Outlaw - Justice just got rougher

 

Source: The Times
February 24, 2007
Justice just got rougher
Nick Love’s Outlaw, a tale of vigilante violence, will upset Left and Right.

That’s how it should be, he tells Kevin Maher

 

Nick Love is mad as hell. And he’s not going to take it any more. “Look at

the state of this f***ing country!” hisses the tough-talking Londoner and

37-year-old film-making maverick, trying not to upset the finely dressed

clientele of a swanky Soho hotel. “Look how that c*** Blair has failed this

country! He’s created a society where you can get arrested for being

antiIslamic, and yet it’s fine to go and carpet-bomb Baghdad! He has

cheated us, he has lied to us, and he has neglected the working classes.

We are worse off now than we were ten years ago, and I feel f***ing angry

about it.”

 

And if you don’t believe him, just look at his new film Outlaw. A visceral

vigilante flick that is politically provocative to both the Left and the Right,

it stars Sean Bean as a disillusioned Iraq war veteran called Bryant who

is so repulsed by our crime-ridden and paedophile-plagued society that

he decides to dole out some rough justice of his own. Recruiting five

equally enraged males from across the social spectrum (posh, poor,

white and black), Bryant begins to target — in the words of the movie’s

one good copper (played by Bob Hoskins) — “the dealers, the bullies,

the junkies, the scum, the c***s, the dogs, the lot!”

 

Naturally, it’s a film that’s designed to ruffle feathers — whether it’s the

disturbing sight of a heavily pregnant woman with a butcher’s knife sticking

out of her stomach, or Bryant’s controversial crypto-fascist monologue

on the evils of Blair’s Britain, Outlaw dares you to remain impassive

throughout. “Some people tell me that it’s a really important film,” says

Love, who previously upset the establishment by releasing his love-letter

to soccer hooliganism, The Football Factory, on the eve of the Euro 2004

championships. “But other people, good friends of mine, say that it’s f***ing

dreadful, and that it’s militant fascism and that I should be ashamed of myself.

But, ultimately, that’s what the film is about, isn’t it? It’s about dividing

people and sparking debate.”

 

And yet for all its conspicuous push-button provocations, there remains in

Outlaw a sense that the politics is simply a Trojan Horse for the real

concerns of its director. Like Love’s underestimated debut Good-bye

Charlie Bright,and his subsequent working-class parables, The Football

Factoryand The Business,at the heart of Outlaw is an obsession with

emasculated men, with a crisis of masculinity, and with what it takes

to be a “real” man in an increasingly feminised society. In short, his

movies are about men and their relationship with violence, and how it

can and does define them. They are, if you like, modern cockney westerns.

 

Love agrees. He bends over and lifts up his white shirt to reveal a giant

Wild Bunch tattoo on his lower back. Outlaw, he says, is hugely influenced

by the Sam Peckinpah classic. They are both films, he says, about people

who are disenfranchised and desperate enough to live on the other side

of the law. And yes, he says, his movies are about men, too.

 

And how we’ve lost our way and a sense of who we are. And thus, naturally,

they’re also about violence. “I’ve always been scared of violence,” says

Love, who grew up with his divorced mother on a council estate in Greenwich.

“When I was a kid I gravitated towards street gangs. I was excited by violence,

but I was always on the periphery of it, always the outsider, because I was so

terrified by it, too. And I think that’s reflected in the films.”

 

It’s exactly this sort of blunt confrontation of unfashionable social concerns

that has alienated Love from the liberal mainstream film industry, while

simultaneously winning him a huge following among what he calls “Middle

England lads and their girlfriends”. He is, in case you hadn’t heard, one of

the most commercially successful directors in the country. The Football

Factory cost just £500,000 to make, was critically reviled, and yet became

one of the year’s best-selling DVDs — shifting an unprecedented 970,000

copies (which, in the UK, is Harry Potter numbers). His gangster-themed

follow-up, The Business, sold another half-million DVDs.

 

That’s just one reason why 20th Century Fox has hired him, together with

the Trainspotting producer Andrew Macdonald, to make its big-screen

adaptation of the TV cop classic The Sweeney. “Fox hire me and they say:

‘Cool, a million DVDs right away’, ” says Love. “‘This is the guy who can

make it hip’.”

 

He adds, however, that despite the prestige that comes with The Sweeney

and the notoriety that Outlaw will inevitably bring, he is under no illusion

about his place in the cosy, luvvie-filled world of the British film industry.

“I have no place,” he says. “I don’t get invited to parties, my films don’t

get considered for awards. I am the ultimate outsider.” He pauses, and

adds: “Anyway, why would I go to film parties when I don’t need to?

Young film-makers go to parties because they’re like sharks round a boat,

hoping for a bit of chump to be thrown overboard, waiting for a kill. But

I’m up in my office, working away on my own films. I don’t need a kill.”

 

Outlaw is on general release from Mar 9

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