Over the course of the summer holiday he finds fresh male role models when those in the local skinhead scene take him in. Q: This is England is yet another film made outside of London. “So, you’re obviously five years away and I don’t massively want to copy the film ideas, but if I went back I’d love to do a millennium one.”. But when you started going through this footage from the 1980s, [Margaret] Thatcher was the first to be media savvy. See, look, they can’t take that away from you can they? A: Completely. Stephen Graham: My brother, our Aston, came to see me with a copy of Empire magazine. The GuardianPre-production interview with Shane.Time OutInterview with Shane.The GuardianShane on Skin Head culture in his youth.Eye For FilmInterview with Stephen Graham.The GuardianShane on the BBFC 18 Rating given to the film.The National FIlm Theatre Part 1Part 2Q&A with Shane at the NFT hosted by Jason Solomons. But it’s changed quite dramatically. And I thought it was very brave of him to bring it forward and use that complication for his character. I have got a This Is England set at the millennium that I would like to make. SM: I was talking with Paddy Considine about how I was struggling to cast Combo. AFTER his 2004 revenge drama Dead Man’s Shoes, British director Shane Meadows returns with his boldest film yet, This is England.. It was basically like working with myself at that age. He is contemplating the incident and brooding about what happened, with his mother Cynthia assuring him that Milky will be all right. So, thank you Stephen for not changing, but at the same time getting better and better as an actor. music to bands like Screwdriver, that took on that white power mantle. You want to hate and love him at the same time, no-one could have played his character better. It is about not looking down at working class people through a microscope, it is allowing people in that situation to look up and out with a kaleidoscope. Q: One person we haven’t talked about is Thomas Turgoose, who plays Shaun. SG: The script is there but it is like a skeleton. [17], Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want, Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 in D. OP 39/1, Wilsthorpe Business and Enterprise College, "Subcultures, pop music and politics: skinheads and "Nazi rock" in England and Germany", "Films made in Nottingham | Nottingham Post", "Thomas Turgoose: the 13 year old cheeky chappy goes from Grimsby to the big screen - YOU Magazine", "Metacritic: 2007 Film Critic Top Ten Lists", "This is England '90 - Channel 4 - Info - Press", Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, British Independent Film Award for Best British Film, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=This_Is_England&oldid=983121490, Best Foreign Film Guldbagge Award winners, Articles with dead external links from August 2015, Album articles lacking alt text for covers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, "Maggie Gave a Thistle" – Wayne Shrapnel and The Oi Stars, This page was last edited on 12 October 2020, at 11:01. A: Yes, I did witness something like that. So because he wasn’t as dark skinned as his brothers, he was never quite sure if he fitted in. He looked right at me and I could see his pain. Q: Did you find it was still an era of racial intolerance back then? [6] The opening fight was filmed at Wilsthorpe Business and Enterprise College, a secondary school in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, close to the Nottinghamshre/Derbyshire boundary. SG: It is love. SM: On the morning we shot it, Helen had some sad news about a friend of hers and a member of my family got taken ill. We spend a long time doing workshops. As an adult, I look back at who led the country up to that point. SM: It is a dream of mine that we set up a little studio, like Ealing Studios but in the East Midlands, where we can work together. I rehearsed over three or four months with people trying different things, but during the last ten per cent of that we were still looking. A: Then, there was very little in the way of ethnic minorities. Turgoose was 13 at the time of filming. SG: I said, let’s use what we have got here and do it. A: It was one of those situations where we were getting quite close to the wire, and we’d been all over the place – Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham. Shane Meadows, Stephen Graham and This Is England’s enduring creative legacy Stephen Graham is the hottest actor on television, following his starring role in Line of Duty with the lead in The Virtues, which reunites him with This Is England writer-director Shane Meadows.