GFF 2012: Hunky Dory interview: Marc Evans and Jon Finn

Today’s cinema is obsessed with the past. In the last twelve months filmgoers have been transported back to 20s Paris, the golden age of Hollywood, and 60s civil rights-era Mississippi – and that’s just the Best Picture Oscar nominees. But even if you’re feeling fatigued by this wave of nostalgia I'd urge you to seek out Hunky Dory (the title pretty much reviews itself), a high-school movie set in a South Wales suburb during the sun-bleached summer of '76.

“The original conversation was, 'why is it that [British filmmakers] don’t make that kind of school film which is uplifting?', but, you know, not in a cheesy way” says the film's director, Marc Evans, in a thick Cardiff accent that betrays the autobiographical nature of this humane coming-of-age musical. “Americans just seem to celebrate that youth culture so brilliantly,” adds Hunky Dory’s producer Jon Finn.

The kind of films Finn and Evans are talking about are Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s hip love letter to his 70s school years, and George Lucas’s cinematic poem to early-60s teen motor heads, American Graffiti. “Those were two big influences,” says Evans. “American Graffiti, in the sense of the ending that we stole [Hunky Dory closes with the same “where are they now” coda]. And with Dazed and Confused you go, ‘why don’t we make that in Britain? Our music’s just as good.’”

By taking the music of their youth – ELO, Pink Floyd, and Bowie, whose 1971 album gives the film its title – and incorporating it into a story of a hippie-ish teacher (Viv, played by Minnie Driver) who mounts a musical production of The Tempest with her sixth form drama class, Evans' film has drawn extremely misleading comparisons to US TV phenomenon Glee. The use of Bowie et al. is respectful and inventive, and the young cast of unknowns sing in a refreshingly straightforward manner that’s the antithesis to Glee’s melismatic strangling of asinine pop ballads. “Every bit of music you hear, and every bit of song, we didn’t fuck with it at all,” says Finn.

Driver impresses as Viv, an easy-going lefty whose biggest struggle is finding appropriate teacher/pupil boundaries with her ne'er-do-wells students, and from the way Finn tells it, it sounds like she went method. “You’d be on the set and you’d fucking hear this racket coming from the back and you go ‘look, man, this isn't a youth club...’, you’d be in the middle of this rant and you’d realise Minnie was right at the centre of it all, and you’d be like, ‘right Driver, get back to your trailer.’”

Watching the film is as much fun as this anecdote suggests the cast were having, but there’s barbed wire wrapped within the candy floss. As well as exploring the emotional open wound that is adolescence, Evans' film also has a strong sense of the period’s social history. “If I’m honest, we started looking at that time because of the music, but if you start looking at '76 socially, you could make a case for it being an end of an era," says Evans. The inclusions of a pre-leader of the Tory party Margaret Thatcher giving her famous "sweeping away of Socialism" speech on a background TV set certainly sets this tone. "Thatcher was round the corner, punk was coming, Elvis dies in '77, and so suddenly you have a sense of where it’s placed, and the Thatcher clip was something that we really wanted to put in there because there’s something very effecting [about it], and very much in the general melancholic mood of the film. These kids didn’t know what was coming.”