INTERVIEW
Self-doubts begone – with work like TwentyFourSeven, This is England and The Virtues, Shane Meadows is one of the finest British directors working today. So to mark the rerelease of his 2004 drama Dead Man’ s Shoes, Total Film sits down with Meadows to discuss how his troubled youth infuses the personal and political nature of his work, and how he’s now entering a new chapter. ‘A full stop got put on something,’ he says.
Shane Meadows is a talker. He doesn’t talk at you, he talks with you, a down-toearth, ebullient guy who enjoys trading stories, information and viewpoints. And while he loves a bit of banter, he doesn’t hide behind it – amore open and honest man you could not hope to meet.
And meet him Total Film does, twice: first, in June, in a West End screening room, and again on Zoom in July, with a cheeky phone call sandwiched in between. There’s a scintillating 27year career to talk through, and eight pages of the Total Film Interview to fill. ‘If you don’t have enough, I’ll send you a picture of my beer belly,’ he grins.
Really, it’s not hard to see why actors love Meadows, eagerly signing up to spend many months in his company and to experience his process. Meadows, you see, is not one to meet his actors on set on day one of the shoot, and to film from a finished script. He instead spends months casting, improvising and rehearsing, with whatever series or movie he’s working on finding shape as it’s pushed and prodded from every angle.
‘I’m shit at filling in forms and I’m not very good at writing,’ he says by way of modest explanation for his workshopping methods. Truth is, he’s found something that yields special results, a process that adds to the honesty that comes from ransacking his own background to fill his frame. Mostly set in the Midlands and often mashing genres because life, after all, offers every flavour, Small Time, TwentyFourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England, Somers Town, Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee and The Virtues are all informed by events and people from his youth in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire.
The son of a father who was a longdistance lorry driver and a mum who worked three jobs (one in the local chippy where Shane scarfed deep-fried jam sandwiches), Meadows signed up to a performing-arts course at Burton College at age 18. It was there that he met Paddy Considine, who would go on to strikingly star in three of his films. But Meadows is in fact a self-taught filmmaker: ‘I really liked Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Stephen Frears,’ he says, ‘but Alan Clarke [Scum, Made in Britain, The Firm] conn
