An interview with Harry Clegg, noted down by Nils Bothmann.

What inspired you to make this film? Were there any incidents in particular?

The inspiration came from various sources. I have a friend who was adopted and who tracked down his mother and had a less than satisfactory meeting with her. I was also inspired by a very interesting broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in which various adoptees spoke of their lifelong yearning to meet their natural mothers. I was very struck by one of them, a man in his 30s, who said when he finally got to meet his birth mother the years were stripped away and he felt like a small boy desperate for all the love he felt he’d missed out on in the intervening years.

Are there any films or directors that serve as idols for you or inspire you in general?

The films I’m making these days are quite different from MUMMY’S BOY. But at the time I was certainly quite influenced by Ken Loach’s early films and some of Mike Leigh’s work, particularly SECRETS AND LIES. I think I was also watching Krzysztof Kieslowski’s DECALOGUE and I like to think that I was influenced to some degree by these amazing filmmakers. This may seem a bit strange but I think the bit when they throw the photos into the gorge may have been inspired to some extent by the scene in NATURAL BORN KILLERS where a shawl Juliette Lewis was wearing floats away into a canyon, though of course, the two films couldn’t be more different.

In MUMMY’S BOY, what is not said is at least important as that what is said, maybe even more important. So a lot depended on the actors. How did you make your choices?

I remember in the auditions being town between James Paul Macartney and another much more conventionally handsome actor to play the part of Kevin. I’m so glad I chose James because he has such a wonderfully expressive face and he really did begin to look like a small boy in the scene where his character finally came face to face with Marjorie. Generally I was looking for actors who could act between the lines – in other words good actors!

The protagonist’s mother is clearly not the most sympathetic character, but on the other hand she is clearly not cast as a stereotypical negative person. Was it difficult to find this fine line, which leaves the character open for personal speculation and evaluation to the extent of sympathy or antipathy?

Part of the credit for this must go to Alison Mead, the actress playing her, for discovering Marjorie’s human qualities. I felt it important to show that Marjorie was a perceptive person – she quickly spots the fact that Cathy is pregnant and that Kevin is ambivalent about this. But this perceptiveness is also perhaps part of her prying and bullying nature. On the other hand, Marjorie is clearly not unmoved by meeting her son, but in the end her sense of shame and the terror of the past catching up with her prove stronger.

With it’s look, which is a little grainy, and the topics of personal life: Do you see MUMMY’S BOY as indebted to the tradition of the so-called “kitchen sink realism”?

The film was shot on super 16mm film, the same format as used by directors like Loach and Leigh when they did their early films for the BBC and I dare say this was not entirely coincidental. I’m not terribly keen on the expression “kitchen sink realism” because it makes me think of TV sitcoms but I suppose I was trying to do something which would tackle some serious issues in a realistic way.

Are there any aspects to MUMMY’S BOY which you would call typically British? It seems that on a narrative level would work in other countries as well. Do you see the plot of MUMMY’S BOY as a universal tale?

I hope so! The setting probably seems very British to an overseas audience but the truth is that as a very low budget filmmaker I used locations that I had to hand and where I could film cheaply. It was all filmed on real locations and there was very little production design involved and all this probably gives it a somewhat documentary feel. I didn’t set out to make a specifically British film and I think themes of loss and estrangement are indeed universal.

Links

• MUMMY'S BOY (GB 2009. Harry Clegg)
• The Unsaid – Nils Bothmann about MUMMY'S BOY
• Realism for the Art, Romance for the Market – Nils Bothmann about the British film market