Awaydays, intervista con l' autore

Pubblicata su Proper Magazine, un'interessante intervista con Kevin Sampson, autore del romanzo "Awaydays", di cui abbiamo parlato nel post precedente. Nell'intervista in inglese (sorry mates!), si parla, naturalmente, del film tratto dallo stesso romanzo di Sampson.

Gratifying is exactly the right word... it's been a saga trying to get the film off the ground. Came close so many times, but ultimately TV and Film in the U.K. is largely run by people who have no real interest in working class culture. As your Gran would say to you: "If you want something doing, do it yourself..."

So we did.

Myself and the ex keyboard player from OMD, Dave Hughes (who wrote the film scores for Lock Stock and Snatch and, lately, that Hogfather on Sky) set up an IES, which is a government initiative to finance low-budget film in the U.K. Basically a tax loophole, where people can invest in a way that they're nailed-on to make money. More or less. But yeah, I'm ecstatic. All those years of hurt, and now....

"Come 'ead!! These want it!!"

It's not so much a case of re-writing as having to be fairly brutal about what stays in and what gets binned!

You have, more or less, 90 minutes to tell your story, so you have to quickly get right to the heart of what that story really is. Awaydays touches upon many things; it documents the early days of the only major British youth movement not to have started in London. It gives a flavour of how much it means to young males to belong - to have an identity, and be part of something that matters so much to them that they will go to extreme lengths to preserve it. But above all it's a growing-up tale. It portrays one of those great, meaningful friendships that all 17 year-old lads have, but that always, sooner or later, have to come to an end.

That became the heart of the story for the film adaptation - the way that Carty and Elvis are bang into each other, inseparable, all-time bezzy mates...up to the point that something has to break.

By Jove, yes! Really, really tricky. There's some stuff I can't go into because of ongoing struggles with certain companies.

We wanted a simple, core 'uniform' of green Peter Storm smock cagoules (the ones that had the pouch zip, armpit to armpit); Fred Perry t-shirts; Slazenger v-necks; Lois straights; and Samba, Nastase and Forest Hills as the main trainies. That's a strong, easily identifiable look, so you'll always know who's who... but without the help of loads of you lot from the various Casuals websites who have either lent, rented or sold us your swag - and without an unbelievable, massive and beyond-the-call of duty amount of input from Gary

Aspden at adidas, we might have struggled to have got the lads' look as good as it is now.

I've got to say, they look boss. We deliberately cast them dead young so that the contrast between how they look (dandies with tarts fringes) and how they act (brutal) is something of a shock. It's how it was; I was one of the 90 on the Ordinary to Middlesbrough, August 1977 and the look on those men's faces was a treat. They obviously fancied their chances - they were men with moustaches and tattoos - we probably looked like rent boys... but you could see real unease with them. They were looking round at each other, obviously

dead confused... who are these puftas. The Liverpool lads of that era were mainly all small, and the wedge haircuts made us look easy. Then you'd run at them and they genuinely were flummoxed.

I told our director that story, and he was made up. Wanted all The Pack bar the leader, played by Stephen Graham, to look baby-faced.

  Are there many familiar faces in the film? Stephen Graham is perhaps the best known?

Stephen Graham is definitely the best-known actor. But for the lads, we wanted to find a new, young, Northern rat-pack... The Pack Pack. So it's mainly new talent.

The faces in The Pack are played by Nicky Bell, Liam Boyle, Oliver Lee, Michael Ryan, Anthony Borrows... none of them a household name, yet. But there are good cameo roles from, for example, Rebecca Atkinson from Shameless, and Ian Puleston-Davies who plays Carty's Uncle. (In the book, by the way, Bob is just his boss. I morphed him into a surrogate father figure for the film script... Carty's Ma has died, his Dad is a reclusive shell, and Uncle Bob susses his ever-growing obsession with footy violence. Ian P-D is just amazing in that role...)

Generally it's about a year to 15 months from completion ... so somewhere between this time next year and Feb 2009. But every scamp on the set has been sneaking footage on their video phones. There'll be out-takes all over YouTube.

Outlaws is already in production. I'm not directly involved in that, so there's not much I can tell you. The stills look good on the Outlaws website though.

It all looks good on paper, like there was some devlish masterplan... the truth is that I stumbled from one great job to another, always with the writing as the underlying thing that carved out the opportunity. It really was a case of one thing leading to another, without a whole lot of thought going into it. Like, with The Farm for example - I'd set up Kinesis and we were getting a lot of wrok making youth culture documentaries. I probably would have carried on really enjoying it, making a reasonable wedge, living the life in London. But Hooto told me they were thinking of setting up their own record label, I knew enough people from the house scene and medialand to think I could maybe help make it work and, without too much further analysis up sticks and moved back to Liverpool. There was no wage, no guarantees... just a massively exciting opportunity to do something meaningful at the apex of a massively exciting time.

To my mind, the best thing that came out of that initial bloodrush of activity was the Ibiza film - A Short Film About Chilling. Like I've said, I had a toehold in film production. I knew lots of very young, very talented technicians. Tim Maurice Jones, the cameraman, was only a kid at that point, but he went on to shoot films like Gladiator. Angus Cameron, who directed the film, did loads of great work subsequently with Primal Scream, The Shamen, loads of bands... but at the time I gave him the Ibiza job he'd directed a total of 15 minutes of film. Jo Wiley was one of the production assistants. You go with your instincts, don't you? I couldn't see a way that if we got a load of brilliant DJs and bands in a location that's visually stunning, atmospheric, weird and wonderful, and have the whole shebang filmed by kids I knew who had the hunger and the guile, and who were from that culture... I couldn't see how anything other than genius would result from throwing it all together.

Again, it was chaotic, flying on the seats of our arses, and amateur in the purest sense of the word... we all did it for love. But it was ace. Nobody but nobody made a penny from it. Channel Four give us £25,000 to finish off the edit in exchange for 7 (seven!!!) broadcasts. Every years since, someone approaches me to do an 'official' DVD, but I always swerve it. It was a defining film about a defining moment in club culture. The film should be freely available to anyone who wants it. It came about that way, it should live on that way. I let them put it up on YouTube and anyone who hasn't seen it will find it there.

So that was The Farm, Produce Records and a wonderful white-knuckle ride. It worked out - but I always knew it wouldn't be forever, and that I'd be back writing again sooner or later.

There'll be a new book in 2009 - The Wasteland. Thank you kindly - hope you enjoy Awaydays.