Nick Love makes irresponsible films – that’s what people say. When he did The Football Factory in 2004, the BBC said that Love had ‘glamourised’ hooliganism, the Guardian that he’d ‘legitimised’ football violence. There were correct ways to make films about depravity – keep it bleak, puerile, disapproving. Love did not agree. After The Football Factory he made The Business, a happy-ender about a drug boss on the Costa del Sol, and following that, Outlaw, which argued that an AK-47 delivered better justice than the Crown Prosecution Service.
Two decades on and this brute of British cinema suddenly finds himself in vogue. Love is receiving praise for the sensitivity of his upcoming film, Animol. He wrote the screenplay and Ashley Walters from Adolescence directed it. In February the film won an award at the Berlinale – the jury approved of its ‘positive message’ – and Peter Bradshaw said it was made with ‘empathy’. Critics usually dislike your films, I say when we meet in a west London bar. Why not Animol? ‘It is deemed to be worthy,’ he says. ‘My other stuff is not.’
Those unworthy films came from experience. Love’s 1980s childhood was spent living on south London council estates with his single mother. He was bullied at school and went through ‘various stuff that had left me very angry, questioning my masculinity’. He started smoking weed, was arrested aged 12 for the first time for smashing up a phone box, and joined a gang, ‘burgling houses and factories and nicking things out of cars and stuff’. Love’s mother was a liberal type who worked at the Citizens Advice Bureau and was a volunteer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She basically left him to it.
‘I will never condone crime, but I fucking loved it, I’m not gonna lie,’ he says. ‘You’re right on the front line in this weird way.’ Love began to see beauty in south London gangsterism – in the working-class culture it came from and the Ferrier and Thamesmead estates in Greenwich where he practised it. ‘It felt very colourful,’ he remembers. ‘Council estates are really exciting places to be when you’re 13. The sense of, like, anything’s possible.’ The costumes and sets in Love’s early films often used Bagpuss pinks and banana yellows to nod to his elated reaction to crime. He was inspired by the saturated style of the Mexican architect Luis Barragan.
The BBC and the Guardian were half-right about Love’s old work. It did legitimise. It did glamourise. But is that bad? Love just spoke about crime and violence in a way that other filmmakers didn’t. Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa (1986), Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth (1997) and Shane Meadows’s This Is England (2006) were commended in different decades for handling lowly subjects in a frowning way. Love’s films were attacked because they said something simpler, more disturbing, truer: wickedness is fun.
By the age of 17, Love was addicted to heroin and speed and all right, OK, the fun stopped there. He was sectioned at the Maudsley mental hospital in Camberwell and locked in a room with a grilled window, a prescription of Librium and the screams of his wrist-slitting neighbours.
‘I remember thinking fucking hell, this is grim,’ says Love. ‘I didn’t feel cut out for it. I could walk the walk and wear the right clobber and nick things and hit people or whatever, but I was scared. I was a little boy in a really grown-up environment.’ When Love was discharged he relapsed – ‘a blow-out’, ‘nearly got nicked’, ‘nearly got killed’, ‘absolute calamity’ – and then he went clean for good. He has been sober for 39 years, and goes to Narcotics Anonymous a few times a week. ‘I’m still capable of blowing my life up,’ he says. ‘It’s been a long time, but it’s still in my fucking DNA.’
Love began making films a few years after the Maudsley, at the same time as other young directors such as Guy Ritchie and Jonathan Glazer. Together they recast the ‘British gangster’ genre. Their plots were absurd: in Glazer’s Sexy Beast, Ray Winstone is haunted by a satanic rabbit wielding an Uzi submachine gun. And their scripts were gratuitous: there are 197 ‘fuck’s in The Business. (In The Italian Job there were zero.)
Britain had changed: ‘Bit different nowadays though innit? Eh?’ says Jamie Foreman’s taxi driver character in The Football Factory. ‘It’s the Pakis coming over in the 1970s, see. Spoilt it. And what you got now, eh? Fucking asylum seekers. Bloody Tony fucking Blair. He’s got to be a poof, ain’t he?’ Love supported Blair once. Today, he likes Kemi Badenoch. ‘I feel I am a Tory,’ he says. ‘I just, you know, I believe in fiscal responsibility.’
The new British gangster films were bad films made well. What came before were good films made poorly. There’s a difference. Love and his lot wanted only to be entertaining. They didn’t grasp for meaning. Love describes his films as ‘bargain basement’, and as films that don’t ‘give a fuck’. ‘One that just says: “We’re going to tell a working-class story about idiots who are fucking their lives up, not even thinking about it, taking a lot of drugs, chinning people, and having a really good fucking time.” You know what I mean? Destroying everything in their wake.’
The first decade of the 2000s was a golden age for these great, vulgar gangster pictures. The Football Factory would eventually become the biggest-selling British indie film on DVD in history, in spite – or probably because – of the hatred from the critics. ‘I like nothing more than putting something out there that is going to really upset the establishment, but yet it’s going to find an audience of kids that are going to discover it, are going to go, “oh my God, you’ve got to see that film. It’s fucking out there.”’
Love’s films said something simpler, more disturbing, truer: wickedness is fun
After making The Firm in 2009, he gave up on the genre – and the genre had started to give up on him. ‘That film died at the box office,’ Love says. ‘I think that felt like a death knell.’ He struggled to get big money behind similar projects, so made a straight police drama, The Sweeney, which did well. He then spent the next decade producing other people’s films and making the Sky television show Bulletproof.
Last year Love made Marching Powder, his first film in a decade and his first with Danny Dyer since The Business. Ritchie was earning zillions in Hollywood. Glazer was doing a Holocaust film for A24. Love was still getting cheques for sales of The Football Factory. Someone was watching it. He sensed his former audience was being ignored.
Marching Powder followed Jack, played by Dyer, a football casual who is trying to get sober. It hit the anarchic themes of Love’s earlier films, but was really about men who need to grow up. ‘Fighting at football. Possession of cocaine. At your age? Don’t you feel the slightest bit embarrassed?’ a judge says to Jack early on. He could have been talking about Love’s audience. Perhaps of Love himself. ‘Jack struggles with irrelevance and the fact that no one fucking wants him around any more,’ Love says. At the box office Marching Powder more than doubled its budget. Love’s now making a sequel, Marching Powder 2: Stoned Island, which will be set on Ibiza.
The Marching Powder films are a late goodbye to this old new genre. Love, I think, knows that times have changed. Animol, his upcoming film, is a gentle portrayal of two young men in prison who have a sexual relationship. ‘It’s certainly not a queer film, but it’s not a straight film,’ he tells me. ‘I have fallen in love with men in my time. You know what I mean? Like when I was young. Older boys, hard boys, criminals. I was always sort of getting crushes on men.’
It is considerate in a way his old films never were. And so, it seems, will be a lot of his new work. As well as Stoned Island, Love is making a film called Missiles with the British Film Institute about him and his mother, and something with Amazon about ‘the post-iPhone generation’. I will be sad if Love stops making his brilliant junk, but he is sanguine. ‘Make a queer love story in jail’, he says, ‘and of course you get a fucking award!’
Animol is out now nationwide.
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