Andrew Ellis, Andrew Shim, Kieran Hardcastle, Joe Gilgun, and Jack O'Connell in This Is England Yves Salmon/Courtesy of IFC First Take

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The film obviously seems to echo some of the troubled times that we live in now. You've used archive footage from the Falklands and of skinhead culture that seems to mirror current unrest in Britain, violent war abroad, as well as the scapegoating of immigrants. How much of this was intentional?
A lot of people have picked up on [the parallel between] Iraq and the Falklands. The politics are part of the backdrop, but I never really go out to be political. For me, it's always about a microcosm. If you get the small details right and you care about one boy, you care about one beating, and you're not going around showing a lot of racial beatings. There is just one act of violence in the film. And I think really, for me, that is the most important thing: that you care for them. And then if people pick up different things, then that's great. People can take their own meaning from it. But I don't believe in being overtly political. [I believe in] telling a personal story with heart. People have found a lot of things that were never deliberate in the film. But obviously then the film [is entitled] This Is England, and not This Was England, because this is England now. And things were happening during filming. There was a racial beating when a boy was killed in Liverpool — a young lad who was killed just because he was black — and he was killed by kids. And so that's why the film is called This Is England: It's still happening now. There are still wars that the public don't believe in. Technology has changed and fashion has changed, but a lot of things are still the same.

What was the genesis for the film? It seems you have this fascination with the notion of bullying in a lot of your films.
I did a thing about the whole bullying element in Dead Man's Shoes, which is [about] a guy who takes revenge on people who bullied his brother. Watching [the DVD documentary on the making of the film], I realized I had not really closed that chapter on that period of my life. For me, it wasn't a racial beating, but it was something that I wanted to see: violence. But I was appalled by violence and probably that's why I became a filmmaker. And for me it was really having to tell the reason why.

The casting process must have been a nightmare for you because the film is autobiographical. How did you settle on Thomas Turgoose?
I think we had seen 200 to 300 kids beforehand. We realized that we had to troll further. So Des Hamilton, the casting director, went over to Grimsby and found a few lads who were all really good…I went there with Jo Hartley who plays Cynthia (the mum), the producer, and casting director. And Thomas came in and just did a five-minute improvised scene with Jo Hartley. And it was the best thing we had seen in months…He's just so talented that you could see the potential from the very first minute he opened his mouth. We keep in touch now. He's turned 15, and he's a great kid.

Stephen Graham in This Is England Yves Salmon/Courtesy of IFC First Take

And Stephen Graham, who plays Combo, is cast as a racist skinhead but in real life has a black heritage. How much of a stretch was it for him to climb into the role of a racist?
He didn't actually let on to anybody that he is of mixed race. He was worried about telling me and the producer and everyone else, because he felt that we may reject him from the part once that was found out. But we were able to draw on that, because, really, when you see Stephen lose it and when you see him in the scene where he turns on Milky (Andrew Shim), there's so much complexity. And he's drawing on all those experiences of not quite belonging. In that scene, Combo wants everything that Milky's got. He realizes that he cannot break this guy because of his color. This guy had everything, a family. What [Combo] never had was a family and he never felt he belonged. And I think a lot of that is what Stephen brought [to the role]: never feeling black, never feeling white. And that sense of never really belonging anywhere was why he was kicked out all of his life. So it for me just added another layer that he was able to draw upon. Stephen's acting in that scene still, to this day, sends shivers down my spine.

You mentioned you had two or three other projects that you were working on before you did This Is England. And apparently you've turned down several offers from Hollywood after you did TwentyFourSeven. But has Hollywood come knocking again? Would you consider a studio project?
I'm kind of doing two projects at the moment. The next one is, if you like, my "big film" called King of the Gypsies, which is based on a bare-knuckle fighter. It's quite an epic film. It's told over a period of over 40 years. It needs a lot of money, so I guess, really, we'd be looking for a partner. I wouldn't rule out bringing a studio partner in, or a mini-studio on that front. At the same time, I also quite like making films quickly with a lot of the people who I know are making [films] in a very true indie way. And I think the way people are consuming films now and the way films are being [put] on the internet is phenomenal. And I do like to constantly be making films. I'm about to do a film with Paddy Considine. We've kind of got this character that we developed called the Donk, who is a very evil yet a hilarious roadie for rock bands…We're actually going to film [Considine] in a real situation. We've got him roadie-ing for the Arctic Monkeys. I quite like the idea of going back to Dead Man's Shoes where we made a film in three weeks. I guess that [while] developing a big film, I like to make other films that can be done quicker and smaller.