Since the release of Shane Meadows’ debut TwentyFourSeven in 1997, when the director was a mere 24 years old, British critics have anointed him as the natural successor to Mike Leigh. The harsh black and white tale of misspent youth and boxing clubs in Nottinghamshire, told with a wicked sense of humour, had him earmarked for greatness.

The film’s complete commercial failure, soul destroying for any other director, now sees Meadows edging his way back onto cinema screens two years on with A Room for Romeo Brass, a glorious and hilarious paean to the simplicity of youth and the bond shared with best mates.

“At the time that it happens, you’re walking around with a dark cloud over your head wondering why people won’t watch a black and white film,” Meadows says. “But what actually came out of the other side is that I never would have made Romeo Brass had it succeeded enormously.

“It would have sent me over the edge mentally, I probably would have ended up growing my hair out, dying it blonde and calling myself Shane Warhol,” he laughs.
Meadows and co-writer Paul Fraser stumbled upon Romeo Brass almost by accident, after toying with some more novel ideas to follow TwentyFourSeven.
“I went away to write a Western about group of guys from the Midlands who went over to the Wild West in the Gold Rush — people from Derby and Stoke on Trent,” he says.

“Paul Fraser and I, with the critical acclaim that we got from TwentyFourSeven, had a bit of a free reign to go away and write a new film. We were sat there one night trying to write this Western idea, and just talking about our childhood and how amazing it was that these two kids who had lived next door to each other and grown up together ended up working in the film business.”

Romeo Brass emerged as a largely autobiographical tale of the two writers’ childhood friendship, and the cruel things that kids do in the name of friendship, played out by the thinly veiled characters of Romeo (Andrew Shim) and Knocks (Ben Marshall).

“One day Paul had a friend back from school,” Meadows says, recalling one of the pair’s more surreal misadventures. “When your mate brings home somebody else, suddenly they don’t want to hang around with you, because they’ve got their new friend. They were playing badminton in their front garden, and wouldn’t let me join in.

“I went in the house and I watched The Outlaw Josey Wales, because me and my dad always had loads of Westerns on the shelf that we’d recorded off telly. When I saw the plight that Josey Wales had been through when the American rebels had burned his house down, I decided that I’d been treated in the same way. I got my air rifle, went outside and said eif you don’t let me play, I’m going to shoot you’. He said ewell go on then, I bet you daren’t’, and I shot him straight in the stomach.”

Having been banned from seeing Fraser for almost a year by his irate mother, Meadows eventually fell in with the wrong crowd (represented in the film through Paddy Considine’s deliciously surreal and menacing Morell) and felt a painful shove into adulthood. It was Fraser’s unquestioning decision to forgive Meadows for all he had done wrong that inspired the film.

“When you grow older, you forget, and you lose the mentality that you have at that age. We realised that if we didn’t tell a story about this now, it would probably pass off, and if we ever made a film about childhood, it would be the kind of ‘golden haze’ movie that I didn’t want anything to do with,” he says.

“I wanted to tell a story of truth, because childhood is painful and difficult, and it’s funny. It’s a very organic process being a kid.”