England Made Me
As his latest and most personal film This Is England hits our screens, David O Mahony surveys the career of unorthodox British filmmaker Shane Meadows, and talks with Stephen Graham, star of This Is England.

If pressed to reveal the source of their ideas, most writers will fall back upon the old ‘write from what you know’ adage, sound advice that has served many veterans in good stead. Mining the experiences of one’s life for the raw materials of art facilitates truthfulness in the work that audiences respond to. Whether an anecdotal incident or encounter summoned from the memory banks and used to enrich a script, or a location of particular resonance, a home town or the scene of your first romantic entanglement, it doesn’t matter; it’s the artist’s connection to it that is the key. For proof of this one need look no further than the rogues’ gallery of personalities that populate the New York of Scorsese, the la of Paul Thomas Anderson, or the British Midlands (or more specifically, the Nottingham) of British director Shane Meadows, whose latest excursion into low-rent realism, This Is England, has recently been released. One of the most consistently interesting directors working today, Meadows’s habitually raw subject matter has denied him the commercial success he deserves. Any hope that This Is England, his strongest and most personal work to date, will arrest this lamentable trend lies with its mid-eighties nostalgia appeal and Stephen Graham, whose headline-grabbing performance as Combo, ringleader of a gang of skinheads, is a blistering piece of screen acting.

That sinking feeling
A superficial reading of the director’s work, especially the two early films TwentyFourSeven, and A Room for Romeo Brass, could indicate that Meadows hails from the lineage of British ‘kitchen sink’ dramatists that gave us Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, but this would be to misinterpret the films’ lyrical qualities and deeply personal aesthetics. Unlike the didactic, social realism of contemporaries Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, Meadows's films never seem to exist to highlight a social wrong or injustice, the civil-minded tone of TwentyFourSeven being perhaps an exception, although in truth it feels coincidental. His cinema is never outraged in a campaigning sense.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 116.