Shane Meadows

Shane Meadows is a British film director who grew up in a council home in the town of Uttoxeter, Staffordshire. His father was a truck driver and his mother worked in a fish and chip shop. After leaving school with no O levels, he turned to petty crime. As a director, his social background is important as it was the foundation of his portrayal of English identity (specifically the East Midlands) through social realism.

What makes his films so believable is that most if not all of them have a degree of autobiography about the characters and the plot. For example, This is England (2006) was deeply autobiographical. Meadows made a realistic portrait of 1980s culture that was based heavily on his personal experience of joining in with the skinhead movement, with the main character Shaun representing a younger Shane Meadows when he got absorbed into the skinhead subculture himself.

The personal familiarity he brings to his films comes in a different way in A Room for Romeo Brass, (1999) where the plot is heavily based on a time when Meadows’s best friend had an accident and was bound to bed for two years. He began to hang around with more undesirable people and the feelings expressed by the characters are so realistic and representative of life in the east midlands because the story is more or less a true one, as realistic as films get.

In his other films, there is a larger sense of brutal honesty than social realism. Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) was inspired by Meadows’s friend who had been bullied, took up drugs and then committed suicide. He said “I couldn’t believe that, going back ten years later, he had been totally forgotten in the town – it was as if he had never existed. I was filled with anger against the people who had bullied and pushed drugs onto him”. The plot follows the character of Richard, who returns to his home village seeking retribution for the abuse of his younger brother. This film is not realistic in the same way as the British New Wave, but it is realistic in the sense that it is a screen translation of real experiences and feelings.

Meadows is often compared to directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach for his use of kitchen-sink realism and improvisatory methods in filming. He encourages his actors to ad lib to give his films heightened reality, which results in the vernacular language found in his work. The slang and style of speaking are very important in the creation of identity in Meadows’s films, because having a specific dialect can completely change someone’s regional identity; for instance, the cultural label of Scouse comes with an assumed liverpudlian accent, not the queen’s “RP” english. This is a main part of the credibility of the identities represented through Meadows’s characters.