THE way he tells it, in a quicksilver rant full of vivid detail and colourful language, the director Nick Love’s own life story sounds like the material for a movie. Raised on a South London estate, he was a chess champion at the age of 10, but slid into crime and drugs in his teens. Then at 18, having just finished a stint in rehab, Love watched Alan Clarke’s drama The Firm and decided that the cinema was what he was looking for. “I got a job as a runner quite quickly after that.”

Love takes responsibility for his wilderness years. “My dalliances with crime and drugs were totally my own doing. It wasn’t like I was getting abused by my father or anything. It was more about me wanting to be a bad boy. You can’t admit that at the time, you want to feel like a victim. But I’m old enough and honest enough to say, you know what? I wanted to be a bad seed and so I was.”

The allure of the outsider is a key theme in Love’s movies — ballsy, unapologetic, non-judgmental tales of life on the edge. It’s not coincidental that his three films so far feature bored, bright lads from housing estates not dissimilar from the one on which he grew up, lads making decisions that could ruin the rest of their lives. It’s as if Love is replaying what might have been if his friends and family had not intervened and his own ambition and formidable work ethic not kicked in just in time.

The key to good film-making, according to Love, is being a voyeur with a big memory. If the stories and settings have a ring of truth about them, that’s because Love grew up close enough to see the Millwall thugs of The Football Factory in action, and to experience the teen ennui of Goodbye Charlie Bright at first hand. “I didn’t pick up my working class influences in my mid-twenties to make films,” he says wryly.

BACKGROUND

• A clockwork outrage

• Who framed Bob Hoskins?

• Justice just got rougher

• Nick Love: wild boy finally shines

On the move

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His latest picture, The Business (reviewed on page 13), is set on the brash, affluent Costa del Sol of the 1980s; a promised land where gangsters in designer sportswear mould Thatcher’s ethos to their own ends; where drug-smuggling wide boys have movie star status. It’s a world that Love glimpsed from afar. His father, a self-made businessman, had a holiday home in southern Spain. And although his father had no involvement with the criminal culture of the region, it can’t have been hard for an observant youngster to spot a certain breed of local character living it large, enjoying the kind of status only dirty money can buy.

As a child of the Eighties himself, evoking the era in which the film is set was as important to Love as capturing the gaudy glory of the location. He has done so brilliantly, tapping into the magical moment when a decade stops being naff and starts being the focus of nostalgia.

Love recalls pitching the idea to his producing partners. “I said, ‘I’ve got this mad idea. I want to do an Eighties film.’ And I could see them go: ‘F***.’ Because everyone associates the Eighties with bad hair and big shoulders, not with people looking cool.”

But, counterintuitive as it may sound, for a while at least Love’s characters do look achingly hip. The designer sportswear of the first half of the decade — predominantly Fila, Kappa and Sergio Tacchini — has aged remarkably grace- fully, although the shiny suits that came later have fared less well.

Love was so determined that the period detail should be spot-on that he started scouring eBay for rare pieces of Eighties sportswear as soon as he decided to make the film.

Equally important was the soundtrack, a greatest hits compilation of every seminal track you can remember from the Eighties heyday of Top of the Pops. Love and his producers cut a deal which gave them access to EMI’s extensive back catalogue, meaning that the only track for which they had to pay extra was Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome. It was money well spent — Frankie’s anthem to excess sounds better than ever, and is a suitably debauched backdrop to this vision of a pumped up, adrenalised Eighties.

While the time may be ripe for nostalgia for Eighties pop culture, the politics of the era are a tougher sell. But Love makes a case for a reappraisal of Thatcherism. “I can’t say I’m a hater of her. I had a lot of problems when I was young, and apart from some good people around me there was also a very strong voice of the era — Thatcher — saying get off the scrap heap of no hope and do something.”

In Love’s case, the payoff from a Thatcherite upbringing is a business-savvy approach to film-making. He’s keenly aware of his audience and is one of the few young British film-makers who could potentially fill multiplexes rather than just cause a ripple on the art-house circuit. For Love, making commercial, crowd-pleasing movies is just a matter of common sense.

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