This is England

Shane first hit on the idea for This Is England whilst working on his preceding film, Dead Man's Shoes, a story of victimisation, abuse of power and revenge, in rural England. It was a project that made the director reflect on the nature of bullying and violence. Specifically there was an incident from his own life, when he was about 12-years-old and had become a skinhead, when as he explains, "I thought the be all and end all in life was that kind of hard masculinity in men. I craved to be like a Jimmy Boyle, or a John McVicar, or a Kray.

It's like kids who are into Beckham, I was into Jimmy Boyle in the same way. I wanted to see men fight, and there was an act of violence that I almost prompted, and that was something that became very difficult to live with." Ironically it was this experience, alongside the example set by a figure like Jimmy Boyle, a criminal who became an artist, which ultimately became very influential for Shane in a positive way.

Of his childhood in Uttoxeter in the eighties, then a small Midlands town with a population of around 10 000, high unemployment, and the epitome of Thatcher's rural dispossessed, the director reflects: "Coming from a town like Uttoxeter, nobody expects you to leave and become a filmmaker. In a way my reaction to that act of violence was the first stepping stone to getting out of that way of life."

As Shane sees it, making This Is England has become a way of exorcising the demons of that night of violence, yet the impact of those early experiences can be felt across the body of his work. Indeed all of his films deal with issues of masculinity, from the boys' boxing club of TwentyFourSeven to the compromised boyhood friendship in A Room For Romeo Brass, the question of male power structures and revenge in Dead Man's Shoes, through to the teen tribes and father figures of This Is England. "In film terms it's almost like the Star Wars series," he jokes. "Now I'm into my prequel series. This Is England is made before all of my other films. The others are based on a certain period of time, from 15-years-old onwards when, though I abhorred violence, I was a bit of a small time crook. I think This Is England has gone as far back as I could probably go and found the root of what got me making films to begin with