I didn't want to make something without hope'
The London borough of Hackney has a reputation. It is the home to London's Murder Mile, a stretch of road so-named after a series of fatal shootings in the early 2000s, headlines frequently paint a picture of uncontrolled Jamaican 'Yardie' gangsterism or extreme levels of social deprivation.
But Hackney is home to over 200,000 people and tens of thousands more go there every day to work and play. It stretches from the famous football pitches on the marshes next to the Lea river in the east, to the Nathan Barley country of Hoxton in the west, from Hasidic Jewish communities in the north, down south almost all the way to the City of London, via Turkish and Kurdish strongholds.
Sure, there is gun crime on Hackney's streets: between April 2004 and January of this year there were two attempted murders using guns and 12 non-fatal shootings, but there were no fatalities. In reality, you've still got more chance of being hit by a bus than a bullet in this part of east London.
Much like Hackney, the reputation of the Bullet Boy goes before it. A film about gun crime among black youth filmed in the borough, its star is Ashley Walters, also known as Asher D of south London collective So Solid Crew - an act who are never written about without the obligatory adjective "notorious".
Walters himself was sentenced to 18 months in 2002 for possession of a loaded gun. When Bullet Boy was screened in last year's London film festival, it was the subject of reports suggesting it paints a skewed, sensationalised picture of what is happening in Hackney. But once again the headlines weren't telling the whole story.
The film was sold to its backers at BBC Films as "Kes with guns", says its director and co-writer, 36-year-old documentary maker Saul Dibb. "I wanted to get across to them it's a film about a 12-year-old and innocence and it's a film with guns, but not a City of God-type film." Bullet Boy tells the story of Ricky, a young black man released from youth custody intent on staying straight. Driving home with his trouble-magnet mate Wisdom, they clip a wing mirror. The resulting argument with a couple of youths escalates from the minor to the tragic over the course of the film. So far, so Hackney.
But Bullet Boy is also the story of Ricky's 13-year-old brother Curtis, who lives at home with his mother. Curtis is just emerging from childhood and trying to digest the conflicting influences of his mother and brother. When Ricky returns to the family home with a gun Curtis is drawn by the weapon's weight and glamour. For Dibb, the core of his story is Curtis's conflicts. "What's it a 12 or 13 year old to grow up in a world where guns are a fact of life?" he asks. "And what space is there for a sensitive kid who doesn't want to be macho who finds his older brother has bought a gun into his house, which he's fascinated by?"
His film's exploration of that question provides one of the most promising British directorial debuts of the past year. The film was shot largely within one square mile on the edge of Hackney, taking in the Hackney Marshes, and the Clapton Park and Millfields estates. Local residents were employed as extras, and people's homes used as locations. "It can help how you feel when you're filming, to feel that you're filming in real locations," says Dibb, "in real places where this story could be happening."
That preference for real locations is to be expected in someone who spent over 10 years making documentaries before directing his first feature. His work includes The Tottenham Ayatollah, where he and Jon Ronson shadowed al-Muhajiroun leader Omar Bahkri Mohammed for a year. The son of documentary maker Mike Dibb (who made the Ways of Seeing series with John Berger) he specialises in intimate portraits of lives on the margins.
Recent productions include Electric Avenue, a series of films about people in Brixton and the excellent Junkie Run, about shoplifting drug addicts. The germ of Bullet Boy was seeded in Dibb's mind when he lived in Hackney - its title inspired by a headline in the Hackney Gazette. Although he stresses that the film is not about the specific places it was shot in, Dibb took us around locations used during the shoot at the end of the hot summer of 2003.
The canal, tiny streets and the vast expanse of the Hackney Marshes, are overlooked by a large, pink former council block where, in the film, Ricky's family live on the 13th floor. The dramatic aerial views from the tower block inject a beautiful, romantic view of the area into the film. Footage of Curtis riding his bike across the sunburned football pitches almost presents a bucolic picture of childhood. Yet he is only a couple of hundred yards away from a dead dog floating in the canal, the murder of which is the first turning point of the film's violent plot. The dog too was inspired by real life.
"We saw a dead dog in the canal when we were writing the thing, a bull terrier that had got in and drowned," Dibb says as he is having his picture taken by the water. "There are dogs everywhere here. Dogs and golfers practising their swing." All the people playing characters with dogs were dog owners too. "Clark and Jad had dogs called Tyson and Bronx," says Dibb. Clark Lawson and Jadiel Vitalis play Walters' antagonists in the film. They are two young, black men from the Stonebridge estate in Harlesden, northwest London.
Although Bullet Boy boasts established black acting talent - Walters actually went to the Sylvia Young acting school; his mother is played by Claire Perkins from Secrets & Lies; and her partner by comedian Curtis Walker - half of Bullet Boy's main cast were not professional actors but recruited from the streets of London, boosting its docu-drama credentials. Although the structure of the story was in place, the film's scenes were workshopped by this cast so that the film's tricky London slang could be done convincingly and performances be truthful.
"Having two kids like Clark and Jad, who weren't actors, it meant to the actors we were saying, "You can't come across as fake in their presence,'" says Dibb. His quest for believability also led him to research his characters by interviewing young people from Hackney. Ricky's family was loosely based on a trio of kids he met at the Dalston Youth Project, where the older brother had a reputation and the younger brother wanted to follow in his footsteps.
Other teenagers he met at the youth project had chilling stories to tell: "One girl I talked to, she'd been stabbed, had a gun put to her head when she was 14 or 15, her cousins, who were 12, had been in the high street when someone jumped off a scooter and started shooting and everyone ran away saying, 'Oh, it's like a movie'. There were loads and loads of people who'd had gun experiences along with kids who had actually were actively involved in all of that."
We cross the canal headed for the Clapton Park estate, in the direction of the huge pink former-council block, renamed Landmark Heights for the film. It has a manicured, tropical garden outside its entrance, but anarchy is never really far away. "There was one shot from the 13th floor one hot morning. Ricky's just come home and over the weekend three cars had been nicked," says Dibb. "It's serendipity. We shot the burned out cars and their tracks and some kids mucking about on a potentially stolen scooter. The scene with those kids riding a scooter and falling off, that was real too, not set up."
L, a mother of two teenage girls, lives on the Millfields estate and doesn't want her full name to appear in print). She helped the production to recruit locals as extras, and had her home used as a location. She was also one of a number of residents who saw the film at Hackney's Rio cinema last. "They approached the idea of guns in a responsible way." She says. "I like the bit where the parents went round to see the parents of a little boy that was accidentally shot and you definitely get the feeling that there was still the old school Hackney people there that are like, 'No, I can't believe this is happening.'"
While another scene using gospel singing local residents in a community church might not be unusual in a film about inner city culture, the sight of youngsters ice-skating in a place where Billy Joel's Uptown Girl echoes out of the speakers is. The Lea Valley Ice Centre is on the border of Hackney, just off the Upper Clapton Road, close to the block that was the location for Wisdom's flat. "You'd think if they weren't ice skating, they could be intimidating," says Dibb, watching white boys with close-cropped hair, teenage Muslim girls in headscarves and black girls with braided hair float past us on the ice. "But there's a kind of innocence. For me it was about getting different kinds of associations."
The Hackney tour finished, there is one question left to ask as we sit in a Ukrainian cafe in London fields, the part of Hackney Dibb used to live in. Did he ever question whether he, as a white director, should be making this film?
"Funnily enough, at the same time, the Film Council was funding a film by Amma Asante [A Way of Life] who's a black film-maker, with an all white cast, and we're making Bullet Boy with a white director and a pretty much all-black cast. I think it's quite a healthy thing that those two things are going on at the same time. This is British society, this happens in London, I live in London, I think I've got a right to tell a story that happens in London. From whichever small part of the community of London it comes from, or England, or Britain as a whole, or the world. Why shouldn't you? The film is the judge."
In addition to its quality, the film's best defence against accusations of exploitation will be the positive message in young Curtis's story: that he won't inevitably follow his brother's violent path. "I didn't want to make something without hope," says Dibb. " You can have it really bleak, but I don't really the see the world in that way, and I don't see the world represented in the film in that way.'
You get the feeling the people of Hackney don't see it that way either. Not all of them, anyway.