ERAN CREEVY’s first feature film, Shifty, is an urban drama following 24 hours in the life of a young drug dealer. Creevy chats about blagging his way into the film business, writing from experience, and his ambitions to be the next Michael Mann.
MMM: I believe there’s a living breathing inspiration for Shifty…
Creevy: I grew up in a place called Harlow in Essex, which is a new town built after the Second World War. I grew up there in a single-parent family on a council estate, but it wasn’t a tale of woe is me. I had a very happy upbringing, but returning to the town now, there’s lots of friends there I’ve seen pass away due to stabbings, or who’ve gone to prison.
Lots of my friends have got themselves into trouble, and one of my own family members got addicted to heroin, so the film has a very personal, semi-autobiographical feel to it. And Shifty is actually based on a real person I knew of, so I’ve actually fictionalized it into to this 24-hour condensed story.
The scene where Shifty first meets Jason Flemyng‘s character and sees a girl with a scarred face from a radiator, that happened in real life. I was back home, talking to the real Shifty, and a crack deal went down in front of me. I saw this girl I used to go to school with in the front of the car. She was scarred down the side of her face, so I said to the real Shifty, ‘God I remember her; I used to fancy her massively when I was at school.’ And he told me that she got smacked out on heroin next to a radiator which melted her face, and the paramedics had to peel her off. I was so devastated by that story that it was the first scene I wrote for the film.
Daniel Mays and Riz Ahmed star in Shifty
MMM: What did making Shifty mean to you?
Creevy: My mum’s half Sri Lankan, so I’m a quarter Sri Lankan myself and I’ve got an Asian background. I hung around with a lot of Asian friends when I was growing up in Harlow; lots of my friends are Indian and Pakistani. And because I came from a single-parent family, and I don’t have any brothers or sisters, I place a lot of importance on friendship and they’re still my best friends today.
When I finished writing the script, I realized that Shifty is about the importance that I place on friendship even today. Ultimately it’s a love story between two best mates and I think that’s why I wanted to do it.
MMM: You shot the film on a tight schedule…
Creevy: The film was made on the Film London Microwave scheme. We had 18 days to shoot it, which sometimes resulted in us shooting nine pages of dialogue a day. So we were shooting almost like a TV schedule. We did one to two takes per set up – one if you could get away with it, three at the max, and then moved on. We’d had a week of rehearsal to prep with the actors. We couldn’t afford to shoot in Harlow because of the cost of getting everyone out there to travel, so we based ourselves at Elstree studios and everything was filmed within a five-minute radius of the studio because it was so low budget.
MMM: I heard you had some problems on the final day of shooting?
Creevy: Sometimes we would lose locations and we’d have to find another one on the same day, which was what happened on the last day. The scene is where the main characters Chris and Shifty break up and come back together outside a party. We were meant to be shooting the party at someone’s house but they freaked out saying, ‘we can’t have a film crew here!’
So we had nowhere to film our last scene. In the end we went with our producer Ben Pugh to shoot it at his dad’s house. We all went silently down the street hanging lights up and shooting the last scene of the film. When we said, ‘that’s a wrap on principle photography’, everyone hugged really quietly. Then we all just went our separate ways. It was kind of magical because of the orange glow and the way everyone was being really silent.
MMM: The Microwave scheme gave you £100,000 to play with, and it also gave you a mentor…
Creevy: It gave me Asif Kapadia, who directed The Warrior and Far North, as a mentor. We talked about the rehearsal time and he was instrumental in that. Although I’ve shot music videos and commercials, Shifty’s my first film and I wasn’t used to dealing with actors.
Asif told me, ‘you’re shooting low budget, you’re shooting fast, you’re shooting on film, so the tendency is that when an actor finishes their line you shout cut, cut, cut because you can hear the money flickering through the camera. But allow at least 10 to 15 seconds, if it feels right, to let the scenes breathe and let the actors do what they have to do.’
‘Just let the camera wander on them for those 10 to 15 seconds. See what they do, and if there’s nothing happening then cut the scene. Often those beats are the beats in the edit that you end up using for when you need a look, or you need a moment off one of the actors.’ That advice from Asif was very important and I wouldn’t have known it being a first-time director.
We were quite strict in rehearsals, because we were shooting quickly and in such small spaces. We photographed each space, which made the actors aware of where they’d be acting. And we got black gaffer tape and marked out the exact space where they’d be, so they could see how much room they had to play with once we were on set.
MMM: Tell us about the music you used for the film.
Creevy: Riz Ahmed, who plays Shifty, is a hip hop MC and we met on a music video I was directing for him. So we had conversations about what we wanted to do with the music on the film. Growing up in Harlow in the early 90s I was into my hip hop. I talked to Riz about music of the period, sourced that, and laid it over the first cut of the film. But I realised I’d made a massive mistake as it just felt too generic.
So I know Mat Whitecross, who directed The Road to Guantanamo with Michael Winterbottom, and he’d worked with Molly Nyman, Harry Escott on those films. We sent them a rough copy of the film and they loved it and said they’d be more than willing to score the movie. I think that’s what raised the film up.
I think that if you put an urban soundtrack on a film, it makes it feel very particular to that town or that time or that person who’s making the film. The moment you put more of an epic score on a film, it gives it a more universal feel and opens it up a bit more to the audience.
MMM: What prompted you to shoot on film rather than DV?
Creevy: The Microwave scheme wanted us to shoot digitally because you can keep the camera running as long as you want and do as many takes as you want. But my argument was, if I’m shooting 18 days with two to three set-ups, how many takes can I do and how long can I keep the camera running if I’ve got eight pages of dialogue to shoot in one day?! I think the discipline of shooting on film and shooting quickly tightened up the process. And I’m used to shooting on film with shooting music videos and commercials.
MMM: Francesca Annis has a cameo in the film. How did she get involved?
Creevy: One of our producers, Ben, knows her daughter and they’re quite close friends as they’ve worked on films together. Not thinking that she’d ever accept a part in the film we sent her a copy of the script. It’s a sort of far-out role for her to do and when she was on set that day it was quite funny. She was the most experienced actor we had on set so it was quite nerve-wracking. I got really nervous and didn’t really know how to speak to her!
MMM: And Jason Flemyng‘s in the film as well. How did that come about?
Creevy: Basically I was running around Soho and the sister of a friend of mine was going out with Jason Flemyng, so I phoned him up cold and said, ‘Jason, it’s Eran sort me out with a job!’ At the time he was working on Layer Cake. He got me an interview with the producers and I became a runner-slash-Daniel Craig’s stand-in on the film. That was my introduction to the film world!
When we were making Shifty Jason had just come off the set of David Fincher‘s film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in New Orleans, which had a 150-million budget! Jason’s integral to Shifty and he’s a very close friend of mine. He always said that he wanted to be involved in the film to some capacity, no matter what it was.
MMM: What films or filmmakers have influenced Shifty?
Creevy: My influences are things like Ghost Busters, Back to the Future, and Return of the Jedi. That’s what I was into growing up. My step-dad, who married my mum when I was thirteen, had a video shop and I used to soak myself in things like The Goonies and Gremlins. I think I’ve got quite commercial tastes.
Before I wrote Shifty I didn’t know what to make a film about. So I thought about my heroes like Scorsese and Woody Allen. They made films about where they grew up and where they knew. So I thought ‘what do I know?’ and the answer was Harlow in Essex, so I stuck to what I knew.
I tried to bring what I’d learnt from watching those films, which was to try and keep the audience constantly entertained. I wanted to bring Shifty in short – I didn’t want to make it too long a film so it’s only 84 minutes. I wanted to make the narrative tight. So even though it’s got an indie feel to it, it’s got commercial sensibilities.
MMM: What’s next for you?
Creevy: I’ve just put the final ‘fade to black’ on my next script, Welcome to the Punch. It’s a movie in the vein of Heat or Infernal Affairs. A hero of mine is Michael Mann – I love Heat – so I wanted to write a big epic crime thriller, a British crime thriller but getting rid of the parochial feel we sometimes have here.
MMM: That’ll cost a bit more than £100,000 then!
Creevy: A lot more! I got 80 pages into a different script, which was much more serious, very earnest, and a smaller story, and I thought if I’m going to get the chance to make another film, then I want to make the films I grew up loving. I love films like Heat, Infernal Affairs and The Usual Suspects. And I grew up loving action films like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Predator, and The Last Boy Scout, so it’s a mesh of the two. It’s like Shifty meets Michael Mann meets The Last Boy Scout!
By film journalist Jan Gilbert
