Gavin Scott Whitfield interview

It’s late September 2015 and The Skinny is on the blower to Liverpudlian filmmaker Gavin Scott Whitfield to discuss his upcoming retrospective at HOME in Manchester. If you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t remember any such retrospective at HOME last year,” that’s because it never happened. “Haven’t you heard the news?” said Whitfield back in September. “The screening is off.” Postponed, rather, by request of the Crown Prosecution Service. The reason being that Whitfield’s latest short, Murderous Injustice, which would have been making its world premiere, deals with a very sensitive real-life crime, the trial for which was still ongoing.

Murderous Injustice's inspiration was the brutal murder of Bijan Ebrahimi, an Iranian refugee living on a Bristol council estate, by neighbour Lee James, who, on a warm summer’s evening, beat Ebrahimi unconscious, dragged him from his home and set him on fire. The reason for James’ actions: he was stirred up by a cocktail of alcohol, racial prejudice and false accusations that Ebrahimi was a paedophile. (From his front room Ebrahimi had been taking videos of neighbourhood kids, but there was nothing salacious in his intentions: he suspected they had been repeatedly vandalising his garden and the video was evidence to give to the authorities.)

James pleaded guilty to the crime and was jailed for life in 2013, but the question of any negligence on the part of the local polices was still to be answered. “A criminal trial of a number of serving police officers was about to get underway and [the CPS] thought the film might unfairly prejudice the trial if it was shown at that time,” Whitfield explains during our rescheduled interview. “Out of respect for the trial and the family we held the film back.” That trial has now finished – a police officer and PCSO were found guilty of misconduct – and the premiere will go ahead at HOME on 18 March.

Shooting Murderous Injustice

The film may be rooted in truth but it’s no simple docudrama reenactment. The names are changed (the vigilante in Murderous Injustice is named H; the victim goes unnamed) and the events truncated. This aspect cannot be missed, as the incident escalates in real-time over ten intense minutes, filmed in a thrilling single take that Emmanuel Lubezki would be proud of (the cinematographer here is Ewan Mulligan). For Whitfield, the virtuosic technique is integral to the gut-wrenching storytelling. “Here we are, a moment in time when something changes forever in a community by the awful actions of a popular, socially accepted man,” the filmmaker explains. “The immediacy of a single shot, that you can’t look away as a viewer, and that we are in it until its final, tragic denouement, was entirely conscious and perhaps the only way to tell this story with the truth I think it warrants.”

Perhaps most crucially, the setting isn’t specific. As the camera swoops in, at the film’s opening, on the heels of a young scally bringing a six-pack of lager to two young men perched on a patch of grass in a lively crescent, surrounded by the laughter of kids at play, this could be any street in the UK. It’s this universal quality that gives the film its power, Whitfield suggests. “That is the point of Murderous Injustice, its warning to us; this could have happened anywhere with these conditions, with the same prevalent underlying social tensions.”

“Nigel Farage’s simple-minded but seductive narrative has created a very toxic atmosphere in this country at the moment” – Gavin Scott Whitfield

These tensions don’t come out of nowhere, and their source becomes explicit in the film when we hear a familiar voice wafting through the air from a TV or radio at several points in the scene. That voice is Nigel Farage’s. “Farage claims to speak for the ordinary bloke in the street, promoting this bogus self-interest of our country by pulling up the drawbridge to Europe, thereby blocking out all those legions of ‘feckless, workshy undesirables’ (mostly East-Europeans but now any refugee, really) who want to get here," Whitfield says. "His simple-minded but seductive narrative has created a very toxic atmosphere in this country at the moment.”

Whitfield is quick to point out this doesn't negate James’ culpability. “I’m not for a moment suggesting there is a logical step-by-step relationship between what Farage says and what this man did, but it is undeniably there around us – distrust and fear of the outsider, of those not like us. I don’t think it is any great feat of my imagination to suggest that what we’re witnessing around us, sprung from this commonly accepted perception, is a rise in hate crimes, particularly towards those from ethnic minority and religious backgrounds.”

Murderous Injustice headlines a showcase of four of Whitfield's shorts, called Voices from the Margins: Four Films about Contemporary Britain. It’s an apt title: these are films concerned with everyday people and the social and institutional pressures they face. Jason Wood, director of film at HOME, has been one of the writer-director's long-time champions: “I have known Gavin for over 20 years and he has always been passionate about cinema and a talented and committed writer,” Wood told us by email, comparing Whitfield’s writing to that of Jim Allen, the subject of a recent major retrospective at HOME. “Gavin started making films that looked at Britain’s underbelly and its outsiders and misfits, and he did it in a spirit of complete independence. This is in itself admirable.”

Whitfield grew up in Liverpool through a particularly tough time for the city. “I witnessed first-hand the economic decline, social deprivation and high unemployment caused by a heartless Thatcher government unprepared to invest in a place she considered politically hostile to her – the whole shooting match.”

---

 Pablo Larraín on The Club

 Ben Wheatley on High-Rise

---

From here, Whitfield's path towards filmmaking was not straightforward. He was almost a professional footballer, but turned to education when he sustained a major knee injury, studying philosophy in London. After graduation he spent years unemployed, although in retrospect he reckons this was beneficial in the long run. “I was pretty much left alone on a bare subsistence from the state (unheard of now!) to read voraciously all I believed were the essential and foundational texts for a creative life,” he recalls. “That was when the thought of becoming a writer started in me. That was when I knew I would have to turn what imagination and experiences I possessed into some form of artistic expression.”

He plugged away at his craft, writing unpublished stories and unstaged plays, but eventually found an outlet as an investigative reporter. “That was the beginning in a lot of ways of drawing on my own direct experiences to inform my writing,” he says. His first short film, Paraffin, directed by local Liverpool filmmaker Laurence Easeman in 2007, drew directly from this daily life as a journalist. The next short was 2008's The Last Regal King Size, directed by Simon Hipkins. It's a lyrical portrait of an impoverished urban childhood set over a day in Glasgow, with an Orange march as the backdrop. It won a BAFTA. “At that point I started to believe rather naïvely that screenwriting could offer me more hope as a potential career than any other form of writing I had practiced until then.”

“These films deserve to be seen and I think shine a light on a Britain often ignored by British directors” – Jason Wood

Getting films made didn’t get any easier, though. “I wrote a number of feature scripts, as yet unfilmed, and began the grinding, relentless, miserable at times, joyful at others, journey I am still on today,” he tells us. “But during that journey I knew that I would have to turn to directing at some point if I was to get anywhere in this industry on my own terms. This is what I did, funding the films with my own money. This is where I am at this moment in time, struggling still, but struggling on my own terms, for whatever that’s worth.”

The product of this struggle makes up HOME’s retrospective. The other films in the showcase are that BAFTA-winning short, The Last Regal King Size; The Slain, a haunting portrait of five army marines who died in conflicts abroad and find themselves washed up on a British beach trying to get home; and Thomas Hartley, a surreal hybrid of documentary and fiction about a man living on the breadline.

“These films deserve to be seen and I think shine a light on a Britain often ignored by British directors,” says Wood, who’s most vociferous when it comes to Whitfield's latest work: “Murderous Injustice speaks very eloquently of the class and race divide in contemporary Britain. It is also a technical tour de force, unfolding in a single take. I don’t understand why Gavin’s work has been so difficult to see, but I’m delighted that HOME can do something to address that and to give a platform to a Northwest-based talent.”