Hannah Rothschild: How did you get into film in the first place?

Shane Meadows: I was a bit like Madonna. You know these people who do really badly at school and left with no qualifications and went for a job as a clown’s assistant at Alton Towers. Then I got on a photography course in Nottingham and exposed every loophole and got about eighteen student loans and would use fake names with the gas board and stuff. I had all these names with different gas bills in different names and had to leave because I got into a lot of trouble. They said I had to pay all the money back. I was on my way home from having that meeting with the head of the photography course when I saw a film crew, and the thing that attracted me was there were about eight girls. There was this guy, Graham Ford, a black guy and I was saying, ‘How did you get on the course?’ He said, ‘Well unless you are black or a lesbian or single parent or disabled,’ he said, ‘you have absolutely no chance, because it is for minorities.’ This guy took me under his wing and at weekends he would lend me camcorders and cameras and things like that. It was the holidays and everyone was away, so I made this film by myself where I played like four to five characters in the house, just to amuse myself. By the time they had all come back from their holidays I had made three films. So within twelve months I had self-trained myself as it were and gone through my own kind of condensed film course if you like.

Then your career took off very quickly didn’t it?

I sent Where’s the Money, Ronnie? off to a short film competition and got a call from Steve Woolley. And then within I think two to three months we were basically going round having meetings about 24/7 and Stephen knew Bob Hoskins from Mona Lisa and said, ‘Who do you imagine playing the part?’ And it was like at every turn I said, ‘I would love to work with Bob Hoskins,’ and he knew him and arranged all these meetings and I realised if you have got a key to the door in those things, having the right person who knows these people makes all the difference. That was kind of how that transition from making a load of films with my friends and one phone call from someone senior in a film competition, and everything accelerated at an incredible pace.

So becoming a director was accidental?

Yes completely. Now I am directing I have that passion and I have that vision and I can’t imagine doing anything else and it almost scares me sometime because I think to myself it would have been so easy not to have found it.

Are you telling stories that no one else could tell?

It’s not the story; it’s the way of telling it. Lots of working class dramas are the same on paper, but what sets me aside is the fact that I kind of grew up within it. I was a small time thief, I was a gambler and I was a hustler. A lot of films about that kind of subject matter seem to be observational and so rather than sympathising with people, I am empathising with people.