GFF22: Angry Young Men
Paul Morris’ surreal scheme epic sees the gang hierarchy of fictional Scottish town Mauchton disturbed by a new arrival.
The Bramble Boys run Mauchton – but it wasn’t always that way. Like every gang who sit at the top of the tree in their town, city, or country, they had to mobilise, plan, then seize power for themselves. Luckily, conflict in Mauchton is a thing of the past and the town’s gangland hierarchy is firmly in place; a self-sufficient underworld ecosystem where the Bramble Boys call the shots.
That is, until the Campbell group arrive. With grand ambitions of their own, the Campbells set about persuading the gangland figures of Mauchton to pledge their allegiance to the Campbell cause. It’s a tempting offer that threatens the status quo of Bramble Boy rule. Who could say no to three weeks annual leave and sick pay? After one Bramble Boy is on the receiving end of a beating at the hands of the Campbells, Mauchton edges towards all-out war. It’s berets versus balaclavas, camouflage versus bomber jackets. But who takes the crown?
The term ‘multi-hyphenate’ is a cringey celebrity title that seems to be enjoying popularity amongst social media influencers at the moment, but it’s completely appropriate when describing Paul Morris, the writer-director-actor-composer-cinematographer-editor-prop master-costume designer-SFX engineer behind Angry Young Men. Morris’ first forays into filmmaking came via sketches and spoofs made with friends which gained a cult following on social media, followed by a short film version of Angry Young Men. The idea stuck with Morris, who took the bold decision to turn the concept into a feature film and planned to make it entirely by himself, with a cast of amateur actors and virtually no crew. If he wanted the film to be made, this was how it had to be done.
The Bramble Boys, with director Paul Morris in the centre
Angry Young Men is probably the purest example of grassroots filmmaking that you will find at any film festival this year (or decade). Morris began writing the script in evenings and weekends in 2016, then switched to 4am-8am sunrise sessions to revitalise the writing process when the output began to flag. With the script complete in April 2018, filming began around Hamilton in June of the same year. The shoot spanned three years (and one day) and was worked around the availability of the amateur cast and any volunteer crew while they juggled jobs, partners, children, and social lives. To persevere through three years of filming – three years’ worth of everchanging personal commitments, hangovers, and facial hair – is an achievement in itself, never mind the fact that a global pandemic was added to the mix halfway through shooting. Clearly, Angry Young Men wasn’t alone in being impacted by COVID, but it would have been easy for Morris or the unpaid cast to lose focus while the world shut down for months at a time.
In some respects, Morris feels that the pandemic actually helped the film, giving him time to assemble a rough cut of the work so far to reinvigorate the cast when some may have been having difficulty seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. It also necessitated that some scenes – originally planned for indoors – would be shot outside instead; something which Morris felt improved the scene in question.
Morris’ permanently positive, single-minded ambition to finish the film is a thread that reoccurs throughout the production of Angry Young Men. Rather than compromise, he got creative to overcome the limitations that the production faced; a mantra to forget about what you can’t do and focus on what you can. With Angry Young Men, this is manifested by masterful camerawork that instantly grabs even a casual viewer, compared to the static and fixed camera placement that would be the natural choice for a low budget film with (at times) one crew member. It’s a genuinely impressive achievement and acts as a character that often contributes to the plot development as much as the dialogue. And maybe some scene-setting landscape shots aside, how many ‘microbudget’ films have overhead drone shots that follow characters as they are being chased through streets, or a perfectly timed Steadicam journey through an underpass as a train passes above?
It’s these flourishes that mean Angry Young Men holds its own as part of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival programme; the creative ways that the usual barriers to making an engaging film are dealt with. How many directorial debuts had the balls to utilise a cast of over 70 actors, stage large battle scenes, and go all out with something on this scale? It keeps coming back to that focus on what is achievable: we can get people, we can make costumes, we can use the camera, and we can creatively bypass some of the things that might put other low-budget filmmakers off some of the violence and action that the film contains. While clearly drastically different worlds - comparing it to one of the greatest achievements in cinema history that influenced everything that followed - I think of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey’s space scenes. Not because there is anything in Angry Young Men that compares to the pioneering and unbelievably-realistic visuals, but due to the parallels of two filmmakers knowing there is no precedent to realising their vision with the tools that they have at their particular disposal – being able to film in space and a lack of CGI for Kubrick in 1968, or having any means (financial or otherwise) to stage battles, chase sequences, and violence while filming on the weekends around Hamilton for Morris. In both examples, the easiest outcome would be to scrap the ambitious set pieces or finer details, but in both cases the filmmaker applied their own ingenuity to realise their vision.
Alongside Angry Young Men’s surrealist gang warfare is the central thread following Charlie (Alexander Hamilton) and Siobhan (Rebecca Riddell), who are struggling with dead-end life in Mauchton. Their story is used to frame the sensation of feeling trapped in the cycle of small-town scheme life that often creeps in once it’s too late; that feeling of ‘where has my life gone?’ The benefits package offered by the Campbell group – which quickly sways a lot of Mauchton’s peripheral figures – appears to be a parallel with how the allure of something such as a glossy full-time job in a nearby city might be received by real-life residents of a scheme; that same ability to improve your life and escape the dreary cycle that you are stuck in.
Angry Young Men is Morris’ personal response to the prospect of being stuck in the mundanity of small-town monotony. Understandably, the limitations surrounding the film’s production mean there are some rougher moments that can interrupt the pace of the tighter scenes, but the scale and ambition of Angry Young Men should allow audiences to make concessions for individual imperfections. Morris has already shifted focus to his follow-up film, Anyone Can Get It, a ‘scheme opera’ (think of a space opera but in a housing scheme, rather than any musical connotations) centring on two warring families, with inspiration derived from the mythical Greek story of the Minotaur. As he continues writing his second feature, Morris will hope that the attention and success garnered by Angry Young Men will showcase what he could achieve with conventional film industry backing. With his budgetless directorial debut being selected to premiere at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, Morris has proven that with incredible work ethic, laser focus, and raw talent, anyone can get it.