The news that the UK Film Council is to have its funding cut is a slap across the face for the British film industry. The statistic that every £1 of lottery money invested in British films has generated £5 at the box office might surprise people wondering when these isles last produced a global hit like Four Weddings & A Funeral, but scratch below the surface and critical and commercial successes like Vera Drake and The Last King of Scotland can be used as fantastic examples of Film Council funded projects which have enriched cinema here and abroad.As the Government pulls the financial rug from under the film industry in this country many directors, camera crew, writers and actors will be worried about where their next job or wage-packet will come from. With our film industry in a position of strength the withdrawal of funding makes absolutely no sense. During a time of depression and recession a burgeoning arts scene can provide an escape, a rallying point or even just light relief. This decision could endanger that prospect.
One film-maker who has benefited from the support of the UK Film Council is Shane Meadows. His biggest hit to date, This Is England, received funding from them and with a television series based on the film due to hit British screens in September it’s worth revisiting his career so far and asking whether the abolition on the UKFC will prevent people like him making a name for themselves in this country...
Meadows is, for want of a better expression, a self-made man. In 1994 the Midlander volunteered his services to Intermedia Film & Video Ltd in Nottingham. In return for his free labour the company were prepared to lend him camcorders and editing equipment. Enlisting the help of friends and family, Meadows began to write and direct a series of short films of increasing quality. Lacking an outlet to show them, Meadows and friends founded the bi-monthly screening event Six of the Best at an old local cinema.
From here, the Meadows snowball began to roll, with short film Where’s The Money, Ronnie? (1996) Grabbing the attention of the film industry. This led to the Channel 4 commissioning the documentary King of the Gypsies for their Battered Britain series. With the money he received from Channel 4 he went on to make Smalltime (1996) – as usual a tiny budget and ad-libbed performances from friends were the basis of the piece. I remember watching the film at university when we were producing our own shorts and being amazed at what could be done with a handheld camera and an original script. It goes without saying that our productions never quite scaled the heights of Smalltime.
Meadows achieved all of this independently. His determination led to him borrowing equipment and facilities, corralling his friends into being his actors and borrowing money to make films. The budget for Smalltime was £3000 – and totally self financed. Incidentally, £200 of this was spent on tinned corned beef – the catering budget. It would be perfectly possible to argue that Meadows would have found things even easier today. Self publicity has never been easier since the advent of social networking websites and youTube. A proliferation of digital cameras and editing software now mean that anybody can become a filmmaker or a broadcaster without even needing to leave their bedroom.
twentyfourseven (1997) was Meadows’ first feature film and the moment that I truly fell in love with him as a filmmaker. Shot in grainy black and white, it’s set in a grimy working class community where the ebullient Darcy (a wonderful performance from Bob Hoskins) attempts to bring together the community by establishing a boxing club. There’s nothing clever about the plot, but the pace of the film draws the viewer in and the realistic dialogue, fine acting and occasional bursts of visceral violence are bang on the money. The soundtrack is fantastic too, particularly the songs of Sun House, whose singer, Gavin Clark, has gone on to produce songs for almost all of Meadows’ subsequent films (as well as becoming a permanent part of UNKLE). Unfortunately my ex-rental copy of the video was lost some time ago – although the soundtrack remains a fixture on my iPod.
The budget for the film was £1.5 million, but it was Meadows’ talent which managed to secure that budget – as well as the participation of Bob Hoskins. The director was approached by a film producer and the whole process snowballed from being a germ of an idea into a short and then into a feature. Funded by the BBC and Scala, public money was not involved. But with the endless rows over BBC funding and how the license fee is spent, would the Beeb still fund a first-time filmmaker’s script in the same way? Possibly not.
A Room For Romeo Brass (1999) followed. A much more ambitious film, it saw long time friend Paddy Considine appear in a Meadows production for the first time. He plays Morell, a creepy outsider who befriends two 12-year-old kids, Gavin and Romeo. As the friendship gives way to bullying, Meadows again draws subtle yet powerful performances from unknown young actors – an ability which has characterised all of his films and later launched the career of Thomas Turgoose. But the star of the show here is Considine – brooding, funny, dangerous and tragic. It’s an electrifying debut with every shift in the dynamic of the film being linked to his unpredictable brilliance.
The first Meadows production to receive funding from the UK Film Council was the only wrong turn the director has taken so far, moving away from the autobiographical stories of his adolescence to make Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (2002). It would be churlish to argue that the bigger budget spoiled the film, but armed with a more considerable budget, Meadows enlisted a who’s who of British comedy and character actors including Ricky Tomlinson, Robert Carlyle and Kathy Burke. It’s a more accessible film but not better for it – the typically ‘western’ tale of the loner returning to town to win back his woman never quite works and it’s notable that Meadows swiftly returned to his more gritty style with the release of his next movie, Dead Man’s Shoes (2004).
After feeling that he’d ‘lost himself’ after Once Upon A Time In The Midlands, Meadows desperately wanted to get back to being true to himself. A visit to his childhood home of Uttoxeter provided him with the inspiration he needed. Meadows told Film Four (who helped to fund the production) about a friend in the town who had developed a drug problem and ultimately committed suicide: “I couldn't believe that, going back ten years later, he had been totally forgotten in the town - it was as if he had never existed. I was filled with anger against the people who had bullied and pushed the drugs on him, and with despair at what drugs had done to that small community.”
The film centre around the relationship between Richard (Paddy Considine) and his younger brother Anthony (an assured debut by Toby Kebble) as they return to the hometown they abandoned years before. What seems at first like a trip down memory lane rapidly becomes a violent drama of revenge on the bullies who made Anthony’s life a misery. Again, Considine gives a powerful performance as the vengeful Richard and the script which he wrote with Meadows is taut and tense yet touchingly tender when the siblings are on screen together. Even the villains of the piece are afforded a humanity which elevates the film above regular ‘revenge dramas’ and roots the plot in reality.
By his own admission, Meadows next film, This Is England (2006) is his most personal (and up there with Trainspotting as the greatest of all British films as far as i’m concerned). The movie’s main protagonist, 12-year-old Shaun, is essentially Meadows himself. Having grown up as a young skinhead around the time of the Falklands conflict the director has often spoken in interviews about the characters he was surrounded by at the time – and many of these have made it into the film in one form or another. Many of these are likeable skinheads such as Woody () – a social group who a myopic society seem to have written out of history over the passage of time. Meadows is keen to dispel the myth that all skinheads were violent racists and the film goes a long way towards doing so with subtle musical choices such as Toots & The Maytals version of Louie, Louie reinforcing the message.
The arrival of sociopathic Combo (a career best Stephen Graham) continues the recurring motif of the sinisterly charismatic outsider and sees the insidious influence of the National Front permeate the group of disenfranchised youths. Through extremely clever scripting and a well-judged cameo from Frank Harper’s NF spokesman we can see how Combo’s brand of hatred appeals to some of those affected by the plight of Britain during the Thatcher years. Meadows himself has said, “nowadays when I tell people that I used to be a skinhead, they think I'm saying I used to be racist. My film shows how rightwing politics started to creep into skinhead culture in the 1980s and change people's perception of it. This was a time when there were three and a half million people unemployed and we were involved in a pointless war in the Falklands. When people are frustrated and disillusioned that's when you get extremist groups moving in and trying to exploit the situation. That's what the National Front did in the early-80s. Skinheads had always taken pride in being working class and English so they were easy targets for the NF who said that their identities were under threat.”
Meadows gang of disenchanted youths contains just one black character, Milky (Meadows regular Andrew Shim) but he’s central to the plot and treated sympathetically by everyone – with one notable exception. As the sole representative of the multiracial aspect of being a skin, Milky’s espousing of family values and his acceptance by Woody’s gang is emblematic of Meadows’ desire to tell the truth about the distinct identities of the National Front and the skinheads. The jarring, bone crunching violence which ends the film seems all the more futile and despicable because of this.
This Is England is by far the biggest film yet from Shane Meadows and it’s true to say that some of the funding came from the UK Film Council. But money was also provided by Film Four, Big Arty Productions, Screen Yorkshire and a number of other sources. Without UKFC funding would the movie have been made? Of course it would. By the time production started on This Is England, Meadows was a well established filmmaker and he had achieved critical and commercial success.
In the midst of the ensuing credit crunch, funding for the next production, Somers Town (2008) came from Eurostar. Enlisted initially to make a short promotional film, the project swelled and grew into a full-length feature. With largely improvised performances from a young cast (including Turgoose) and a return to the grainy black and white which characterised twentyfourseven, the movie is a simple character study of two lonely kids making their way in the area around King’s Cross and Camden. Chock-full of insight and warmth it’s trademark Meadows, only transported from the north to London. Even the colour saturated ending works, infusing the screen with a nostalgic Technicolor glow.
Clearly this film received all its funding from the private sector, with some people going as far as attacking Meadows for ‘selling out’. It’s a lazy argument to suggest such a thing – the film fits far more easily into the canon of Meadows’ films than Once Upon A Time In The Midlands – the only time the director handed over any of his usual autonomy. In an era of blatant product placement, the sponsorship of this movie is refreshingly up front and the Eurostar itself acts as a plot device to effectively drive the narrative.
Perhaps as an (unnecessary) antidote to the criticism that Somers Town received, Meadows went back to his routes for his next production, Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee (2009). Made in just five days, completely improvised and costing just £50,000 to make, the film reunites Meadows with longtime friend and collaborator Paddy Considine. The documentary-style production follows former roadie Le Donk (Considine) as he teams up with rotund rapper Scor-Zay-Zee (Dean Palinczuk) and attempts to make him a star.
Meadows himself has described the film as "the kind of project that most film companies would run a mile from if it was pitched by a young film-maker, however talented". It’s a telling quote – clearly he feels that it’s his reputation and his previous work that have afforded him the opportunity to make a film in this way. Surely that’s just wrong? It’s not much of a risk to provide a tiny budget like that to a bunch of students or enthusiastic amateurs with a clever script or an original idea, is it?
Meadows has been an outspoken critic of the current system, worrying for youngsters coming through and having to jump through so many hoops that their creativity is stifled. But would the UKFC have helped these people? Arguably not. Meadows himself only began to benefit from their patronage when he was a well established writer and director – and even then he initially felt that he’d had to cede some of the editorial control of his own work to his paymasters.
It’s easy to trot out the tired old cliché that the ‘cream always rises to the top’, but it’s certainly been that way for Meadows. From his early homemade shorts through to his current output he has never strayed far from what he knows, has established a way of working which has grown and matured, surrounded himself with capable people and remained true to himself and his aesthetic. Through hard work and determination he has become one of the most feted film-makers in Britain. He has benefitted from UK Film Council funding at times, but it’s difficult to envisage a world in which he wouldn’t have (somehow) produced This Is England.
Perhaps the despondency which has greeted the demise of the UKFC is a little overblown. Granted, they have helped to produce some great films and have fostered that careers of some real talents. But in an age where film-making and self-distribution is becoming easier and easier, the path that Meadows has followed should become increasingly well trodden and easier to follow. It’s sad that the film industry in this country should have another obstacle placed in its path at a time when some wonderful work is being produced here but as has always been the case, the talent will shine through eventually.
Despite what i've said here, i still think you should throw your weight behind the campaign to save the UKFC. Join the Facebook group, sign the petition, do what you can. It worked for 6 Music - maybe it can work here too.
http://www.gopetition.co.uk/petitions/save-the-uk-film-council.html
