Peter Mullan is already well known as one of Britain’s most intense screen actors. But with Neds he cements his reputation as a director whose commitment to emotional truth transcends social realism.
Peter Mullan recalls reading a newspaper report about the murder of an eight-year-old boy in Edinburgh: “This boy and his friend had watched a fight in the street involving two older boys. They knew nothing about it. After the fight, the victor chased after these two kids, just because they had been cheering for the other lad. And when he caught up with them, he beat one of them to death with a brick.”
One might imagine that this is a story out of today’s newspapers, at a time when street gangs and rising knife crime are a major concern (one recent report suggested that as many as 50,000 British teenagers are involved in gangs). In fact it was a cutting – presumably a yellowed one – from 1893. “When I read it I was really shocked, because the story was so familiar,” says Mullan. “But this act of seemingly random violence, where a child lost his life, was well over a hundred years ago.
“So for me, today, you can’t just blame society,” he continues. “This problem is a massive, complex cocktail that stretches back to the beginnings of time. In England and Scotland you can date it to the industrial revolution, when you start seeing groups of young lads creating these weird territorial divides, only defined amongst themselves, with no particular financial gain to be had. It’s about disaffected youth, having fuck all to do, not knowing who you are. It’s aligning yourself with your peers – and you can only do that if you have another set of peers to align yourself against. You find your little grouping and you go, ‘OK, what are we going to do? We’ll take on that group, and that group. Let battle commence.’”
Insights such as this inform Neds, the Glaswegian’s third feature as a director, steering the story of a 15-year-old’s destructive dabbling with a gang of ‘Non-Educated Delinquents’ away from the stale sub-genre of contemporary British films about teen violence and hooliganism – which are so often little more than exploitation dressed as ‘rites of passage’ – towards something more thoughtful and resonant.
Set in the early 1970s, it follows the fortunes of John McGill, an intelligent working-class boy who looks set to transcend his impoverished background and escape the violent tendencies of both his father and elder brother. But his community doesn’t make it easy: at school he’s demoted to an inferior stream, merely because of his brother’s reputation; later, during a fateful summer break, his crass, class-informed rejection by the mother of a well-to-do friend propels John into the welcoming bosom of a local gang, the Young Car-Ds. Before long, the mild-mannered newcomer has become the gang’s resident monster
Initially Mullan intended to look at the issues involved in gang culture. “I wanted to look at the nature of tribalism, education, the role of family, the church,” he explains. “But as I was writing, I realised it was less about issues and more experiential. This is about adolescence. This isn’t about gang, tribe, family, church – they’re there, but it’s really about the travails of youth and what happens between prepubescent and post-pubescent worlds.
“Of course, it would have to be set in an area of industrial decline,” he continues, “but bringing no great mention of that industrial decline. I made a conscious effort to not look into these people’s work lives, the employment issues of the time, the political culture. To really evoke adolescence, you have to be true to it, and when you’re in the middle of that experience you don’t give a monkey’s fuck what’s happening in the rest of the world. You care about your haircut, about how you’re dressed, about who you’re meeting tonight, if you’re going to get off with somebody. It’s purely hedonistic and narcissistic. I didn’t want to be a middle-aged man forcing my view of the world upon this group of kids.”
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