"I never really thought of myself as a director, even when I was doing it. Most people who want to be a director look at Spielberg, Scorsese or Jim Jarmusch. I was making films just to have a laugh and get people together.”

It’s not what you expect to hear from one of the brightest British film-makers of his generation, but then Shane Meadows is full of surprises. During the past ten years, the self-taught 35-year-old from Uttoxeter has assembled a canon of work that examines life in provincial Britain with humour and unsettling honesty.

In 1998 he hit the headlines with Twenty Four Seven, an award-win-ning feature that starred Bob Hoskins as a lonely fiftysomething who reinvigorates his own life by organising a boxing club for local hooligans. Next came the dark comedy A Room for Romeo Brass, followed by Meadows’s one flop, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. In 2004 Meadows rocketed back to form with Dead Man’s Shoes, about a former squaddie who returns to his home town seeking revenge on a gang that terrorised his disabled brother.

Meadows’s latest film, This is England, inhabits similar territory. It is also his best work to date, a coming-of-age story that refuses to deal in simple black-and-white morality and wallows in the difficult greys. Like all his films, it’s set in the Midlands, this time on a sink estate in a coastal town in the early 1980s. Eleven-year-old Shaun, who has lost his father in the Falklands and is bullied at school and misunderstood at home, finally finds friendship when a gang of skinheads adopts him as their mascot.

“The basic premise came from my life,” explains Meadows, sipping on a cup of tea in a London studio where he is helping a friend to edit a film. “I remember going into town and seeing this gang of skinheads. There was a mystique that went with them. Even though I wore reindeer jumpers and flares, I was taken under the wing of a skinhead called Pecker and gradually fell in love with the whole thing. I went from being this kid that no one noticed to one that other kids started to fear, who started getting girlfriends. And I really enjoyed it. Being part of something for the first time was fantastic.” It is not hard to imagine the director as a terrifying skinhead. Thickset and shaven-headed, Meadows has lost none of his native Midlands accent since becoming the toast of the world’s film festivals. If anything, success seems to have thrown the events of his own past into even sharper relief.

“Just like Shaun I was introduced to a world of racism,” recalls Meadows. “In towns such as Uttoxeter there wasn’t an ethnic community, so you could be persuaded to follow that racist path as you had no black or Asian friends. If you’re impoverished and out of work it’s easy to point the finger. It was painted to me that thousands of immigrants were landing in boats and stealing our jobs. That is why the National Front took off.”

In the film, Shaun is propelled towards a turning point by an act of extreme, unnecessary violence.Again, it’s an episode that exactly mirrors the director’s own experience.

“There was a transition between the fights. At the start they were like the ones you’d seen on telly, where you were laughing while fighting. Then, all of a sudden, this character introduces you to a brand of violence that is utterly disturbing.

“I was having a great summer,” he continues. “I wasn’t scared of anyone. Then there was this one night ofviolence that was almost done on my behalf, and I realised that I didn’t have that ability to carry out that type of wanton violence. They would be walking along with a bag of chips and, for no reason, they would smash someone’s head against the floor until they stopped breathing before carrying on laughing and joking. Seeing this had a massive effect on me and I changed immediately. I think it’s been reflected in my films. I try toshow that those single moments of violence can affect someone for the rest of their lives.”

This is England, with its carefully selected soundtrack of period classics, attention to detail and unflinching realism, wears its nostalgia with pride. But it gains a contemporary edge thanks to its use of the Falklands conflict as a backdrop.

“The film you now see was not the film I wrote,” says Meadows, who spent nine months editing it. “The montage of films you see in the beginning uses stuff like the miners’ strike, Roland Rat and fitness videos. When I was looking for that footage I came across an ITN report of Falklands soldiers drinking vodka in front of these bodies under tarpaulins, next to this group of pathetic captured Argentine soldiers who looked like Super Mario, with big moustaches and ill-fitting uniforms. When I realised that these were who we were fighting, I felt a sense of shame.

“Seeing this drummed home just how much the war was an open act of bullying. I needed a bookend to stepout of the film and extend the violence beyond this microscopic event.”

So it is, as in all of Meadows’s films, that the political becomes personal and the personal political. Nothing and no one exists in a vacuum, the film tells us. The Falklands and skinhead violence spring from the same source. It’s a message that is perfectly complemented by the film’s hand-held, low-budget style.

“I wasn’t pleased with Once Upon a Time in the Midlands [it was the first time he’d been given a large budget], but I learnt a lot and now know that I work best independently with non-actors,” Meadows explains. “It’s the ‘f*** you’ attitude that came from my time as a skinhead that influences my films. I started experimenting with a camcorder without any understanding of what I was doing. But because I wasn’t being funded by anyone I could make s*** and no one cared, so I developed during that period. I made Twenty Four Seven from pure instinct. This is England is a return to that film-making ethic, which is what I’m most comfortable with.”The rawness of Meadows’s approach and subject matter has drawn comparisons with Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, although perhaps the closest parallel is with Martin Scorsese, another stylist whose roots have been the basis of his best work. And indeed, The Scorsese of the North is the title of the South Bank Show devoted to Meadows’s work which airs on April 29. But whereas Scorsese is content to spin a tale, Meadows still hopes — like Loach — that his films can have an influence outside the cinema.

“I feel I can do more good and have more effect by making films than by writing to my MP,” he says with a smile. “So I’ll just keep making these films and trying to get ’em right. And you know why? ’Cos I’m f****** useless at everything else.”

This is England is released on Friday

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