representatives?’ this lovely climb and you're kind of like, you know, I was really sucked into this thing, this really false economy.
And when you actually come out the other end, the vacuum is so painful and I suppose ultimately what's going on is it you're hurt because you feel like you've failed. And so that young bit of you is the bit that's wounded, that kid that you know that was basically, you know, in the film class that felt like a bit of an idiot. The guy that got rejected from the film club because, you know, they’re going ‘it's not on thirty-five’. I think it's the kid in me that gets hurt and it's really difficult because obviously I've got a wife and two kids. There's like a sort of fifty year old wandering around going ‘whose is that car?’ But I think fundamentally I've realized that I have to be scared enough of failing to be able to sort of succeed. So I've accepted it as part of it. Now, I don't want to feel, I've had about three or four projects that have been turned down in the last four or five months, and the last one knackered me a bit and it has knocked my confidence and it's kind of like, you know, kind of OK up to a point, but what's great about doing this talk, as I ended up looking back at those short films going, you know, in the last four years it's been difficult because of COVID and then you’ve had these kind of rejections. I've made three hours of TV and I looked back at that period of time where I had nothing and I had a tenner to make a film and I seem to be so much more productive, you know?
And so I've learned a bit myself by looking back at kind of going, no matter where you are in your career, you can still get kind of, you can go out of fashion, you can get pulled back, but I think the fundamental thing from my point of view is it's a fear of failure. And when I feel like I've kind of failed, it's not fifty year old me, there's an old part of me I think that struggles.
MS: OK, great question. Well, look, lots of questions. OK, I see you in the hat. Hello. Yes, you in the hat.
Q: Yeah, hello, I'm quite interested in all your work. The actors that you work with all seem to have a quality like an honesty. And I guess in a casting process like, how are you looking for that and what is that for you? And how do you find it?
SM: I think it's the beauty of, you know, not having a script and you know a financier's worst fear is not having a script. And my worst fear is having one. So to explain, for that that that naturalness in there that I hope comes across in, in my work and stuff is comes about because some actors who can deliver script as though it's coming out of someone’s mouth for the first time, I applaud people that can do that. I applaud people in soap operas that are doing fifteen, twenty pages a day and making it semi-believable. That's got to be one of the most difficult jobs on the planet. And I don't believe that people can truly put something across--you know, in every film that you do, you hope you get one of those moments and I can recall one from each film where you kind of watching something and you're not nervous something's going wrong. You just go, they're laying something special down here and you get the odd one of those every time you do it. And it comes about, I think actors’ true potential can only really be realized when they can speak in their own voice and they can work, you know you need a shape, you always need a shape and we always work. It's not like we just walk in there and go hey, let's have a party. You know, you have to know where it's going. But I’ve found that if someone's trying to remember, you'll find, I sometimes find that someone will trip up on a line and my job on that day as a scriptwriter is to try and read, because I have to find which word it is that's making them get it wrong, even though we’re not doing a script they keep coming in and something will offset them. And so if you've got that going on all the time, you need to land on this cross. So we light the whole room so anyone can go anywhere. And we talk about the scene and we know where the scene is going, but ultimately it doesn't have to happen in any particular time order. And I think that any conversation we have when you're in a pub or whatever it is, it has a certain flow to it to make it believable that it's maybe not really, it's very, very difficult to create word by word by word done on a wide, a mid and a close. You know for me it's letting actors know where they're going and where the scene’s going, but not forcing them to speak in someone else's voice.
MS: OK. Thank you. Yes, I see you. Hello. Yes. What's the? There's the microphone there, yeah. This gentleman here? Yeah. Yeah, it's you. Yeah. It's like the lottery winner. There you go.
Q: Yeah, yeah. Good evening. I would say first and foremost, I really want to express how grateful I am for your vulnerability and taking that time to reflect on your career and all those, I guess little moments that became bigger moments as they were as you kept going along your journey. I've come to numerous events and listened to a whole slew of actors, directors, screenwriters to find my own voice as a filmmaker or how they went about their journey and I always felt that, that moment of yeah, you got to that point but what was all that in between? So thank you for displaying that vulnerability. In terms of filmmaking, going into a movie without a script, are you visually seeing the story and working with the DOP beforehand? Or are you organically saying well, this is how we feel with the actors it could be and let's follow that with our five cameras or is there a specific intention that you want to translate other than the acting being organic in its nature?
SM: Yeah, so I've come up with this thing now, which is a sort of like it's a sort of groovy, I don't know what you call those kind of words one of those things you think is going to go down well in the, in the banks that are financing it, which is scriptment. So it's got the word script in it, it's like the sort of groovy bus. Come on guys, it's got the word script in it, you know, give us loads of cash. But to be honest with you, because what I've done in the past is I could write a script for everything, but what people can't let go of--cause when we did the script for This is England and what I was doing was doing a script so people could have the script, getting it financed and then doing my own thing as we went along. The dream to get to was to do the minimum amount of writing with the most amount of planning and shape, create a document that gives people a sense of the film they’re going to watch without tying them in.
And the example I would give is if I'm giving a script, Dead Man’s Shoes started off as a kind of mad, sort of almost like vigilante comedy, and ended up where it did. You know, the people that went on that journey were brave, but on This is England because I'd written, the journey we went on with, especially with Thomas Turgoose and Stephen Graham and Andrew Shim, you know, I have this feeling that there's an organic film. There's a film out when you're making it that's going, you can make that. But I want, I want this to be this. I don't want you to just follow that. And so my job as a director is to go ‘this is steering me in a slightly different direction and it feels right. And I want to go with it.’ Now the problem with that is when it's This is England and the end scene that the financiers have put their money into is a big fight on a beach, a bit Quadrophenia-esque, you know, and it's basically Milky’s relatives and a load of NF and it's this big battle scene and they and then it doesn't get shot. And that they think the ending is this and the ending, which kind of, you know, there was an ending at the sea but fundamentally, I found my ending in this little flat where Combo and Milky spent the afternoon together and it slowly descends into this most horrific violence that's in front of this child. And I knew anything beyond that that was looking at violence in any capacity was just an after thought, but the problem with that is people have financed it on that and so they go ‘where's our ending? Why is there a guy playing piano on it? You know, what have you done?’ And I'm not blaming those people because I think, you know, if someone tells you there's something coming and you get something different you, then don't get a proper response to the material because they're angry.
So I've found this way now, which is what I do is I sort of go on this thing of trying to create a document of intent. And it will be, you know, we just put one together recently that was about thirty pages. So it's, you know, it's no small titchy thing and it gives you a sense of it but it leaves enough freedom that people aren't going ‘where's this bit? Where's that?’ Because I sort of feel like the scriptment is the halfway house because people get a sense of what you're trying to capture. But then they aren't feeling really sad at the end of it because you've missed loads of what they thought was coming if that answers the question?
MS: OK, I've got people kind of waving at me in a cross manner. So I'm gonna get one more question, one more question and then and then we'll do it. Who have we got?
Q: Sorry, I feel bad for taking the last question
MS: It's fine, it's all yours. No pressure.
Q: I was just kind of based on that, have you ever felt like you've had to make work based on what you think kind of commissioners and stuff want? Or has it always, have you always just made what you wanted to say? And I suppose kind of just speaking personally there’s like a bit of fear of like, how truthful can you go and like, actually do people actually watch that? Yeah. And like, how do you kind of balance that?
SM: Yeah, it's a good question, too good. I mean it's yeah, I can't do anything other than be honest. You know, I am now in a position where I'm finding I'm not investigating all avenues, but certain avenues I've been looking into, where I want to kind of take my work and how I want to shoot my work is looking less and less likely to kind of get made. And I'm not saying that it can't be done. But I'm starting and I think you know, there's a million and one reasons we've got time to talk about now and I think in society there's a lot of people who don't quite know what the floor is anymore and that will kind of land. And I'm also a firm believer that amazing art comes out of sterile times. But I'm definitely finding that what this five to ten year, maybe ten year period where I was able to work in that way it feels like--because and obviously there's a lot of good reasons behind it, you know safeguarding you know when you want to go to that ragged edge. I'm a very responsible person and I really try to make sure that everyone's as comfortable as they can be even in really awful situations and so it's a bit hurtful sometimes when people are kind of talking to you as if you haven't got a clue what you’re doing, saying you put people in harm’s way when it's the last thing you do.
But we are entering an age I think now where the kind of work I've been making, I'm not quite sure how I get to continue making it because--and this it the stories can be made but how I want to make them on the day is very difficult to do just at the present time just because people need to look at a script, know every word, know that it's safe, know that it's been signed off. So if you've got a guy going around there changing things, it makes people quite nervous. And so you know, so I'm kind of in--and to answer the other part of the question, it's kind of I've never gone into--I've set off on a few journeys that were wrong. Midlands was the only one ever since 2002, whenever that was, when I kind of, you know, it didn't go very well. I've never done anything that I didn't want to do since then. But a couple of times I've almost done it, you know, to pay the mortgage and all that. And I just thought, you know, I've thought better of it. But it is a really tricky time at the moment because like I said, no one quite knows where the bottom is, you know but the reasons behind it are fantastic. You know everyone wants to make sure that everyone is safeguarding and stuff on set, but for people that improvise and these things in a kitchen sink rough and ready environment. I don't know whether that can, how long that can survive.
MS: Interesting. Thank you for that question, it's very interesting. OK, I have a few little things to say before we leave. I have a little script that has been given to me. You're nodding at me. OK, so obviously my first thought is to say thank you to you all for turning up. You've been a lovely audience, obviously. Thank you to Shane and to BAFTA and the David Lean Foundation. Just to remind you, if you want to post about tonight's lecture, please do so including #BAFTA and the video will be available on BAFTA's YouTube in the coming weeks, so you can keep an eye out for that. And I just wanted to say if you have a wristband and you're joining us for the reception, you've gotta go out the back, and if you're about to leave otherwise, thank you for joining us and can you go out through the front. There you go, that's, those are my things.
SM: Thank you so much, Miranda as well. You've been amazing.
MS: Oh no, and thank you, of course, to the fabulous Shane.
[Applause]
