Director's Seat: Shane Meadows on his gratitude for the Nottingham Television Workshop

When writing, you often use the word ‘scriptment’. Could you explain a bit about that in relation to your process?

Yeah, so a scriptment is basically the compromise I’ve made with the world at large, as it’s a working document. During This is England, so much changed as we were making it; when some of the executive producers came to see the film, what was written on the script was that there was a big fight on a beach at the end. It was meant to be a microcosm of England at large, but they were expecting a big Quadrophenia mods and rockers fight. 

What I learned from that was that when I deliver these scripts, people are disappointed because they don’t get what they thought they were getting. Scriptments fill this neat little hole where they get a sense of what’s coming, but you haven’t filled in every single colour. I often say that if you want a finished script, you should buy a book because these are just starting points. 

Scriptments will have lots of images. I’ll create Spotify playlists, there’ll be character breakdowns, a tagline, a log-line, photographs … there’ll be thirty to forty different pages: half the size of a script. It’s a bit more immersive. For Gallows Pole, it didn’t really work, because improvisation in the 1700s is quite tricky! If ‘that’ pub doesn’t work, you can’t just go to the Wetherspoons up the road, you’ve got to build one. 

Gallows Pole seemed like quite a change in your work. Obviously, there’s a lot of ‘you’ in your work. Gallows Pole was the first thing not set in the 20th century and it’s an adaptation of someone else’s book. What was it that led you to want to make that? 

When I made The Virtues, it was probably the most personal thing I’d done up until that point. After that, there was the sense of a full stop to some degree. I kind of needed a break from the autobiographical thing. When I got the book, I loved the fact that the main character was basically Robin Hood. You can’t really prove that Robin Hood existed, but not much further up in Yorkshire in the 18th Century there was a guy who was taking gold coins [at a time] when there were about 237 things you could be hung for, all to stop you just wandering around freely on people’s land. I was really taken by that. 

You worked with Michael Socha in Gallows Pole. Tell us a little bit about his qualities as an actor and what he brought to that part.

The sad thing about Gallows is that we only got three episodes in, before COVID took us down a bit at the end. The first series was meant to end with this guy who’s been a bad man, but is trying to be spiritually better and give back to the community, before he comes out of retirement as a bad guy again. A lot of people who auditioned saw this guy as a Heathcliffe type-of-character, but I kept saying to Michael, ‘We’ve seen that a million times: the Robin Hood thing, the Braveheart character, leading an army.’

I love the idea of a guy who is as hard as nails but isn’t so good at talking. Michael was really honest and said ‘I’ve never played a character like this’, but I thought it was really interesting to investigate that. I loved the idea of Michael bringing a softness and a comedy, so that when it got to the moments  where the character actually changed, you see who he was and what he could be. Michael was nervous about those big moments, but I thought that was a nice way in. 

Michael’s also one of many actors that you discovered through Nottingham Television Workshop. About a third of this audience are probably from the Television Workshop, but for the other two thirds, can you tell us what it is, and why it’s important to both you and Nottingham? 

I was at a fundraiser last night, which brought home a fact that I never really realised: they had no funding whatsoever. The principle behind the Workshop, fundamentally, is training actors irrelevant of their financial situation. With no funding, it’s hard to make that viable, because if the people in your classes are from backgrounds where they’ve got no money, they’ve got limited funds. That ethos  struck a chord with me, because I was given similar opportunities. 

For TwentyFourSeven, I went to London, where I did some auditions and went to a couple of different drama schools. I didn’t realise at the time, but I look back now and realise that I wasn’t finding the right kind of people. I was almost thinking ‘maybe we’ll cast that guy we saw in Watford’, but then I went into the Workshop, and it was like night and day. You gave them a script and a scene, and the gang that I got introduced to, everyone in that audition was in the film the same day. That was because they’d all grown up together in the Workshop: they start at eight or nine years old, and some of them stop at 21. 

What they do with improvisation: I’ve never seen that anywhere else on the planet, let alone in the UK. Going from making these crazy improvised short films for the cost of a tape, to walking on set with Bob Hoskins, for a film costing a million and a half quid, with people sawing wood on set and making things… I don’t think I would have made it through that job if they hadn’t been there with me. When I went back for Romeo Brass I didn’t go searching the country, I started in Nottingham, and I start in Nottingham every single time I need people in that age group. I owe a great deal to the Workshop. 

To grab your (free) tickets for our live interview with actress Chanel Cresswell on 6 December, head over to leftlion.co.uk/library