Interview: Vicky McClure & Andrew Shim

Andrew: A lot of it was filmed in Nottingham. It’s based around a young lad called Shaun and a skinhead gang that me and Vicky are part of. It’s set it in the six week school holidays. Life’s not too great for Shaun, he lost his dad in the Falklands war, he’s getting bullied at school and he falls out with his mum. Then he stumbles across our skinhead gang and we take a shine to him. He’s about thirteen and we take him under our wing and Vicky and her gang of girls kit him out. It basically goes from happy, pissing-about type adventures, until an older member of the gang (Combo) comes out of prison after a couple of years inside. He’s been introduced to the National Front whilst in prison.

 

Andrew: Yeah, it’s all about that transitional period. At first being a skinhead was basically a fashion statement, but then the National Front moved in, and the BNP, and a lot of skinheads turned to racism.

Vicky: Shaun’s a vulnerable character and when Combo comes along, Shaun sees him as a father figure and puts his trust in him. There’s quite a nice scene in the film where he spits on his hand and rubs it as if to say, ‘we’re together now’.

Andrew: Yeah, Combo basically fills his head with a load of shit. He splits the gang in two, one side goes down the National Front path and the other, including mine and Vicky’s characters, go the other way. Unfortunately Shaun tags onto Combo’s side of

things, until he gets out of his depth and realises that things aren’t right.
 

Vicky: I’m not sure if all the scenes were drawn directly from his experiences, but when Shane created the film and characters he told me that the girls that were in gangs when he was growing up were as hard as the blokes. In the film my character Lol is certainly not effeminate at all. The gang is quite similar to the one Shane was in when he was young, and each character in the film has very strong characteristics that I’m sure were drawn from real people.

Andrew: It’s not a mirror image of his own life, but it is based around a period in his life when he had to make certain decisions and was faced with uncomfortable situations. All the characters have tough decisions to face. I suppose it’s a coming of age film at heart.

Vicky, you had to shave your hair off for the part…

Vicky: We were in this pub when Shane said to me ‘this character I’m thinking of for you is a real rough, skinhead type of girl’, and I just thought ‘yeah, whatever’. I didn’t think anything of it and then it kind of clicked that I’d have to do it. The night before I woke up in a cold sweat, panicking.
Andrew: She did! She woke up crying.

Vicky: When it came to the day, all the girls in the room were in tears and it was quite dramatic. When I look back on it now, it was actually really liberating and I’m glad I did it. Watching the film back, if I hadn’t shaved my hair off, it would have drastically changed my character.

Andrew: We were down in London doing some interviews and someone actually asked her if she’d shave her hair off for a photo shoot!

Andrew, most people will know you as Romeo Brass from A Room for Romeo Brass. That film has a very improvised feel to it. Is that how Shane likes to work?

Andrew: To be honest, Shane always works like that. He basically uses the script as a guide. You read through your scene in rehearsal, but we put the script aside and he’ll basically say “well, you know where it starts and you know where it needs to end up”. It’s a really good way of working.
 

Andrew: Yeah, man, I don’t know how many other directors would work like that…

Vicky: For me and Andrew, a lot of our training at Central TV Workshop was based around improvisation. Obviously Shimmy’s worked on the majority of Shane’s films, so doing it at a young age and then again in This is England, for us it’d probably be scarier using a script, knowing you’ve got to hit your marks. I’ve worked like that, where you’ve got to be technically spot-on. So when you’re given freedom and choice, it’s probably easier for us.
Andrew: The only thing we found really hard in terms of improvising for this film was that there’d be seven or eight people in the same scene and everyone wants to be noticed and tries to fit their line in. You get a lot of overlapping and it doesn’t always work.
Vicky: God, it must be a nightmare to edit.

Andrew: Yeah, wow, no-one’s ever asked me about that. The BBC and a Canadian company got together to adapt the book into an animation and I played a character called Grot. I had to go out to Canada for the filming. It was great! I was 19 and living in Canada for a couple of months, in a hotel. I provided the character’s movements and voice. Actually, I can tell you this, it was one of the first productions ever to use motion capture. I had to wear a skin-tight suit with balls all over it, like motion sensors. You could actually watch yourself on a monitor with the CGI character put over the top.

I notice that you both starred as ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in something called The Stairwell. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Andrew: Man and woman! (laughs).

Vicky: Shane was asked to make a 15 minute short film on a Nokia mobile phone.
Andrew: Were we in here again?
Vicky: Yeah, we were in this very pub trying to come up with some ideas. I think we went through so many stupid ones until we came up with the set-up of a French girl and a man who bump into each other on some stairs, job done.

Vicky: I think so, maybe it wasn’t, but I think it was meant to be. God, we’re giving away too much information here.
Andrew: It was good that was. It was about £200 for half an hours work. What else have we done?
Vicky: Well, the majority of my work has been in the theatre, through Central TV Workshop. I did do a two part drama with Ray Winstone and Adrian Dunbar, called Tough Love and also a short film called Birthday with a guy called Johan Myers.

Andrew: He was in Romeo Brass as well.

Vicky: Yeah, he was the gay guy who worked with Ladine in the laundrette.
 

Andrew: Yeah. Funnily enough, me and Vicky played a brother and sister in the last play we did together. It’s really strange, we always seem to end up playing siblings, we did in Romeo Brass as well.

Vicky: And now we’re together as a couple.

 

Andrew: (laughs). No, I like theatre, but I find it much harder than film. There’s no room for mistakes and if you do go wrong, you have to think on your feet.

Vicky: I think theatre gives you a good grounding. It gives you the technical skills, I  suppose in the same way that a trained ballet dancer has the basic technique to dance in any style. If you can master the theatre, when you go onto film and TV you’ve got the basics under your belt. I think the transition from TV and film to theatre is much harder than from theatre to TV and film.
 

Andrew: I went to the Carlton Junior workshop, when Vicky was there, but I’d only been there for about six months. I was kind of pushed into it by my grandma, because my sister (Shauna) went there and really loved it. I went there but didn’t really take to it. I was just about to leave, and I’m sure I said to my grandma on

the Monday that I was going to leave, but on the Wednesday I heard about an audition that was coming up for a film by a guy called Shane Meadows. So I thought “oh, I may as well stay for this.” So I went to the audition and got the part of Romeo Brass. After that I just became really good friends with Shane.

 

Andrew: I’ve done bits and bobs. A while ago I actually did a reconstruction for Crimewatch UK (laughs). I was in a barbers shop not long after it went out, and a guy who I knew, who’d recently been released from prison, said ‘I saw you on that Crimewatch, driving that Mitsubishi. You know the geezer you were playing, I was actually in prison with him.’ It was quite a famous case, a group of guys were doing a job at a Carphone Warehouse store when someone asked them what they were doing so they beat him up with a wheel brace, stuck a circular saw into his stomach and tried to run him over with their car afterwards. I met the victim actually, he was a big geezer, with a big old stomach and that was the reason he survived, because the saw couldn’t get past the fat through to his vital organs. But I played the geezer who drove the car. It was brilliant, I got to drive a Mitsubishi Evo 6 to drive. It was the fastest thing I’d ever driven.

 

Vicky: That’s right. I think it’s being shown at a film festival in Bradford soon.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s gonna be a tough one, because of the subject matter of the film, the racist theme. We’re going to the festival, so it’ll be interesting to see the reactions. Like I say, there’s a particular scene in an Asian corner shop with Combo and his gang. It’s a fantastic scene, but it’s a bit tough to watch, so we’ll see how it goes down.
Vicky: It’s a real shame that the film’s been given an 18 certificate, because it’s a film that’s been made with kids under 15 and it’s about growing up and coming of age and all that sort of thing. I think it needs to be seen by that young audience.

Andrew: I can’t believe they’ve given it an 18 certificate. Like Vicky said, it needs to be seen by 15, 16-year-olds because they can learn from it. It’s better to see these themes on the screen than learn the hard way by making mistakes in your own life.
Vicky: Kids are taught about World War Two, the Middle Ages, all these important points in history, but they don’t know about more recent history that their parents lived through and has shaped what they are. A documentary on MoreFour the other night took the film to a school and got some fifteen year olds to watch it and they said that the language and issues are basically what they experience all the time. You just want to say to them, ‘listen to your audience’.