In anticipation of the director's fourth This is England instalment, we recall his touching account of watching westerns with his father
"When I was young, my dad was a lorry driver. He was away a lot and so my fondest memories are of him coming home. One of the reasons I got obsessed with films was because we used to sit down and watch them together – inevitably they would be westerns. It's very masculine because at the end of the day it's about two blokes sitting down for a whole Saturday or Sunday afternoon watching a mysterious stranger and gunfights. This Hell's Angel guy lived near our house and he was the first pirate video seller I met. He didn't just do pirates of modern stuff but had a huge collection of films, all stuff he had taped off TV. I'd go up there and he'd have a little book and I'd take out five or six films – The Drifter, Once Upon a Time in the West... You didn't have to pay for them but he weighed about 25 stone, so you'd take them back every time."
"One of the reasons I got obsessed with films was because my dad and I used to sit down and watch them together" – Shane Meadows
Shane Meadows admits that he only ever comes to London for the food. When we meet, he's tucking into a box of takeaway noodles and talking about his latest and third feature film, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. Like all his films, it's set – as the title hints – in his home territory, the Midlands. But unlike his boxing club drama, TwentyFourSeven (1997), or his portrayal of a kid who befriends a local loner, A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), Meadows has moved on from a cast of unknown – yet brilliant – actors. Instead he has hired the services of Rhys Ifans, Robert Carlyle, Shirley Henderson and Ricky Tomlinson. But Meadows retains his tragi-comic style in this story of a mother (Henderson) who must make the choice between her daughter's unreliable, largely absent Dad (Carlyle) and her slightly awkward, caring boyfriend (lfans). As Meadows shows, the mysterious stranger may be a cowboy – but he's not always the hero.
This feature originally ran in the Autumn/Winter 2002 issue of AnOther Magazine. This is England '90, premieres on Channel 4 on September 13.
