Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee at Broadway

Broadway hosted a massive, sell-out fun event on Sunday evening 4th October with the first public screening of Shane Meadows’ new film Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee, before it goes on full release next weekend.

The city’s favourite director was there with pretty much the whole cast and crew including Paddy Considine (Le Donk), Nottingham rapper Scorzayzee (Scor-Zay-Zee), Nottingham film-maker Richard Graham (who edited the film and had his first starring role as Le Donk’s ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend) and Meadows’ long-time producer Mark Herbert from Warp Films.   

As Shane explained, the project was floated years ago with no thought of it becoming a film, let alone a cinema release.  “Paddy’s been acting this part since we were at college”: they became best friends at Burton College but left to pursue a rock & roll dream.  The character of Le Donk was based on ‘arsebags’ they kept meeting who promised recording contracts and glory.  They tried to write a script about it a few times but wondered if it might just be too much of an in-joke to work.

After the triumph of This Is England, Shane felt he needed to take a break from examining the darker recesses of his 1980s childhood.  The opportunity to direct Somers Town for Shane's other long-term writing partner Paul Fraser intervened unexpectedly.  Then he and Paddy returned to their music project and decided to have a bit of fun, thinking it might possibly turn into a short TV film.  The immense reception it received at Edinburgh this summer made them realise they had a potential smash hit on their hands, but they decided with Mark Herbert to by-pass the usual distribution channels and release the film themselves.

It’s already the stuff of legend that the film took just 5 days to make.  Shane’s film career goes back to short semi-improvised films that he made through Intermedia in Nottingham in the mid-1990s, starting with Where’s The Money Ronnie? and first drawing wider attention with Small Time. He and Paddy are clear that Small Time is the ultimate inspiration for Le Donk which Shane sees as the launch-pad for a new Dogme-style manifesto – 5 day films for all!

Paddy Considine is modest about his role: “Shane made the rules, I’m only an actor because Shane saw I had it in me and I only thought I could do it after I saw Small Time. Shane’s a kind of older brother figure for me, always has been.  The purest thing for me was working on Romeo Brass [A Room For Romeo Brass, Meadows’ second feature].  I fell out of love with acting again for a while, but I always seem to be at my most crazy and brave when I’m working with Shane.”

Through Mark Herbert, they’d had an invite to go backstage at an Arctic Monkeys gig at Old Trafford and decided just to turn up and see what happened.  Another film-maker (Mark Davenport) introduced them to local rapper Scorzayzee (Dean Palinczuk) and because they had no better plan they decided to take him along and see if they could get him on stage. 

The genuinely improvised style is what makes the film so powerful and hilarious.  In lesser hands, it could have become a very self-indulgent in-joke kind of project, but a mixture of Shane Meadows’ control, Scorzayzee’s naive but very talented likeableness and Paddy Considine’s astonishing acting make it a top-class film by any standards.  It’s been compared with This Is Spinal Tap, but as a sustained piece of work it probably surpasses it. This is great film-makers at the top of their acts.

Mark Herbert is serious that they are looking to help other film-makers who want to make 5-day films on the same terms as theirs.  They are not offering a blank cheque to every budding film-maker to escape his or her bedroom studio.  But they do want to nurture a new mode of film practice and there is no group of people better placed to achieve this than Shane Meadows, Mark Herbert and Paddy Considine. 

Shane himself is keen to make a film like this every year as well as to create a mini-studio to carry other talent: with a fund of, say, £1 million he thinks at least twenty ‘5-day films’ could be made.  As Mark Herbert says “the more money you get, the more idiots you have to deal with”, so by paring it down and financing it out of their own funds, the only idiots they have to satisfy are themselves.

Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee (Cert 15) is a hilarious and exhilarating film.  It will be showing at Broadway from Friday 9th October for two weeks.  For more details go to www.broadway.org.uk