This movie absolutely would not work without the perfect child actors. They can’t appear to be acting. How did you find these two?
That’s exactly right what you just said. I became aware of that instantly. If you feel that they’re acting, it feels fake and phony straight-away. You feel like you’re being manipulated. You really have to be so careful to get a genuine, naïve presence in the film. And we just looked around Manchester, where we made the film, at thousands of kids. These two just walked in the door one day and I kind of felt instinctively that they were the pair. And you audition them and put them through a whole series of processes to make sure that you’re not fooling yourself, you’re not imagining it. And they turned out to be the ones.
They’d never really done it before and it gives you a whole different process in working, the way you have to work with them. You have to let them tell the story. You can’t force it into their mouths. You can’t force them to say things the way you want them to be said. You have to let it emerge from them. It’s sort of like going back to making your first film again. All the kinds of tricks and techniques that you’ve used are actually no good to you. Again, you can sense them being used in a kids film and it feels exploitative. It has to be very genuine, the storytelling, I think.
Did your directing style evolve while you’re working with the kids?
Yeah, very, very much so. That was the way I wanted it to work. I wanted them to feel that it was their film and it’s told from their perspective. The colors of the film are the colors of the world when you’re a kid and the way you see the world. They move into the house in the beginning of the film and like when you’re a kid and you’re moving houses, you don’t sense any of that agony that adults have about moving houses. About lawyers and mortgages and removals and deeds and all that kind of stuff. You just suddenly turn up and there’s a new house! You move in and it’s great and it’s a big adventure. I wanted it to all feel like their perspective, really, in a way. You have to become a bit of a kid. You have to go back to being a bit of a kid yourself, you know, to relate to the world through their eyes.
Did that reinvigorate you as a director?
Yeah. I mean, it’s infuriating because you only get a few hours with them every day. The law protects them, and rightly so, which means you can’t work them the kind of hours you would like to work them. But when they’re there, it’s fantastic, really. You have to leave behind a bit of the cynicism that we all have in the film business about making films. Not cynical – that’s the wrong word. But a kind of knowing-ness you have to leave behind because if that infects the film, it spoils it.
How close was the very first draft to the screenplay you wound up shooting?
It was very different. The writer Frank Cottrell Boyce and I, we worked together on the script for about a year and by the time we finished, we realized that there’s only one scene from the original draft, which is the train robbery sequence. The rest of it changed. It had sort of grown with talking about the film and reading it to each other constantly, and talking about the characters. It was a lovely process, actually. It’s been a labor of love throughout it I have to say.
Is that the type of process you go through for every project or was this one a little more involved?
No, it’s pretty much that we try and work the scripts. Making a film, even a small film like this, is so expensive that what you’ve got to try and do is make it at the script stage as much as you can because there, that’s when you can change things without a huge expense. And so you sort of try and make the film in the script. We perform it to each other and kind of have all these pictures and images of the way that certain scenes will look and the feel of the film and the colors of the film. So you’re sort of trying to make it before you actually make it. Because then when you come to actually shoot, that’s the expensive part where you’re carrying like 40 people and they all have to be paid every day. If you make any mistakes and have to go back and reshoot things, that’s when the budget starts to escalate. We try and keep a grip on the budget so that the film doesn’t have to…the film can just have its own integrity. It doesn’t have to hit certain buttons because of the price. It doesn’t have to perform at a certain level. It can just be itself and go out there and hopefully captivate people.
