Meniscus Films

This is England

This is England

This Is England, is the story of a summertime school holiday, those long weeks between terms where life changing events can take place. It’s 1983 and school is out. 12-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is an isolated lad growing up in a grim coastal town, whose father has died fighting in the Falklands war. Over the course of the summer holiday he finds fresh male role models when those in the local skinhead scene take him in. With his new friends Shaun discovers a world of parties, first love and the joys of Dr Martin boots. Here he meets Combo (Stephen Graham), an older, racist skinhead who has recently got out of prison. As Combo’s gang harass the local ethnic minorities, the course is set for a rite of passage that will hurl Shaun from innocence to experience.

July 1983. It’s the last day of term and that means ‘no uniform day’. In a down-beat coastal town 12-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) sets out to school in the flares his dad gave him. En route, he is banned from his corner shop for being cheeky, and while everyone gives him jip for his fashion sense (“you look like Keith Chegwin’s son!”) he gives back twice as hard. On the way home he meets Woody (Joe Gilgun), and his gang of skinheads. Contrary to their startling appearance they are friendly and fair-minded. Admittedly a day out with the gang means trashing the new, unoccupied, housing development, whilst dressing up in outlandish costumes, but they are welcoming and they are fun. The skinheads offer Shaun two things he has been missing, friendship and male role models. Shaun’s own father has been killed fighting in the Falklands war.

If he’s going to be a skinhead like them, he has to get the look. There is a trip with his mum Cynthia (Jo Hartley) to the local shoe-shop. Unfortunately cherry red Dr Martins don’t come in size fours, but he gets the next best thing. Later that day Lol (Vicky McClure), Woody’s girlfriend, shaves his head. He’s only missing one thing, a Ben Sherman shirt, Woody comes to the rescue and welcomes him to the gang. While Cynthia is less than happy about the new haircut, she is grateful that Shaun has found some friends to spend the summer with while she is out at work.

At a house party Shaun meets Smell (Rosamund Hanson), a kooky punk who takes him to the garden shed for his first kiss. Meanwhile, the party is interrupted by Combo (Stephen Graham) who Woody is initially thrilled to see. Fresh from prison where he has just served a three and a half year sentence, Combo soon upsets the younger gang. To the great discomfort of Milky (Andrew Shim), the sole black member of the gang, he embarks on a vicious racist anecdote about his time inside.

The next day Combo summons the gang and lectures them about ethnic minorities taking their jobs and the Falklands. Lol is worried, particularly when she sees Shaun kick off against Combo for bringing up the Falklands, the war where his father died. Combo manipulates this, and draws a line asking those with him to cross it. Disgusted, Woody makes to leave. He doesn’t want to be brainwashed. Shaun however, decides to stay and Combo tells him that looking at him is like looking in the mirror; they have both lost people.

Combo takes his new gang to a local National Front meeting. On the way back to town, Shaun is given special privileges when he is allowed to sit on the front seat, while the four fully grown men have to make do in the back. Shaun further gains Combo’s admiration by revealing that he has stolen an England flag from the meeting. The gang terrorise the local neighbourhood, scaring off Indian kids who are playing football, and attempting to spray racist graffiti, though they struggle with the spelling. They trash the corner shop that Shaun has been barred from, robbing the owner, and defecating on the floor. To mark his affiliation with the gang, Combo tattoos a cross onto Shaun’s finger. They take their booty to Smell’s birthday party, and Woody leaves with Lol saying he has a documentary on Aardvarks that he must watch.

The following morning, Combo stops Lol on her way to work. For the first time he seems twitchy and unsure of himself. He tells her that all he has thought of since he went to prison is how much he loves her, and the one night they shared. He gives her a box he made inside, but Lol rejects him straight, the best night of his life, was the worst night of her life. She walks away incensed and Combo bursts into tears.

Milky is walking a girl home when Combo approaches him to buy an ounce of hash. With Shaun, Smell, and Combo’s thuggish friends they all get stoned. Combo and Milky initially bond – Combo talks about the original ’69 skinheads and their shared love of reggae music. For his part Milky talks about the beauty of his family life, and extends an open welcome to Combo. While Milky is describing his close, happy family however, a look of pure hatred creeps across Combo’s face. In a fit of anger he beats Milky and then turns on his friends. Shaun is left outside crying hysterically.

Back at home, Shaun looks through old pictures of his dad with his Mum. He takes the once cherished flag to the beach where he hurls it into the sea.

The Search For Shaun

Casting is an essential part of every Shane Meadows film: working chiefly with non-professionals, he is an extraordinarily intuitive director who allows story to take shape through workshops. A film’s structure will be organically developed around the personality of his actors, often young people who have come to acting through far from traditional paths. For This Is England, he had the jumping off point: skinhead culture, growing up in the eighties, and childhood interrupted by violence. Yet the substance of the movie depended on finding the perfect lead, a task that would not only involve hard work, it hinged on luck and something close to magic.

In the search for Shaun, Shane and his long-term collaborator and partner, Louise Meadows who had found the rest of the cast single-handed, held many auditions with children in inner city workshops all over the country. They realised that what was needed was “a real kid of the street” as Louise puts it, and decided to enlist the help of casting genius Des Hamilton. Having worked with directors such as Lynne Ramsay whose film Ratcatcher used a cast of non-professional child actors, Des has a special approach and is a renowned expert in street casting. A strong sense of the character he was looking for was established through discussions with Shane. Des then targeted those areas in which he believed the real Shaun to exist. Invites to casting sessions were given out at holiday camps around the east coast, and Des particularly focussed on the town of Grimsby. It was at The Space Project, a scheme run for disadvantaged kids, many of whom have been excluded from school, that Des found the quality they had been searching for: a canny combination of innocence and hardness that set these children apart.

Thomas ‘Tommo’ Turgoose

Here the team chanced upon Thomas ‘Tommo’ Turgoose, a 13-year-old boy who had grown up with the odds stacked heavily against him. Small in stature, he looked far younger than his years, yet more than made up for it in gumption. All the children Shaun and Louise met were naturally very eager to be in the film, yet Tommo was different. He actually charged for every audition he went to, at once wheeler-dealing and street savvy, and at the same time sadly unable to grasp any other kind of exchange. Producer Mark Herbert recalls the startling impression he made at his first audition: “He was, you know, ‘one of them’, he had such cheekiness and spirit! Yet he threw things in that were so unobvious… he was much more subtle.”

“I just got that feeling that directors probably get when they see something that has this magic, Simon Cowell’s X Factor,” says Shane, for whom the young lad’s impact went even deeper. “I could see myself in him. I remember there were teachers at school who’d said I was going to end up in prison, there were only bad things out there for me, yet somehow some people believed in me and I actually made something of myself.” At the time of casting Tommo, two other boys were on the shortlist, actors from the Carlton Workshop in Nottingham, with suitable experience that had prepared them for a larger role. Tommo on the other hand had little structure in his life, had been diagnosed with an Attention Deficit Disorder, was in school for one hour only a week as Shane recalls, and had recently been rejected from playing an extra in the school play.

For Shane though, the choice was not just obvious, it was a matter of artistic truth: “I thought I’d much rather take a chance on a kid like Tommo and risk failure. If you turn your back on the person that’s meant to play the part you shouldn’t make the film anyway. It had become this beautiful full circle thing: that you go out there to make a film about yourself, and you end up finding yourself. It’s kind of crazy!” Accordingly, This Is England became as much Tommo’s story as Shane’s. The focus on the loss of a father figure was emphasised, and Tommo was able to bring a wholly new aspect to the character of Shaun, a boy who, unlike Shane, is often happiest alone.

It almost goes without saying that the risks of casting Tommo were going to be high – he is after all in every scene, an exhausting challenge for any actor. The experience was not without its bumps. At the end of the first week, when Tommo fully comprehended the depth of how hard he’d have to work, there came an afternoon where he said he didn’t think he could do it. Momentarily floored, Shane remembers how he even considered pretending the pint-sized tearaway was contractually obligated. Instead, a serious heart to heart was called for: “I chose to say, ‘if you turn your back on this now I honestly believe you’ll regret it for the rest of your life, because if you don’t work your way through this, you’ll never work your way through anything. I got my chance a bit later than you, and to be honest Tommo, I couldn’t have done it if I was your age…’ I knew it was the difference between him having a life and never having a life.”

These strong words hit home, and as with Andrew Shim, the young star of A Room For Romeo Brass, as soon as Tommo decided to dig in, his appetite for filmmaking became insatiable. From the camera work through to the editing, he wanted to learn about it all. “We even changed his diet,” laughs Shane of the stunning transformation. “The chips and Coca-Cola went, and by the end me and him were drinking Purdeys, all we needed was a fitness instructor on set!”

Tommo particularly bonded not just with Shane, but with his co-stars Andrew Shim who plays Milky and Stephen Graham who stars as Combo. Of working with Tommo Stephen says, “you’re looking at Robert De Niro. He’s the finest actor I’ve ever worked with, he’s completely in the moment.” For Tommo’s part he says the way he watches films has definitely changed since working with Shane: “I’m looking in the corners [of the screen] for the boom mike!” Andrew could most easily understand what Tommo was going through, having been given his first opportunity by the director seven years ago: “He reminded me of myself,” he says. “I’d never prepare for a scene I’d be the one laughing and talking right up until they shout ‘action!’ Just like he was! Every time he has Coca-Cola he goes really hyper and could drive everyone insane and as soon as they said ‘action’ his face dropped and he was straight into it.” Stephen the hard-man character actor from such films as Gangs Of New York, and Snatch, was someone Tommo especially looked up to. As they do on screen, the duo became great buddies behind the scenes, even performing a variety act for the cast and crew during the shoot. Yet working with a lad like Tommo carries a certain weight of responsibility. It would not be a simple matter of becoming best friends for six weeks over the course of a shoot, as so often happens with filmmaking, and then never seeing each other again.

Shane states, “I felt if I was going to say all those things to him to get him to actually do the film, I couldn’t just turn my back on him at the end of it. As an adult you can’t do that to a child, because ultimately they would feel so used at the end of it, and as if it was all a trick.” The three men, Andrew, Shane and Stephen, made a gentlemen’s agreement that they would be there for Tommo. Tommo regularly goes to stay with the director and Stephen’s families. He is currently filming a BBC drama with Stephen, and the older actor is putting him forward for other roles.

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