Viva Brighton Issue #43 September 2016

FILM
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The Violators
First-time director Helen Walsh
“Oh dear,” texts Helen
Walsh, in response to
the news that I’ve just
arrived back from my
honeymoon and I’d
like a Vimeo link to
her film The Violators,
before I interview
her the next morning.
“It might put a bit of
a dampener on your
holiday mood.”
No matter. I manage
to catch an hour of the film, and I’m immediately
immersed in the travails of its 15-year-old protagonist
Shelly, trying to look after her motherless kid
brother in underclass Birkenhead, a world of casual
prostitution, drug abuse, pawn shops, and relentless
violence.
“Is it a film that’s essentially about class?” I ask her,
down the phone, and I seem to have hit home, first
question in. “I’m often asked how or if my gender
has informed my directorial style. On a subconscious
level, yes, it probably has but once I’m behind
the camera, I cease to be a woman, a mother,
a feminist. Class though, is deeply embedded in the
decisions I make, as is sense of place.”
A sense of place. Birkenhead is a tough workingclass
town, dominated by its neighbouring cities,
which shares many similarities with nearby Warrington,
where Helen was brought up in ‘a house
with no books’. “I filmed within a five-mile radius,
on location, in and around the post-industrial
wastelands of Birkenhead. I rehearsed the actors
on the landscape, and the harshness of the environment
was reflected in their faces. We filmed
one scene in Liverpool, but I didn’t end up using
it. Tonally, it stuck
right out. The
change in environment
seemed to
elicit a different kind
of performance from
the actors.”
We talk about the
Dardennes brothers,
the Belgian directors
who have made
an art form of using
setting to great effect
in their human tales of young people making
their way through life as best they can in socially
deprived urban environments. Helen reveals that,
in particular, their 2002 film The Son was a major
influence on the her directorial style while making
The Violators (her first movie; Helen is also an
award-winning novelist). “The Dardennes privilege
truth over everything,” she says.
Her film was made with a small crew, and a tiny
budget, with little time to rehearse or plan set
locations: it’s all filmed in real places using natural
lighting, à la Dogme 95 (give or take the odd
snatch of background music). As a novelist who is
used to controlling her whole show, I ask her, was
it difficult working alongside a cinematographer?
“Of course I had to fight my corner and make sure
that the narrative rather than the cinematography
was the driving force of the film,” she says. “But
Tobin [Jones, her director of photography] understood
the sensibility I was striving for, which is
slightly more European in tone and outlook.” AL
The Violators, Fabrica, 7th, 7.30pm, featuring a
Q&A with Helen Walsh, as part of the Scalarama
Film Festival scalarama.screeningfilm.com
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