Shot in Notts… We asked Ali Catterall, co-author of Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties; The Guardian TV Reviewer, Q Magazine Cinema Columnist and walking film-encyclopedia to tell us a bit about how Beeston and environs have been the back-drops to a wide swathe of classic film. From the MI6 building in Vauxhall, to a certain residential blue door in Notting Hill, London is still far and away the most popular British city among film location scouts. But there’s still been many a great movie shot on your Nottinghamshire doorstep. Over the years, films as diverse as the Mitchell and Webb comedy Magicians (utilising Nottingham’s Theatre Royal) and Anton Lord B seeks out a local maverick Corbijn’s Control (shot in and movie-maker in the most unlikely around Beeston) have seen movie of places... crews humping their equipment I’m sure you’re meant to meet around the City in search of local award-winning fim producers in the atmosphere. In Control’s case, the Groucho Club, or over some crazily Albert Hall Conference Centre, expensive meal at the Ivy. So it’s a North Circus Street, doubled for bit odd to find myself seeking out the exterior of Manchester’s Lesser Steve Deery, founder of Pondweed Free Trade Hall, where the nascent Productions, in the rather Joy Division caught that influential incongruous settings of a huge book 1976 Sex Pistols gig. 1960s Kitchen depot on Beeston Business Park, a Sink classics The Loneliness of the bibliophile's Nirvana. "Yeah, this Long Distance Runner and Saturday is my job when I’m not producing. Night and Sunday Morning were Makes a great set though. We’ve also shot here; the latter featuring filmed a few things here". Which everything from the old Raleigh probably explains the 7ft terracotta warrior standing guard by the door. Bicycle Works on Cycle Road, to Norton Street and Beaconsfield Steve set up Pondweed a couple of years back to make short, pithy films Terrace – areas now changed almost beyond recognition. with high production values. I’ve During 2009, Mighty Boosh seen a few and they are faultlessly director Paul King commandeered professional, rather darkly humoured vignettes that demand a the University of Nottingham’s replay. Steve has been writing for King’s Meadow Campus for 5 years for a variety of publications, so weeks to shoot Bunny and the moving into mini-screenplays was Bull, a brilliantly absurdist road a natural step. He has a writer's eye movie. Transparently influenced for the implicit act; dialogue is kept by Withnail & I, it’s a bizarre yet to a minimum: this is a visual art surprisingly touching meditation afterall. He enjoys the constraints of on male friendship, impotent the shorter form, this keeps things bravado and grief. For all its disciplined; tight. Boosh-style surrealism, the most More films are in the pipeline, indelible impression is left by and he’s already attracting a fair Simon Farnaby's cheerfully bit of interest at film festivals.Will disgusting shagger-gambler – the he be off to Hollywood once that ‘Bunny’ of the title – who with first BAFTA comes in, riding in his second-hand sheepskin coat stretch limos and quaffing Krystal and accompanying stench of with a Kardashian? "Nah. Not my thing. 'Prefer The Vic to be honest. mid-strength own-brand lager Plus, the light is better here than in resembles nothing less than some utterly disgraced 1970s polytechnic California". LB lecturer. He also looks as if he's
Steve Deery:
not falling short
carrying at least three varieties of STD… if those STDs happened to be uniquely English ones. More recently, in June 2011, Christopher Nolan transformed Wollaton Hall into Wayne Manor for Batman threequel The Dark Knight Rises, its Elizabethan splendour perfectly complimenting the classic curves of cat burglar Anne Hathaway’s cat suit. Talking of criminals, Nicolas Winding Refn’s weird and wonderful Bronson, starring Tom Hardy as the notorious British jailbird, was also filmed here. Locations included Sherwood and Worksop, with Welbeck Abbey doubling for Rampton – the psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. In a movie overflowing with startling, hallucinatory moments, it’s the scenes set at the latter that particularly lodge in the skull, featuring drugged, drooling inmates dancing woozily to The Pet Shop Boys' 'It's A Sin’, against a cinematic palate of reds and blacks; Hell colours. With visual nods to Francis Bacon and Magritte, this film is practically an art installation, or contemporary performance piece. It’s also one of the most impressive gigs Hardy has ever signed up for; the former slip of a pretty-boy actor pulling off one of cinema's most impressive bulkups to play a strange little boyman incarcerated inside endlessly replicating walls of muscle, a selfmade prison of bone and gristle. That said, when it comes to dishing out a bit of the old ultraviolence, Bronson’s got nothing on Mum and Dad from Steven Sheil’s 2008 horror film of the same name. Perry Benson and Dido Miles play the eponymous Fred and Rose-style serial killers, who kidnap and torture a Polish Heathrow airport cleaner, in this smart and extremely splattery satire on the nuclear family and (especially) Little British attitudes to the issue of immigration. A house in Hucknall Road became Mum and Dad’s suburban abattoir for the shoot, while the former Carlton TV studios, in Lenton Lane, served for Heathrow airport. Almost as grim is 2003’s One for the Road, from Sheil’s fellow Nottingham director Chris Cooke.
Unspooling like some diseased offspring of Ricky Gervais and David Mamet, this sees three blokes with nothing in common except a charge sheet embark on a rehabilitation course for drunk drivers. Led by their selfloathing, sandalled team leader, the Booze-ual suspects are soon obliged to endure spirit-sapping role play games and paintball weekends – shot at The Paintball Jungle, in Mapperley Plains. With an ingenious visual style lurching from sober to sozzled via some kamikaze editing, this cocktail of acrid comedy and dramatic pathos occasionally jars, but mostly slips down easy. There’s one name, obviously, that we can’t pass over; the one director who’s lately become completely synonymous with his Nottingham home town, in the same way, say, Martin Scorsese is with his native New York. For the past quarter century, Attenborough resident, Shane Meadows has been among the foremost and most accurate chroniclers of English workingclass life. Having initially shot dozens of shorts around the City, this most compulsive of filmmakers had his first breakthrough with 1997’s Twenty Four Seven, starring Bob Hoskins as a boxing trainer. The superb A Room for Romeo Brass followed, marking the debut screen appearance of his old mate Paddy Considine. (If Meadows is a British Scorsese, then Considine’s his De Niro.) This seriously enigmatic actor would go on to star in the lo-fi vigilante thriller Dead Man’s Shoes – Meadows’ one stand-out masterpiece, as far as this writer’s concerned – before the director made a real splash with the BAFTA-winning 80s-set drama This is England, his most personal film to date, encompassing everrelevant subjects such as absent and surrogate fathers, Western imperialism and white workingclass marginalisation, particularly in the post-industrial suburbs. Yes, This Is England packs a lot into its 100 minutes, and yet it never feels hectoring. Therein lies its power. (The terrific, danceable soundtrack helps too.) At time of writing, Meadows’ clattering, eccentric Stone Roses Rockumentary Made of Stone is just about to hit the big screen, like a big red pot of paint. We wish him the very best of luck with it. Ali Catterall