Interview with the cast of Peter Mullan's Neds

This article appeared in The Guardian, 15 January 2011

Do we get paid for this?" Christopher Wallace, AKA "Wee Man", has everyone in stitches as the cab pulls up outside the Glasgow Film Theatre. The other four kids in the car, despite being media novices, know the answer already; they won't be getting a penny. Inside the cinema, a huge cardboard cutout greets them. The image on it is stark and confrontational: hammer-wielding thugs in Crombie coats and Harrington jackets. The tagline spells out the message: "Some people need to be taught a lesson." The kids inspect the standee keenly; it's their faces that are on it.

The film is Neds (reviewed here), the third feature to be directed by Glasgow actor Peter Mullan, and it draws heavily on Mullan's youth. Starring newcomer Conor McCarron and set in the 1970s, it tells the story of John McGill, a boy with a promising future from a poor background who drops out when he realises that society has no place for a would-be working-class intellectual. Instead, McGill joins a local gang, taking his brother's place as a violent leader, fomenting a spate of turf wars that involve machetes, Stanley knives, screwdrivers and, well, anything that comes to hand.

Promoting the film, Mullan has stressed that his own gang experience was never so grim ("I was a tourist," he says), but the cast of Neds, auditioned by his brother Lenny, was put together with the intent of creating something much more visceral and true to the times.

"When we were casting," Lenny says later, "Peter and I insisted on one thing: that every face you see on screen will look real." No drama schools were visited, no agents called, and, today, some of the fruits of the Mullans' search are slowly assembling in front of me. As well as Wallace and McCarron, there's Gregg Forrest, who plays the latter's younger self; Joe Szula, who plays McGill's wayward older brother; and Joe's sister Stef, who plays one of the gang's molls. They are all far removed from the usual aspiring actors; their attire alone gives a clue. Four days before Christmas, in the middle of the worst Glaswegian snowfall on record, Stef's dressed for an autumn afternoon, while Gregg turns up in a black Adidas tracksuit and plimsolls.

Asked how they got the part, the kids reply, variously. "I just went for it by chance." (Wallace); "I wasnae that bothered." (Joe Struz); "My mum seen it the paper." (Forrest). It takes a while for them to settle: Joe and Conor even disappear for several minutes and return without a word (in fact, a lot about Conor's demeanour is explained when, two weeks later, it's revealed that his father is John McCarron, the Glaswegian pub landlord recently sentenced to 18 years in jail for the murder of a punter, something Conor has not yet raised in interviews). But when Lenny arrives, they snap to attention. An actor himself, Lenny prefers community theatre to his younger brother's world, and it's clear the kids adore him. He doesn't patronise them, speaks to them as equals, and only once – during the shoot – did he seem at all parental.

Lenny has been a vital part of all Mullan's films, screentesting 1,500 actresses for The Magdalene Sisters alone. For Neds, the watchword was authenticity; like social realist directors Shane Meadows and Andrea Arnold – or more pertinently Ken Loach, who gave Peter his breakthrough role in 1998's My Name Is Joe – the Mullans wanted to find the actor first and the character second. "Obviously, I get final say," says Peter, "but Lenny does the groundwork, where he tries to find …" he searches for a word … "truth, if you like. We were trying to find people who, when you point a camera at them, for whatever reasons, they'll feel comfortable in their own skin, forget about the fucking camera and just be in the scene. Which is harder than you think."

To do this, the Mullans never use scripts at the casting stage. For the guys, the auditions for Neds consisted of improvisations based on a single line: "I'll kill you." Joe explains the process: "The first audition I did, I went in and there was a guy sitting in a chair, being very intimidating to me. Lenny said to me, 'Put yourself in the scenario where he's being cheeky to you in the street. Just give him some verbal abuse.' And this guy was coming out with all sorts of stuff. So I started shouting back, arguing. And Lenny said, 'Right, that's quality. That's what I'm after."

"I remember my audition," muses Conor, darkly. "Man, I saw white. I saw white."

"The key to the audition," explains Lenny, "was that you had to think the part. We had hundreds of boys come in and do it. The whole brief was to wind you up, push every button. Cos you're all different." He looks at Wallace: "Like, 'Hey, specky!'"

Wallace laughs. "Aye! Pushed my button."

"What we wanted was a silent anger", continues Lenny. "And so many people got it wrong. They were yelling, 'Die ya fucking bastard!' I said to everybody, 'Don't do that. We want quiet anger.'" Once 20 suitable guys were found, Lenny took their Polaroids to his brother, who shuffled them every night until he found the right faces for the parts. "What we did with the guys," says Lenny, "was we put them in a Fight Club. And that was to show us that they were committed to turning up, they knew time-keeping, all the basics of being employed."

But the purpose of Fight Club was also to weed out the actors from the real-life psychos. "Aye," says Lenny. "There was a line. And that was one of the many functions of Fight Club. Because people just didnae turn up. And they lost out."

However, some still got through the net, including a promising performer – Lenny prefers not to name names – whose part had to be reduced. "He was a good actor but we had to pull him back. He had a drink problem. He went to hospital and stabbed a nurse. All the stuff judges hate! And they postponed his going to jail cos he was in Neds. You can see the headline, can't you? 'NED IS A NED!'" As for that term, there is dispute as to what a Ned is. "Some people say it comes from teddy boys, cos the first time you come across the phrase is in the 50s," says Lenny, comparing the look to Showaddywaddy, which thoroughly confuses the kids. "Others say it's a military acronym, Non-Educated Delinquents, which is the one Peter went for."

Inevitably, the film will come in for accusations that it paints Glasgow in a bad light, but Conor argues that it's the film's job to merely tell the truth. "If Peter wanted to show the good side of Glasgow, he would have showed it. And it would have been true. But he shows you the gritty stuff. It does happen in Glasgow – it happens all over the world – but it is quite dark and gritty in Glasgow. Showing the truth – what's wrang wi' doin' that?"

The result is one the freshest British films of recent times, rich in character, stripped of pretension and very, very believable, even to the cast. "For me," says Stef, "cos I'm his sister, watching Joe in the movie was incredible. It's just him! I never seen him act, and …" She turns to him. "It's just you, onscreen. Not that his life's like that, but it was just so natural."

There's a very real chance some of the cast might one day return to the screen, but it seems they're not quite willing to follow the dream just yet. "I don't think I've got the drive yet to just quit what I'm doing," says Stef, "cos I want to be a teacher. And I know not a lot of people make it [in films], so I need something quite steady." Conor is at college studying thermal insulation, while Joe is looking into dry-stone walling, Christopher is keeping his options open, and Gregg wants to work with his uncle, selling vans. "I'd like to keep doing this, though," he says, on the rare occasion that he speaks. "My mum thinks I should go to theatre school. But it's only pansies that go there, man."

"Pansies, aye," notes Joe dryly. "And girls."

"No, I couldnae take that risk," decides Stef, pulling the conversation back on track. "No way. I don't think a lot of people can take that risk either, if you've got a house to pay for."

"So what you do is you find a job to fall back on," argues Christopher, "but then you get an acting opportunity and you want the time off work – and you cannae get the time off work …"

"It's complicated, wee man, but there's ways of doing it," says Lenny. He sighs, mock-exasperated, and rolls his eyes. "Actors …"