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Vice Blog

BRITAIN'S TWO BEST FILMMAKERS HAVE BROKEN UP

Screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto are practically their own brand. Masters of dialogue, their first film was supposed to be

Gangster No 1

, adapted from their own stage play, but creative differences with the producers prompted the pair to jump ship. Instead, along with director Jonathan Glazer, they made the outstanding

Sexy Beast

, which showed how great British films could be, and elevated swearing to an art-form. Today, a decade later, Mellis and Scinto's follow-up is finally here.

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44 Inch Chest

, which they initially wrote as a play, is one of the oddest films about love you'll see, as a bunch of shady men get together in a horrid East London bolthole with the intention of doing nasty things to a guy who slept with the wrong woman. Ray Winstone is excellent as wronged man Colin Diamond, while John Hurt's potty-mouthed performance as Old Man Peanut is an instant classic. Unfortunately Mellis and Scinto's working relationship died a few years back, and they're now working separately on their own projects. I'm still in denial, and after speaking to them both this morning, have spliced their interviews together. Sue me; I'm a romantic.

VICE:

How did you go about adapting 44 Inch Chest from a play to a film? Louis:

We wanted to open it out, but the moment we started doing that, it lost its intensity.

David:

The more we came out of that room, the more we diffused the tension. It was like taking the lid off of a pressure cooker, we started to lose the heat.

44 Inch Chest

needs to be tight, it needs to be claustrophobic, we need to be with Colin's plight. It's a study, not a story. It's a mature film about an immature man.

Louis:

It was originally written about the stupidity of men, and the dying breed of those sort of guys, especially John Hurt's character.

Is that why he's a bit of a joke in the film? He's a dinosaur. Louis:

Yeah. He's the last of a stupid old breed. Dying out, thank god. He's the last vestiges of that Dickensian character you used to see more of.

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David:

When we were writing it we were talking about Wilfrid Brambell, that Steptoe kind of character. Mixing that with something outrageous was… we described him as Old Testament. There was no mercy in him.

Is that why his character's homophobic as well?

David:

Homophobia is a legacy that this country is still shaking off. We think of Alan Turin, the guy who broke the Enigma code, he was persecuted for being a homosexual after. The man who saved this fucking country! Persecuted for being a homosexual to the point of committing suicide. We still have it, we have it with racism too. A few years back I saw a version of

The Dam Busters

, and they'd dubbed it so the dog was called Boy instead of Nigger.

Peter Jackson's doing a remake, and I think they're debating whether they should keep that in there or not.

David:

That's what the dog's name was! You cannot airbrush history. It would be different calling a dog Nigger now. I'm not saying I like hearing it, of course not. But we cannot pretend that we were not racist. No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish. We cannot pretend that it was not with us. We can only seek to improve our society now.

The whole of 44 Inch Chest is like a 1960s timewarp.

Louis:

Yeah. It's definitely last century. That's why we put it in that non-specific dump. There are so many layers of wallpaper on that wall, generations have lived in that house. It was always about something dying.

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David:

Gangsters are different now, they're gone. The ones that cared about their ties and their cufflinks and their cars and their birds, they're gone. It's credit-card Mafioso now, banksters. We're in a different era.

The twisted sense of morality that gangsters have comes across a bit more in this film. Was that something you wanted to have a dig at?

Louis:

Yeah. Some people get locked into unthinking behaviour and it becomes kind of ridiculous, the way they behave is farcical.

David:

They do exist, and it's a decaying society. I'm in Stratford at the moment and it's in my face. I'm in the old place I grew up in and I'm watching a new place spring up for the Olympics. A new world is springing up. When I lived here it was a dead town. My excitement was that I got involved in punk. Music was my escapism. I consider myself fortunate, because my time was the 70s, and in the 70s you had everything. Disco, glam rock, punk, it was a mixed bag. A great era. Now it's all

Big Brother

, it's all intimidating. In the stations you've got cameras in your face, a prefect on the stairs. We may as well be in fucking school, it's a different world. We wrote this film ten years ago, and I'm glad it's here now, because for me, I'm looking at a museum piece. That's gone. Those characters have gone. All those characters that used to mill around Soho, all the artists, writers, prostitutes, pimps, it was a completely different vibe. Grime and crime. But now we live in Tony Blair's sanitized Britain. And having it a little bit dirty can be good for you. If you clean your surfaces too much, your immune system can't support you when you fall ill.

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And the same thing happened with Giuliani's New York.

David:

Yeah. I was lucky, I lived in New York from 1988-90, I just caught the end of it, and it was a time and a half.

So, you wrote this as long as 10 years ago? Louis:

We wrote it even before

Sexy Beast

, after we wrote the stage play of

Gangster No 1

. We always intended the three to be companion pieces. Then we had all the fuck ups with

Gangster No 1

, and me, David and Jonathan left that and went straight into

Sexy Beast

. But in the meantime we'd written

44 Inch Chest

for the stage. We turned it into a film around 2000.

Jonathan Glazer said at the time of Sexy Beast that you three decided to collaborate because you had similar sensibilities about film and about what was missing today.

Louis:

Yeah. The state of what British films are compared to what they used to be with the likes of Michael Powell, Nic Roeg, even Hitchcock. At the time there were a lot of light British films which were OK, but sort of uncinematic, we felt. Naming no names.

Then Sexy Beast grew and grew in popularity, despite not being a big hit when it was released here.

Louis:

Well that was weird, because it was really America that saved our arses.

It got shorter shrift than it deserved here because it came at the tail-end of some other inferior gangster films.

Louis:

Yeah. When we originally wrote

Gangster No 1

there hadn't been any British gangster films for a long time. Then suddenly there was a slew of them. Although

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44 Inch Chest

was never intended to be a gangster film.

Gangster-ish sort of characters though. Louis:

Well kind of, but they're non-specific. Ray's character is a garage owner. It was intended to be much more surreal. I don't see it as a gangster film.

David:

I don't call any of our films gangster films; they're psychological stories set against a gangster backdrop.

Well primarily 44 Inch Chest is a film about love. Was that the starting point? Louis:

Yeah, it was always that kangaroo court set-up, and his journey. People always say how they would behave in these situations, but they never do it that way--they end up as crumbling wrecks, like him. His character was always pathetic.

David:

You can laugh at it, and you can cry sometimes, because when you stop and think about it, Liz actually did trash 21 years that they had together. Where do you go from that point?

He says in the film he loved his wife too much. Louis:

Yeah. That soppiness that men can have, compared to the--well it's a huge generalisation, but women can be more pragmatic. And men can wallow and crack up like that, and bore you stupid. Part of the joke is that all his so-called friends are just bored with this idiot in the corner and having to support him. The wonder is that she hadn't left him before. And she's only had a fling, not a huge love affair. So it was all those kind of things.

David:

Some people are really getting the film, and some people are really two-dimensional about it. Some people are saying "It sounds like the person who wrote this is having an affair and is defending themselves." It's quite polemic, the critics' debate is interesting. I'm really looking forward to the people deciding for themselves when they go to see the film. Somebody did refer to the amount of violence issued on [Colin's wife] Liz as opposed to the lack of it with Loverboy [her new boyfriend]. The thing is, it was important to show the sudden shocking violence that happened to Liz because that was the moment that Colin lost everything--he lost his mind, he lost his wife, he lost his home, he lost everything in that stupid moment of violence. Violence is human, I'm afraid. it's pathetic, and it's tragic, and that's kind of what we are. We are all those things.

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So now these three pieces are done and out there, are you done with this sort of world now? Louis:

Yeah. It just so happened that those were the first three things we wrote. It was chance. I don't wanna go near that area again. That's done.

Sexy Beast and 44 Inch Chest obviously share a very similar rhythmic style of dialogue. Will that carry across to different genres?

Louis:

No, other stuff I do now is completely different. I think that worked because we were working together and a lot of it came out of improvisation, mucking around. The pieces grew from that. We'd act out the films in a room and then write down what we remembered. It works for that kind of piece, but you can't do that in more structure-led films.

How are you finding writing on your own after years of collaboration? Louis:

It's a completely different process, a completely different headspace. You've only got yourself to bounce off, which changes the whole dynamic of what you're doing. But we'd had a long time stuck in a room together--ten years--and it doesn't sustain, it's too hard.

David:

Our fallout was inevitable. If it's not going to the place you hope it's going to go to, it's going to explode or implode.

Do you think writing together is unhealthy?

Louis:

I think it's very unhealthy, I think writing's very unhealthy

.

Why?

Louis:

Because you spend so much time in your head, the minute you come out of that to be a normal social human being, it's very difficult.

ALEX GODFREY