Transcript

Transcript from Sket Q&A at the Empire Leicester Square on Friday 21st October 2011 with Director Nirpal Bhogal, Cast Members Aimee Kelly, Riann Steele, Adelayo Adedayo and Jennifer Blake and Tracy from the Safe 'N' Sound Youth Project in Peckham.

Can you explain how you got involved in this project?
- Nirpal: I did a short film called Cold Kiss last year and after that Revolver approached me to do this and the first thing that I wanted was to make it really really authentic so that’s how I met Jenny and Tracey who came on board as consultants and to talk about it and really give me an understanding of the process and the culture.
How important was it to portray realism in the film?
- Nirpal: For me is massively important that it’s honest but it also has to the entertaining and it has to be a movie in its own right. People have to enjoy it as a piece of art but on top of that there is a responsibility to make sure that the stories and tales in there are things that actually happened and things that your audience knows ‘Ok, that could happen’, that are real and inspire debate based on those very things.
- Jennifer: The film kind of opened the door to allow people to understand the myth as well around girl gangs and what can happen when you do join a group of girls and how violent it can get so when you look at the film it is also educational for me as well so I don’t know if a lot of you got anything from the educational side and certain things that can happen but when we were approached by Nirpal by the organisation that I work with Safe and Sound Youth Project and as an ex-gang leader I was able to assist them in the reality of the film and the reality of what the characters were like, especially with Tracy.
- Tracy: I got involved in this because I wanted to relate to people like you and send a message and also give insight to make sure none of you get into the kind of life that I got into cause it’s not great. You know as a souvenir I’ve got gun shot wounds and I’ve got a criminal record and its nothing to smile about believe me so hopefully we can deter you guys from getting into that life.
Considering how you wanted to convey realism in the film, how important was the casting?
- Nirpal: It’s massively important. The remit that we set out with was to find very intelligent actors who understand the responsibility they had to portray the characters on screen that could stay… emotionally it’s quite a difficult shoot and film because tensions are running high. There are so many different emotions running across and everyone was really, really in there character so we had to have actors who had the stamina to do a four week shoot in character and then of course you needed people who could portray the character effectively on screen and really look the part in front of the cameras so it was a big casting process. We had a great casting director called Jane Ripley on board who bought these amazing actors in front of me and we auditioned and auditioned. It’s when you find someone who is really right for the role you know when you sit in front of your script and start tweaking the script based on the people who have just auditioned for me so the three actors that you see standing in front of you now, there are actually lines in the script based on things they said in their auditions and that is how I knew they were right for their roles.
As actors, did you feel any responsibility to the characters you were portraying?
- Amy: At the beginning, I’m not from London originally so when I first heard about the whole, when I read the 3rd draft about the girls, I didn’t really have an insight into the whole topic so there was a lot of learning, a lot of researching and I mean, I’m not going lie, I’ve watched a few of the hoodie films and stuff like that and I enjoy them but you think perhaps the violence is a bit over the top but when you meet the people you realise that it’s not over the top it’s actually the way that it is.
- Adelayo: I think we feel a huge responsibility because like Amy said, when you speak to the people and hear their stories you realise that it is real so you do have a massive responsibility to make sure that you portray their lives and the violence and the issues, you need to make sure that they are as true to life as possible because even though it is a film and it is for entertainment and we do want you to enjoy it we also want you to take something valuable away from it so yeah, there is a massive responsibility
What research did you do for these roles?
- Riann: Well, I know that Nirpal did a lot of research with the project and Safe and Sound but he also kept them away from me as well so my research was more personal. I have grown up in London, it’s my own experiences that I have used – what I have witnessed, my friends and things like that which I bought to my character.
- Nirpal: That is a really good point because it is really important as a director that you don’t want them to pick… you want the character to become them and them to inhabit it so by introducing them to people at an early stage they can then start picking up things that you think the character wouldn’t have said, or mannerisms. So for instance I wouldn’t want them to become exactly like Tracy and Jennifer because I want them to inhabit their own character, to become their own character on screen and when it came to Amy one of the reasons I wanted someone who was quite naïve about London was because that it is what the character is and I wanted to show that no matter where you are from or what class you are from, wherever you are from in the world you can be drawn into this lifestyle very, very quickly.
- Jennifer: That is so true because people think it is just black girls and black boys but you know what the street life is every culture and every class so to bring somebody like Amy in who is kind of naïve to what is happening is kind of showing you that you can actually get people that you would never think would could get caught up in it, could become a leader, put it that ways.
How did you try to show something different from the usual stereotyped idea of youth that we see in the media?
- Nirpal: The point is that you would feel compassionate to every single character. I mean you’re saying that the young people are stereotyped with what they do but actually the film shows you why these kids are pushed into what they do. You know, I really hate this term that the press are using about this kind of feral underclass but actually they are let down by the system from above and you can constantly see that in this film so you know we’ve created a kind of stereotype through press and your own perception of these children but actually in this film you see why they are there in the first place, because they are pushed into these situations.
- Jennifer: When you look in the papers you see a lot of media around gangs ands when you see gangs you see boys. You don’t see anything about the girls, its always pushed under the carpet as if nothing is happening and this film kind of shows you what is actually happening to girls and how they can get caught up in it so I hear what you are saying but if you watch the film and I suppose it’s a good film that most films don’t have individuals like me and Tracy because with this we can actually stand and explain the film to you. A lot of people just watch a film for the sake of watching a film and this is something totally different because this is all about girls.
- Adelayo: Usually all the hoody films are all about guys, that is just what you see in the media and the news. It’s always about guys doing this and that or young black guys. But this film has, it’s all about females which has never been done before. There are so many ethnic groups in our gang in the film and it just shows you that you don’t need to be a particular type of person to be in a gang and involved in this life so I don’t think the film is just showing a stereotypical version of street life or hood life at all because if in actual fact someone was asked to describe a typical street guy none of us would come up at all.
- Aimee: I think it really easy to look at the newspaper and see the gangs and just think they are bad kids, to think they are the bad ones. I think if people who do see it like that want to change anything you’ve got to understand it and It think the film has an insight into why they are like that – they didn’t choose to be in a gang. I am sure people don’t choose to be in gangs, there is a reason behind why they do things. They go through the same things as us but on a different extreme. So they break up with boyfriends, we break up with boyfriends, basically what I trying to say is they live the same life just on different extremes and there is always a reason why they are like that.
- Riann: I can just, of the back of all that, this film sets apart form other films is the depth of each character, it’s the story. You get an insight into where they are coming from and where they come in and its survival and its necessity and these girls probably wouldn’t even think that, they wouldn’t call themselves a girl gang. They are just a group of friends that get together, they are loyal, family.
How did you create this story?
- Nirpal: Essentially I wanted to show a girl whose background is not a stereotypically background coming into this gang culture so it was about this outsider coming in and the plot is about the characters kind of bouncing off the situations that they are in. She was almost a catalyst for the whole thing. Her life turning upside down meant that you as a viewer got an insight into this world through her eyes.
What inspired you to tell this particular story?
- Nirpal: I wanted to do a movie with actual substance and I wanted to make a movie that create political debate and this was something that… The last thing that we did before was to do knife crime workshops with it and talking to a lot of people in prison who had either stabbed people or who had been stabbed because this was a debate that I knew who start rising because there was a rise in the reporting of female violence so it felt like a good time to be making a movie like this and it seemed like a good time because as soon as this came out government reports on it are coming around all saying the same thing that so hopefully it should do exactly what it is intended to do.