ONE ACTOR dominates the best British films at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. Paddy Considine is chillingly effective in Shane Meadows’s revenge film, the outstanding Dead Man’s Shoes. His performance maintains the balance between pitch-black comedy and ruthless violence. And in the disquietingly seductive My Summer of Love he is a troubled character trying to suppress the spectre of his wild years with a newfound faith as a born-again Christian.

Considine, best known for In America as an Irish actor struggling to support his wife (Samantha Morton) and daughters in New York, makes for a formidable presence on screen. But he’s also, you sense, a little uncomfortable with the less noble side of his profession: “It’s a hard thing, quality control, because sometimes you could really do with a few bob. But I’ve tried to do those jobs for the dough and I have crashed and burned because there’s no heart in it.”

Dead Man’s Shoes reunites Considine with Meadows, for whom he made his debut in A Room for Romeo Brass (1999). They met on a drama course as teenagers. “We hardly talked to each other at first,” recalls Considine, “and then one day we had to put some performance on and we went round the back of the library, got a bottle of ink and painted each other’s teeth black. And we’re in hysterics, literally crying with laughter.”

That early friendship with Meadows made a huge impression on the actor: “When I met Shane, life changed. I’d lived in a small town (Burton-on-Trent) in a bubble, so had Shane, but he was different. The world seemed massive to me, how do you ever achieve anything? But Shane made the world seem the size of a tennis ball.”

It wasn’t until they met again with, respectively, a film and a first-class degree in photography under their belts that Meadows and Considine had enough mutual respect to work together seriously.

The result was A Room for Romeo Brass. Meadows said at the time that Considine’s involvement sent the film in a darker direction than he had originally envisaged. Dead Man’s Shoes, which they co-wrote and produced “under the radar” for a mere £700,000, continues that trend.

The 30-year-old Considine plays a soldier who returns to his home town and systematically dispatches each of the deadbeats who wronged his younger brother. He stalks through this small-town horror story like some avenger in a film that has more in common with the gritty movies of 1970s America than with the safer, sweeter films of the UK these days.

One of the film’s objectives was to establish a distance from the Nottingham housing estates where Meadows has previously set his films. “The aim was to make it look a bit grander in some ways,” says Considine. “We were looking at films like Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade, and trying to get a sense of the landscape.”

It is this kind of fresh perspective that drew Considine to work with Pawel Pawlikowski, the director of My Summer of Love: “The beautiful thing about Pawel is that, because he’s Polish, he has a totally different way of looking at this country. He sees stories within the landscape that aren’t really linked to the usual subject matter that people tend to get involved in when they are making films in this country.”

The film is about an obsessive friendship between two teenage girls (newcomers Nathalie Press and Emily Blunt). Considine plays the newly religious brother of one of them who is torn between trying to save his sister and the temptations of her coquettish new friend. Keen not to portray his character as a “clap-happy stereotype”, Considine attended an Alpha course. “Before meeting these Christians, I was told not to become brainwashed. But I ended up laughing as these people are probably the soundest, most open people I’ve ever spoken to.”

He is yet to see a finished version of My Summer of Love, and he’s “completely gutted” that filming commitments on Ron Howard’s The Cinderella Man, starring Russell Crowe, will prevent him from attending the Edinburgh screening. But then he’s used to missing the more glamorous side of film-making. When Samantha Morton was nominated for an Oscar for In America, her co-star failed to get an invitation.

Perhaps for Edinburgh he could record one of those videotaped messages that are sent in lieu of a personal appearance. Considine’s internal idiot-actor warning system is triggered immediately: “I don’t know if I could do that. They are f***ing sad.”

Dead Man’s Shoes is on Aug 20 & 22 and My Summer of Love on Aug 21 & 24, both at the Edinburgh Film Festival (0131-623 8030)

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