Shane being interviewed

Shane Meadows interviewed by Joe Field, Edinburgh, 21^st August 2004

Did you ever feel that you were indulging in this dark part of yourself?

Yeah, it’s quite cathartic really because you’ve got all these pent-up feelings that every now and again you examine or you look at - me and Paddy were talking about it and we still feel rage for things that went on ten years ago. It’s nice to find a way, an avenue where you can express it, get it out.

Like I say, it’s these unpaid crimes that I can’t cope with - it’s one thing someone getting done for burglary and going through the justice system but how do you get people done for someone that’s hung themselves? How can you quantify what their involvement was? So they’re all just walking around and they don’t feel guilty because they think he’s just got a weak mind, so it’s his fuckin’ fault - whereas in the film someone actually comes up and says “No, it was you.”

Your films usually have strong female characters, Dead Man’s Shoes is an almost exclusively male world.

Yeah and the girl who is in it is just abused by this crowd. As bad as it is, there was always a girl like that when you were hanging around with lads: she seemed to go out with everyone in the gang - and one of them’s going out with her but he doesn’t mind if she goes upstairs and has sex with someone else. That’s the sadness with them people, there was never any respect for women - I was brought up in a very male-dominated environment where it was all about masculinity and girls were just brought in to have sex… there was no fuckin’ respect there.

You draw inspiration for your films from the world directly around you; do you still find characters and stories where you live in the Midlands?

Uttoxeter, where I’m from, I’m probably about one percent through that lot. It’s quite incredible, for such a little place it breeds all sorts - there’s still 100 people that I’ve not even touched on. One of the films I’m writing next is a film called Mary, which is a true story based on my uncle who’s an ex-heroin addict. It’s about this girl who he saved from a good hiding in the street, because she was a prostitute and her pimp was beatin’ fuck out of her and me uncle basically stepped in, knocked this guy out.

But with him doing that and stepping in, she’d suddenly got nowhere to live, so he’d involved himself and he got stuck with her. So I’m writing that, and that’s based on my Dad’s brother so I’m still looking very close to home.

You’re an advocate of guerrilla-style filmmaking and the do-it-yourself ethic. Do you think this is how British cinema needs to evolve to survive?

It’s a good way for people to get started, definitely, but not all projects need to be shot in that fashion. The sort of films that I’m gonna start making now, some of these harder-hitting stories, if you can do it with a small crew, with minimal lighting it means you’re getting a lot more on screen - you’re not wasting money on shit equipment that’s sat in a van somewhere.