Director who puts himself in the frame

Shane Meadows: semi-autobiographical "Scorsese of the North"

This is England is one of the most hotly-tipped British movies of the year. The film, which opens today, has garnered director Shane Meadows a clutch of awards and some of the best reviews of his career.

Set amid a skinhead gang at the height of Thatcherism, it has been hailed by Derek Malcolm, the Evening Standard's film critic, as evidence of a "new maturity" from the director who has ploughed a resolutely distinctive path in his native Midlands.

Having poured his heart and soul into the project, he has been left utterly exhausted. He has split from his wife, Louise, who was co-producer of the film and has worked with him for years. Swamped by media demands and constant mobile calls, he even checked himself into a clinic to recuperate for a while.

But it is not surprising that filming left him shattered. As fans have come to expect, Meadows has elicited astonishing performances from his cast, many of whom he has worked with previously while others - notably its young star, Thomas Turgoose - have never acted before.

And as is also to be expected, the film is deeply autobiographical. From his feature debut, Twenty Four Seven starring Bob Hoskins a decade ago, to This Is England now, Meadows has mined the stories of his working-class childhood to create one of the most distinctively English bodies of work in recent British cinema.

This, he says, is his "most personal film to date". It stars Turgoose as 12-year-old Shaun Fields, a name pointing straight to its autobiographical nature. Fields has just lost his father in the Falklands War but finds friendship in a local skinhead gang where his loyalties are tested by the violent racism of the ex-con Combo.

Meadows, too, was a skinhead, because in the colourful riot of youth tribes in the early Eighties, skinheads were the ones that required only a pair of jeans, Dr Martens and a haircut, which made it an affordable option for the son of a lorry driver whose mum worked in a chip shop.

But as the skinhead gangs moved from loving ska and reggae to association with the racist violence of the National Front, Meadows, too, witnessed skinhead violence at close hand and even attended a National Front meeting, though he never joined.

"People who became skinheads didn't understand where it came from. They thought it was always a racist thing," he says. To Meadows, it was about music and it was about class. "There were no middle-class skinheads where I came from. Everyone thought the working classes were f***ed but we were really proud of being working class."

He still is. He is happiest working within a close-knit community and has always declined to join the London media world, staying in Nottingham, the city he moved to when he was 20. Throughout his films, the same actors - mostly people who were not even professionals to begin with such as his old college friend Paddy Considine - are used time and again.

He sticks to familiar stories with budgets well under £1 million. Twenty Four Seven was based on a football coach of his youth. A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) was inspired by what happened when his childhood friend and co-writer Paul Fraser was confined to bed as a boy after an accident.

Dead Man's Shoes, a revenge tragedy which was his most successful film to date when released three years ago, had its roots in the history of a friend who was bullied and committed suicide. He only faltered when, in 2002, he expanded his budget, hired some stars and made a spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands.

He even casts in his own mould. Andrew Shim, who plays Milky in This Is England, has worked on several Meadows projects since he took the title role in Romeo Brass and has no illusions why he got that part. "I came in eating a curry sandwich and he thought, 'That's definitely like me'," Shim recalls.

Shane Meadows was born on Boxing Day, 1972, in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire. His dad, Arthur, was often away driving when he was a child and began to drink after enduring the horror of discovering Susan Maxwell, a schoolgirl, murdered and buried in woods. Wrongly, he became a suspect, prompting schoolground bullying and isolation for Meadows.

"People's parents told them not to hang around with me," Meadows tells Melvyn Bragg in a South Bank Show programme this weekend. "The first violent urge I ever had was when someone called me a skip rat and the reason why my clothes weren't clean was because my dad was in a police cell."

He was a classic troublesome schoolboy, though he gave clear clues as to where his talent lay. He wrote a poem about skinheads which was published, took part in plays and created a clay sculpture of a punk that a teacher kept for years afterwards. "I was an artist really but all sorts of courses weren't available to me. Maybe if I was going to school now where all the performing arts are built into the structure of it things would have been slightly different."

Instead, he left school and became involved in petty crimes such as stealing fruit. But through a film group attached to the local cinema in Nottingham, he began to pursue his passion for movies. He borrowed cameras at weekends to embark on making short films. Unlike many in the industry, he was never deterred by a lack of cash.

His breakthrough came with Where's the Money Ronnie? a short which grabbed the attention of Stephen Woolley, producer of films such as The Crying Game, who awarded it first prize in a competition. Meadows quickly embarked on the string of hard-hitting but emotionally draining dramas that have now made him a name to watch for on the international film festival circuit.

A shortish stocky man, he looks tough, as if the violence of his films comes naturally to him. In reality, he is an amusing storyteller who is undoubtedly softer than he appears. Emma Clarke, a senior executive of the UK Film Council, a backer of This Is England with FilmFour among others, says: "He's very nice, but he knows what he wants."

Nick James, editor of Sight and Sound magazine, is a big fan. "He's a natural born film-maker in a way very British directors are," he says. "Most come out of television and theatre, and cinema is not something that comes to them naturally. But Shane seems to have been born with a video camera on his eye socket. He has got cachet with young and pop people because he's an authentically working-class film-maker. He's in a class of one there."

Andrew Shim says the Shane Meadows of today remains the same director he first worked with as a teenager. Meadows still uses improvisation in his work and trusts actors in a way few others do, only bringing the film crew in to shoot when the cast is happy with a scene. When not filming, he is happier watching Scorsese movies or Meet the Fockers over beer and sambucas at home than running up a tab in a London club. "He's a really normal person, really down to earth, but he has this fantastic gift." The question is what he does with it next. His friends insist that he has not had a breakdown and will be back in business soon, Mark Herbert, his producer, says Meadows is "on good form", he just needed to get away in the wake of the production. "It's quite tricky to delve that deep into difficult times in your past," he says. "And when he's working, he just gives every ounce." But with the film opening this weekend, they will begin to think about future projects.

According to Nick James: "What he now has to demonstrate, I guess, is that he can make films other than the immediately personal autobiographical - if he wants to." Like many, James hopes that Meadows will continue to work in Britain. "I think that Shane has the potential to make some very powerful films about this country. He taps into an Englishness."

Emma Clarke says she hopes it will be the movie that takes him to a wider audience. "With film-makers like Shane, that's what you want to happen," she says. This is England has already won two British Independent Film Awards and the jury prize at the Rome Film Festival. Now, all eyes are on the box office. "I think it will do more than any of Shane's films before. I think it's got great word-of-mouth and will keep growing. But you never know," Herbert says.

If a hit, Meadows has a dream project of a film about a real-life bare-knuckle fighter which is a period piece requiring a decent budget. If not, he may take off to Eastern Europe to work on less expensive ideas. One under consideration is a film about a young woman who falls into prostitution which would be his first to centre on a woman. Whatever happens, Mark Herbert suspects there will be no more autobiographical dramas. "This Is England has closed a chapter. He's made a lot of films about growing up in the Midlands, culminating in what is the best of them. I think that he wants to look elsewhere."

This Is England is at cinemas from today. Scorsese of the North, Shane Meadows is on The South Bank Show, ITV, on Sunday at 10.45pm.

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