Director Kenny Glenaan on 'Summer'

As Scottish director Kenny Glenaan makes his quietly political cinema debut with 'Summer', Dave Calhoun talks to him about casting, coal-mine closures and connections with Ken Loach

Any hawk-eyed cinephiles who attended the preview screening of Scottish director Kenny Glenaan’s ‘Summer’ at the Curzon Soho last Monday may have spotted an inconspicuous figure watching from the back. It was the director Ken Loach, who has several links to this small, sensitive and quietly political film that comes out in cinemas this week and tells of two down-on-their-luck, middle-aged men, one in a wheelchair, who live together in a council house in a small Northern town of few-to-zero opportunities. We watch their lives now, at a crucial point of change for both of them, and flash back to examine their friendship when they were kids, fighting and flirting and sticking two fingers up to the world. By delving into their past and sharing one long-gone and eventful summer with them, we gain a strong idea of the personalities and relationships that define them in the present.

The first link with Loach is that ‘Summer’ was produced by his colleague Camilla Bray, an assistant producer on his ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’. It also stars Robert Carlyle, whose first major role was in Loach’s ‘Riff Raff’, in 1991, and who five years later again joined the director to play a bus driver who accompanies a young woman to Nicaragua in ‘Carla’s Song’. The final link is that the film’s other star, Mancunian Steve Evets, for whom ‘Summer’ is his first film after a decade of small parts on television, will next be seen in Loach’s ‘Looking for Eric’ as a depressed postman who strikes up a friendship with Eric Cantona.

‘You can’t help but be interested by someone like Loach,’ says Glenaan when we sit down for a drink before the screening, ‘especially if you want to tell stories with a working-class voice. You can’t help it. His films are a great encouragement to you to follow your own style and discover your voice. Ken threw in his tuppence-worth at the end when he was asked.’

Carlyle and Evets play Shaun and Daz: both unemployed, they spend their days together, Shaun pushing Daz in his wheelchair, taking him to hospital for check-ups, even helping him to shower and use the toilet. It’s a relationship of sadness and humour. The actors – and Hugh Ellis’s script – even manage to find laughs in a fateful trip to the doctor. Much of the film’s energy is down to a good rapport between these leads.

‘Steve and Bobby got on easily and were interested in each other as people,’ says Glenaan. ‘But the idea of that relationship, which is a master-slave relationship, with the master in the wheelchair, is something that fascinates me – the tyranny, the punishment, the pain and the manipulation. The politics of that relationship are immense. It’s a love-hate thing which, if it went much further, could become violent. Next time, he might just whack him.’

Glenaan, who is in his forties, comes from a theatre-directing and acting background – he knows Carlyle from his theatre days – and moved into television in the late ’90s. His television film ‘Gas Attack’, which imagines such a catastrophe in Glasgow, won the Michael Powell award for Best British Film at Edinburgh in 2001. Readers may also remember 2004’s ‘Yasmin’, a drama about a young British Muslim dealing with post-9/11 prejudices. Glenaan has also lent his hand to directing series such as ‘Attachments’ and ‘Spooks’. Like Loach, he doesn’t write himself but gets heavily involved in research and works closely with writers. ‘Summer’ is Glenaan’s first film for cinema and he’s obviously relishing the freedom.

‘All my previous work had to be delivered in a format for television. What’s interesting is that if you learn a way of expressing yourself in television, you need to learn a new style for cinema. That’s what I was trying to do with “Summer”. It’s because 85 per cent of television is industrial telly. You don’t use the camera in a visual sense. You just cover dialogue and so it’s like filmed theatre. And time is so much of the essence in television that a lot of directors don’t even know what lens they’re on. They just use two zoom lenses and go up and down them. There’s not even time to choose a lens. It’s hard to break out of that.’

One of the strengths of ‘Summer’ is what it doesn’t tell us: by focusing hard on two characters, now and then (Shaun and Daz are played by younger actors in their youth), Glenaan doesn’t get bogged down in the context of economics and politics, even if their effects infuse every frame. He talks of how Shaun and Daz are victims of the closure of the mines in the 1980s, but there are only hints of this in the film, such as when we see their younger selves playing on a slag heap. Glenaan filmed in Bolsover in Derbyshire, but the place isn’t named.

‘It’s any town where industry has upped and left. The way I describe it is, it’s like growing up in a town that was next to the Somme ten years after the event, where there’s an enormous weight of something that happened nearby. Yet it’s got nothing to do with you. You grow up in the wake of that.’

So why is the main character, Shaun, a Scottish guy? We see the character as a young kid, as a teen and a disappointed man. He’s grown up in the same town and never left. Did the casting of Carlyle define his nationality?

‘Yes, it was defined by the casting. Although we could have asked Bobby to do an accent. But when I was researching in Bolsover, I found several Scottish families that had moved there because the mines had closed in Fife and the miners had moved down. The place is full of economic migrants. It suited the story for Bobby to play a Scot.’

‘Summer’ opens on Dec 5.

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