Shane Meadows: interview

Shane Meadows‘s film about early '80s skinheads reflects his own flirtation with violence. No wonder it's become such a 'hot spud', he tells Time Out

This DVD extra makes for difficult viewing. In it, Meadows tells how when he was just 11 he had an adult friend who he revered ‘like a father’. They were always talking about ‘fights and reputations’ and so Meadows was thrilled when this same guy told him that he was going round to a neighbour’s flat to thump the life out of the bloke who lived there. Meadows tagged along happily, ‘holding his coat’ and hoping that he might be able to throw a punch or two himself.

I wanted this big thug to open the door,’ Meadows remembers. Instead he was faced with a woman with Down’s Syndrome holding a baby in her arms. Her boyfriend came round the corner and, ‘I’ve never heard a thump like that before or after. My mate booted the fuck out of him for about twenty minutes – and I caused it. Looking back, it was one of those things that I’ve always known was a part of me. But it was only when I saw myself talking about it in that film that I realised the impact it had on me.’

‘This is England’ follows Shaun – vulnerable after his soldier-dad’s recent death in the Falklands – from his initiation as a skinhead to his later, brief flirtation with the racist ideas and violence that were infiltrating the skinhead movement via the National Front. The film walks a fine line between celebration and lament. There’s clear nostalgia for the period, as typified by an opening-credits sequence of archive footage of Roland Rat, keep-fit rituals, the miners’ strike and Rubik’s Cube. There’s nostalgia too for the music, clothes and rituals of a skinhead culture that was untainted by the influence of right-wing thuggery.

‘It was an amazing and tragic time for me,’ remembers the director. ‘On the amazing front, it was the best summer I ever had in my life. I’d joined this gang and was part of something special. I’m not ashamed to say I was a skinhead and I sometimes still think of myself as a
skinhead in that original mould: someone who wears their identity on their sleeve and who’s not afraid to speak out. But obviously the shame is what happened. The National Front became more organised and more powerful and used skinheads as their foot-soldiers.

‘It’s very easy to see what can happen when you’ve got 3 million people on the dole and right-wing politicians start doing talks in town halls and everyone’s looking for someone to blame. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t sign on the dotted line, but I did sit and listen to these people and was thinking: Maybe this is the way.

'I was being told that people were sneaking into the country on boats and were living 50 and 60 in a house. I knew no better. But I knew right from wrong, and when it came to racism I couldn’t believe in it.’

Did he take a deep breath before deciding to explore this period of recent local history, especially considering his own complicity in its violence and racism?

‘Not really, I always do everything with an open mind and I wear my heart on my sleeve. I could have made it much more commercially viable with that subject matter. I could have taken people on the journey more, whereas my aim was to repulse people against violence and racism, which doesn’t have huge box-office potential. I believe as a director that if you can make people contemplate the size of an issue by showing them just one beating in a flat, then you’ve achieved something. As a director, it’s the way I want to deal with violence.

‘That’s why they’ve given us an 18 because I’ve shown very little, but very well. They’ve given me an 18 as a punishment! I didn’t expect that, and we’ve been fighting it. I totally, totally understand, but considering what goes through the net without any quantifiable understanding of what violence drives people to do or how it desensitises people... I think there’s 50 people murdered in “Snakes on a Plane”.

‘The truth of the matter is that with everything that’s going on in the country racially, my film’s a bit of a hot spud.’

‘This is England’ opens on April 27.

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