It is not hard to see why Shane Meadows dubs his latest film Somers Town, “a fantastic accident”. It started out as a short film with corporate backing. Now, after evolving into a 75-minute feature, it’s being hailed as the best British film this year. Certainly the jury at the 2008 Edinburgh Film Festival thought so, awarding the film the prestigious Michael Powell award above more high-profile home-grown efforts, such as The Edge of Love and Man on Wire. Indeed, despite its rough and ready charm, reflected in its eponymous London setting, this tale of the friendship between Marek, a Polish immigrant teen, and Tommo, a Midlands runaway, is arguably Meadows’s most moving film yet.

Shot in just ten days, after a short script by the 35 year-old Meadows’s childhood friend Paul Fraser evolved into a feature-length piece through intense rehearsals and improvisation, its achievements are all the more remarkable when you consider Somers Town began life as a project funded by Eurostar.

Understandably, Meadows was wary of joining forces with a company he felt might have demanded a glorified corporate video. “My worry was that it was going to be shots of blokes in trains patting kids on the head and saying, ‘Have a nice day on the Eurostar!’,” he says. “I wrongly thought it was going to be not my territory.” Backing out of the project, Meadows only reattached himself when he read Fraser’s script and saw that Eurostar was going to give him carte blanche.

Underneath all the teenage banter and bravura, Meadows has crafted a poignant story in which both boys lean on each other in lieu of emotionally or physically absent parents.

Appropriately enough, given the subject matter, when I join Meadows and his principal cast the atmosphere feels just like a family get-together. Tucking into his lunch is the bespectacled Perry Benson, the 47-year-old character actor who plays Graham, a street trader who befriends Tommo and Marek. “I’m a bit like their dodgy uncle,” he says. Sitting quietly in the corner is the 16-year-old Polish newcomer Piotr Jagiello, who plays Marek, and the more boisterous, blonde-haired Thomas Turgoose, who plays Tommo. “Is Kate Dickie coming down?” he pipes up, referring to the Red Roadstar who features briefly in the film, as if proceedings wouldn’t be complete without her.

The Grimsby-born Turgoose, 16, made his debut as a would-be skin-head in Meadows’s 2006 film This is England, a starring role that ultimately won him Most Promising Newcomer at the British Independent Film Awards. “I stayed in touch with everyone, including Shane, from This is England,” he says. “That film focused my life and changed my whole attitude.” Previously thinking about a career in joinery, Turgoose now has an agent and is taking acting very seriously. A fortnight after Somers Town, Eden Lake is released, in which he plays a tearaway who terrorises a pair of holiday-makers. “All my roles so far have been bad boys,” he grins, “but then I’m a bad boy myself.”

Still, there was no room to muck about on the set of Somers Town, with Meadows often shooting 17-hour days. “In a lot of ways, it’s the bravest thing I’ve done,” he says, and with the film shot in black-and-white and partly in Polish, you can see his point. What’s more it was the first time he’d shot outside his native Midlands or worked on a script he hadn’t been involved in writing. If these elements made him nervous, it didn’t help that the night before the first day of the shoot, Meadows tripped on a pothole outside a pub and broke a bone in his foot. “All the signs were telling me I shouldn’t be doing this project,” he recalls. “Everything seemed to be going wrong.”

This included the theft of a laptop from a camera-crew car in Somers Town, the London neighbourhood situated between the Euston, St. Pancras and King’s Cross stations. Benson knew the area only too well. “I’ve got family that live there – about three generations of them – and there’s a definite community there. But it’s also quite transient, and I think Shane captured that really well. The fact that Marek has come from Warsaw to live with his dad, who’s working on the Channel Tunnel terminal, and Tommo has just got a train from the Midlands, and then there are people like me, who are the indigenous population. There’s that element of people moving in and out of there all the time.”

While Meadows comes across as optimistic in person, he doesn’t shirk from showing the seedier side of Somers Town. Yet he paints the city with a stark beauty, a considerable contrast to his “harrowing” experience of shooting in the capital. “If someone isn’t reversing up the road in a digger, it’s jumbo jets flying overhead. I’ve never known anything like it. How anything gets made in London, I’ll never know.” At least, he and his skeletal crew got to go to Paris for three days – on the Eurostar, of course – to shoot the film’s finale. For both boys, it was their first trip to Paris. “Everyone was really friendly and the food was nice,” winks Turgoose. “The Eiffel Tower was bigger than it seemed on the television.”

If one thing gives Somers Town its vitality, however, it’s Meadows’s ability to generate fresh material with his cast. “It was very spontaneous with lots of improvisation,” says Jagiello. “It was just a basic screenplay and we were allowed to experiment in the way we expressed our feelings.” This technique resulted in some of the film’s more hilarious moments – such as the scene in which Tommo and Marek try to sell Graham a bundle of stolen clothes on his doorstep.

Wearing just a pair of underpants, Benson pulled out a wad of cash from inside the Y-Fronts, much to the surprise of his fellow actors. Well versed in improvisation on films such as Final Cut and Love, Honour and Obey, Benson nevertheless pays tribute to Meadows’s methods. “He’s like Ken Loach – but better!”

As far as the director is concerned, watching Tommo and Marek reminded him of his lifelong friendship with Fraser, who has penned nearly all of his films. “I was always the little dominant one, but Fraser would always stand up for himself in a quiet way in the same way Marek does.” Indeed, in an era when teenagers are depicted in films such as Adulthood as knife-wielding hoodies, it’s refreshing to see one that takes the opposite stance. “They’ve got a Terry and June-like relationship,” says Meadows. “They’re almost like a married couple by the end of the film.”

While that may be pushing it, certainly Meadows bears comparison with Loach, portraying the working classes with good humour (as well as the requisite grit), a trait apparent in all of his films, from Twenty Four Seven onwards. Next, he’s planning his biggest project yet, King of the Gypsies, a story about the real-life bare-knuckle boxer Bartley Gorman. “ Somers Town made me realise that I like working with undulation – a big one, a tiny one,” he says. “A lot of directors I respect work like that.”

Somers Town opens nationwide on Aug 22 2008

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