Somers Town - Shane Meadows interview
Compiled by Jack Foley
SHANE Meadows talks about directing Somers Town, some of the many challenges involved, working with EuroStar and why the story captured his heart.
Q: Can you explain how Somers Town began?
Shane Meadows: Yeah. It started out as a feature idea, when it was first put to me in the spring or summer of 2007. I was told that Eurostar wanted to make a film about kids, possibly in Paris or possibly in London – places that the Eurostar went to. When I heard it was a feature film with commercial backing, I didn’t really see myself doing it. I thought it’s not really my cup of tea. The idea of getting into bed with someone I’d never worked with, and it being commercial backing – my worry was that it was going to be shots of blokes in trains smiling, patting kids on the head and saying: “Have a nice day on the Eurostar!”
I wrongly thought it was going to be not my territory, and I couldn’t quite understand why they’d asked me, so I pulled off the project. Then I said they should speak to Paul Fraser, the guy I’d co-written with, because he’s worked on a couple of kids’ feature film scripts that are currently in development. And I said, if they wanted to develop that, then maybe I’d look at it further down the line.
Q: So what happened then?
Shane Meadows: A couple of months later, I heard from Fraser that they were going to make a short film and once he’d got the script, would I mind looking at it? It was only going to be a week to 10 days shoot. Obviously a lot less risk, as it’s not quite the same as putting your name to a feature film project. So, I was really happy, read the script and it was fantastic. I was quite baffled that they were going to give me carte blanche to make it as if it was my own film. They’d done a lot of glossy campaigns for Eurostar, but this guy, Greg Nugent, was a film fan, and loved my stuff, and literally just wanted me to direct it.
Q: What agreements were given to you to ensure that the film was independent from the Eurostar brand?
Shane Meadows: Barnaby [Spurrier, producer] did a great job in being very clear from the start with Eurostar that we had to treat this project in the same way as my other films. That meant he got me total control over script, cast, the final cut and the music. We had a first draft script that Paul wrote and obviously that was always going to stay as the blueprint for the film. But the way me and Paul work is one of constant development and improvisation, so Eurostar just left us to it.
Q: What convinced you about the script?
Shane Meadows: I fell in love with it, when I saw the relationship between the two boys. This idea of this rough, renegade kid from the Midlands and this sweet, artistic lad from Poland, whose quite lonely. And they get forced together and fall in love with this French waitress… it reminded me of a lot of New Wave French cinema, and I thought: “I’d like to have a go at it.”
Q: But how did the short expand to a feature?
Shane Meadows: We laid out this 10-day shoot, and a couple of days rehearsal, and when we started to rehearse, things started to expand. The father and son, which were Piotr [Jagiello] Ireneusz [Czop], were from Poland, and they gelled really quickly. That was working fantastically in the rehearsals. Perry Benson is one of those characters, you get him in any room with any amount of actors and gold just seems to come out. And of course I’d had that relationship with Tommo [Turgoose] previously, so we had that shorthand relationship. So, what was meant to be a couple of days of everyone getting to know each other, within half a day they’d got that out the way and were coming up with new material. So at the end of that first day, it had swelled from a 25-page script to a 40-page script, as I had all these brand new ideas. By the end of the second day, I thought: “If we can get all this stuff shot in 10 days, there’s probably something more feature length there.”
Q: How did it influence your direction, having the film financed by a brand?
Shane Meadows: It didn’t make any difference. I made the film exactly as I would have made any other film. The only additional freedom that I had was that it didn’t matter how long or short it was so when I cut it I was able to simply make it work at the perfect length for the story in its own right.
Q: What role did Eurostar play in the production of the film?
Shane Meadows: I don’t remember meeting them at all on set, although I know they were busy helping Barnaby with locations and permissions and all that ‘producery’ stuff. Since we have made the film they have been brilliant at supporting it without ever trying to make into something that it isn’t.
Q: How did you find working in London?
Shane Meadows: Working in London’s harrowing, really, at times. If someone isn’t reversing up the road in a digger, they’re coming out with a ladder and sticking it in your scene, and saying: “Right, I want £500 or I’m not moving my ladder because that’s my windows and I want to clean them now.” I’ve never known anything like it. How anything gets made in London, I’ll never know!
Q: Rather like the character of Tommo in the film, you were the out-of-towner struggling to survive?
Shane Meadows: Yeah. It was really hard at first. It’s like swimming upstream. You just have to go with it. For the first week, I was pulling my hair out. To put it in perspective, the night before we started shooting, I was coming back from the shops with a couple of bags of shopping, to try and save some cash – they’d put me in this really nice flat, but in all the restaurants, pasta was like £385! So, I went to this local supermarket, come back with these two bags of shopping, then fell down a pothole outside this pub in front of loads of people! I broke a bone in my foot, so the next day, I came into work with this great big massive Wayne Rooney air-boot thing on, and then I caught the flu…I was having a nightmare! In my head, I was thinking all the signs were telling me I shouldn’t be doing this project. Everything seems to be going wrong. Sometimes that can happen and the film turns out to be rubbish, and sometimes it doesn’t – and luckily it went that way.
Q: When did you know it was working out?
Shane Meadows: As we got a week in, everything the two boys were doing was working. As you can see from the finished film, a lot of the time, I just let the camera run as much as possible in one take. When you start to think: “Well, there may be something longer here…” There was never going to be the coverage. So it was a bit of a trade off. Do I try and go for a longer thing and go for a simpler shooting style? Or do I cover what we’ve got and make this short film?
Q: How did you find directing in another language?
Shane Meadows: That became one of the highlights for me. You don’t know how it’s going to be, having a translator next to you when people are talking. But I probably learnt more on that film than in five years about directing. You think so much of it is about the words people are saying, but in actual fact, I can tell a good or bad actor in a Polish audition when I didn’t even know what they were saying. It was really apparent. And those two stood out immediately in that audition, so that’s quite eye-opening as a director. You don’t realise how much is about body language and chemistry. It’s not just what people say, so that was an experience in itself.
Q: How would you describe the area of Somers Town to anyone who doesn’t know it?
Shane Meadows: Coming from Nottingham, I always come into St Pancras, and Somers Town nestles between Euston and St Pancras, just a few metres back from the Euston Road. So, when you look at the architecture, with all these different influences on the flats, some of it almost looks Moroccan or Parisian. I was completely baffled. That right behind the British Library is one of the most static London populations that exists. A lot of people who live there, their families – fathers and grandfathers – have lived their for generations. It’s almost like a fish bowl. Everyone has moved their way around. It isn’t a natural cut-through to anywhere, so a lot of people don’t know it’s there, but when you look around the area, you do see the signs. I went in there knowing nothing about it. When I heard about Somers Town, I thought it was going to be in the East End, and then I saw it every time I came into London, but just never knew.
Q: Do you think many people expected you to capitalise on the success of This Is England and make a film bigger than Somers Town?
Shane Meadows: Somers Town was this fantastic accident, in that respect. I decided to take a year off, to take stock and look at doing a bigger project. And in my year off, which was meant to be my quietest year, I made Somers Town. Then I made another film with Paddy Considine, called Le Donk, which was meant to be a short but turned into a feature (and hasn’t been released yet). I made a film about my granddad in Thailand – which was meant to be a holiday. And I also made a film about a musician called Gavin Clark, so it turned out to be my busiest year ever when I was meant to be taking it easy. So all of those things weren’t on the agenda.
Q: Still, you probably weren’t expecting to get a feature when you began Somers Town?
Shane Meadows: Somers Town out of all of them was the biggest surprise to me. I love it in some ways more than my other films. Because there was no pressure on it, you can tell from the film… it’s a lot more light-hearted. It’s not like my last two films, where the end of the film leaves people reeling. I think sometimes when you’ve been given a lot of money – millions and millions – you feel under pressure that you’ve got to hit all of these big major notes all the time.
Somers Town was made on a micro budget. So, although it was accidental that it came out, it was actually a fantastic step for me. I thought I was naturally going to go on and make King of the Gypsies, which was my biggest film to date. And although I started developing it, I started making these smaller pieces in between. It happened quite fortuitously but it showed me I’m going to enjoy working more with undulation – a big one, a tiny one. It’s just about making work, great work.
Q: Do you think Tommo and Marek are like little versions of you and Paul?
Shane Meadows: In a really backwards way they are. I don’t think they are, but Tommo really reminds me of me, and Marek really reminds me of Fraser, and in some ways they are like us. I was always the little dominant one, but Fraser would always stand up for himself in a quiet way in the same way Marek does. They’ve got a Terry and June like relationship. They’re almost like a married couple by the end of the film. But at the heart of it, they’re great kids. Tommo is a bit of an Oliver Twist – he’s got a bark louder than his bite but he’s still a good kid. And Marek needs Thommo to get in those situations where he can talk to girls. He uses Tommo’s confidence.
Read our interview with Thomas Turgoose
Read our review of Somers Town