* This article appeared in The Guardian, 4/2/2011
The Sundance film festival has long been a platform for independent American cinema, launching the careers of directors as diverse as Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky and the Coen brothers. Lately, though, things have been changing. As the event pays more and more attention to European film, the British have begun to infiltrate the brunches and gifting suites that spring up every year in Park City, Utah. In 2008 it was James Marsh with his vertiginous doc Man on Wire, in 2009 it was Duncan Jones with his philosophical sci-fi parable Moon, and last year Chris Morris became an unlikely Sundance hero with his biting jihadist comedy Four Lions.
This year the honour fell to Paddy Considine, for his dark, blue-collar drama Tyrannosaur. Though the film features serious brutality – notably (unseen) violence against animals – which often raises the temperature in the US, the actor's self-penned debut as a features director went down a storm with audiences and jury alike, winning a prize for its two leads and a directing award for Considine.
With no premiere party to go to, Considine celebrated the success with his stars Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman over a quick drink at Flanagan's bar, a few doors down the road. Despite having paid a $20 door charge for the privilege, Considine didn't stick around, spending most of the time with Sundance honouree James Marsh, who directed him in C4's Red Riding and was one of the first to see both the script and a rough cut of Tyrannosaur. He didn't look elated, just relieved.
"To be honest with you, I was the most nervous I've been before anything in my life, I think, before that screening on the Friday," says Considine now, at home in Derby. "And it wasn't because of the content of the film. I just think that when you've written something, and it's so personal … " He catches himself. "Well, y'know, it's not autobiographical, but it's still very personal. And I think that's where my fear came from, really. You're putting yourself on the line a little bit, and I think the gravity of the whole occasion got to me before the screening. I knew I was incredibly proud of it, but there was definitely that fear that you get: it's going out into the world now, and people are going to get a hold of your baby."
Considine had proved himself with his 2007 Bafta-winning short Dog Altogether, which starred Mullan as Joseph, a violent, widowed, unemployed self-hating drunk who meets a middle-class housewife (Colman) in a charity shop. Tyrannosaur was partly a response to those who wanted to know more about the pair than that film's 16 minutes would allow. Some of those people might wish they had never asked: Colman's outwardly perky, happy Hannah turns out to be a battered wife, whose alcoholic husband James (Eddie Marsan) beats and humiliates her in scenes of unflinching abuse. "In that sense," says Considine, "it's a film about how we make judgments about people before we know anything of their history. Before we know about them, we make judgments."
As you might expect from a director better known as an actor, Tyrannosaur is strong on performances. But it's also beautifully crafted, eschewing the gritty handheld style that has come to dominate British cinema for something more stately and formal. Considine says: "I kept saying to the crew, 'We're not making a little British film, we're making cinema.' I didn't want to go round apologising for it. Like, 'Here's our small film, everybody, thanks for paying attention.' I didn't want that handheld, swinging-it-around style of film-making. It's a shortcut, that documentary look. I just got bored of it, like you get bored of a record. I said, 'I want the frame to respect these characters.' Cos to me they're heroes."
Directing, he says, came more naturally than you might think. When he came out of college in Burton-on-Trent in the early 90s, Considine was making short films of his own, and then when his friend and sometime collaborator Shane Meadows ("We're not joined at the hip") offered him a role in his 1999 film A Room for Romeo Brass, he took it. "So I went into being an actor," he says. "Or trying to be an actor. But I always felt very uncomfortable with it." He sighs. "I found it hard being a player in somebody else's game, if you like. I always felt I should be orchestrating more than participating in someone else's vision. I think I got away with it a few times, but, overall, I always felt I was a bit of tourist when it came to acting. I always felt it was leading to this." Even after all the acclaim for his performances in The Bourne Ultimatum, In America and Dead Man's Shoes? Apparently so. "I just never felt a part of anything as an actor," he says. "I don't watch things back that I've done as an actor. I put it this way: in football, the best managers aren't necessarily the best players."
The script, he says, was written in just over a week, in three-hour spurts. "I wouldn't sit there for hours on end," he says. "I think if you just switch off, the things that are brewing inside you will just come out." Such as? "Look, it's everything coming out. These are things that you digest in everyday situations. I don't wanna shock people, I don't wanna be sensationalist. I just wanna say, 'Look, these circumstances are very real for people.' I know Tyrannosaur condenses it into 90 minutes, but these things happen. There are men like Joseph out there, there are women like Hannah – and if you deny it's happening, then that's even more violent, I think."
But though he repeatedly says the film is personal – and has even dedicated it to his late mother – Considine is tight-lipped about these people and the specificity of such circumstances. "Y'know," he says firmly, "I'm not about to launch into where it all comes from, because I'm very aware now that if I say that, all of a sudden it becomes a film about 'somebody'. And it's not. It's fiction. It's me making sense of a lot of things in my life: my own demons, my own relationships with human beings, my relationship with God, my mother, my father. All of those things are in there. But I won't be specific about it. If I start getting specific, then that's what the film becomes. It becomes about my life. And it's not. I'll just say this: I'm not a tourist here. I grew up in the world Joseph inhabits."
And in that sense, he says, it's a film he's still trying to come to terms with. "What's my dilemma here?" he wonders. "Am I making entertainment or am I making art? What am I saying? At the end of the day, cinema is entertainment for millions of people, but for me it's expression. I'm trying to make sense of lot of things with Tyrannosaur. I'm trying to make sense of people who've left now. They're not here, they can't answer for themselves any more, they're gone. And I'm trying to make peace with those ghosts."
Doe he mean literal ghosts? "People who've passed on, yeah. Like parents, and what have you."
Though he has lost both his parents, Considine speaks effusively about his mother, who inspired an extraordinary scene in Tyrannosaur in which the usually taciturn Joseph describes his disabled ex-wife. "Look, man," says Considine, "my mother was the woman described in the film; she lost her legs through diabetes and she was blind. Y'know, all through my life she had this sort of belief in God, and I thought it was to her detriment. Because ultimately she did sit there at the end of her life, and she was like a carcass, and I thought her faith was a weakness. And I thought her capacity for forgiveness meant she was an easy prey. When in actual fact she was probably one of the most beautiful women I'd ever had the pleasure to know. She was my mum and she gave birth to me. Those words in that film when Joseph's saying, 'I thought she was dumb, but she wasn't. She was beautiful.' That, right there, is definitely the feelings I had for my mum."
But although he describes the process as definitely "cathartic", Considine isn't into the idea of making films simply to unburden himself. His follow-up, The Leaning, he describes simply as a ghost story. Will it be lighter? "I dunno," he laughs. "I don't know what that means! Lighter movie? I can only make the movies I make. It's not gonna be Tyrannosaur, that's done. I'm not going to repeat anything I've done already. But while The Leaning's very much a ghost story, it's about a truth. It's about something, otherwise there'd be no point making it."
So directing is definitely the way forward? It seems so. "Tyrannosaur's an arrival for me, but it's also the first step into a new career," he decides. "I don't want to be moonlighting at this, like I have done with acting." He laughs. "Y'know, I think I've found my career at 37 years old."
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