Before I even meet Samantha Morton, she is bossing me around. At a media
screening of her new film, her first as director, a producer steps forward
to address the tiny audience. Sam has requested that we take no notes. No
explanation is offered other than that she would like us to concentrate on
her work without distraction. Two hours later, the auteur sails regally into
the library at the Soho Hotel, looking like an 18th-century courtesan,
magnificent and dishevelled, hair piled into a bird’s nest, bosoms spilling
forth, vintage chiffon frock trailing the floor. Little dark-rimmed
spectacles perch incongruously on her nose, and she is mistress of all she
surveys. Or this interview, at least. She notices a distracting noise, and a
manager is summoned to disconnect the fan behind the real-flame fire. Might
the furniture need rearranging? Maybe not. There is nothing diva-like in her
behaviour — I suspect she is just as particular in the butcher’s: it is
simply that she likes to be in control.
Morton is known as an uncompromising performer, tough on fools and slackers, a
woman whose route to stardom has been more rocky and random than most. Now
she has made The Unloved, to be shown on Channel 4 next week. It’s a story
she had been struggling to write for 10 years, between making films such as
Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown and Jim Sheridan’s In America, until she
found a sympathetic co-writer in Tony Grisoni, who adapted David Peace’s Red
Riding novels.
“I didn’t want someone to give me money to write it,” she says in her vaguely
Midlands accent, “because then I would feel I didn't own the material, and
people would interfere.” Perplexingly for an actress who refuses to answer
personal questions — and, I suspect, relishes telling nosy journalists to mind
their own business — the film is (admittedly indirectly, but still
unarguably) about herself. “I’ll always be frosty when I’m asked about my
life,” she shrugs. “But what’s the point of making a film about this subject
matter if I’m not going to talk about it?”
The harrowing story of 11-year-old Lucy, a child cut adrift in the care system
— played with an unsettling stillness by Molly Windsor — is informed by
Morton’s disrupted childhood, spent in and out of foster care and
residential establishments in Nottingham, her mother having left the family
and her father being unable to care for her. As an infant, she bounced
between the authorities and her inadequate home; at seven, she was made a
ward of the court and never went home again; since then, she has nurtured
“the compulsion” to make a film about being in care.
She found her star, Windsor, in a youth drama group in her home town; at one
point she had been a member of Central Junior Television Workshop, the club
that sparked Morton’s talent and ambition 20 years ago. At 14, she told the
workshop’s director, Ian Smith, that she wanted to go to Hollywood. He told
her to lower her sights. “I was thrown out for bad behaviour, so I only did
a couple of years.” The problem wasn’t disruptiveness, but punctuality, she
says. “I was coming from a children’s home and had to get two buses, and I’d
not been given the bus fare. I had to walk for nearly two hours to get
there. If I turned up late and said to him, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t have my
bus fare’, he treated me the same as everybody else and said it wasn’t his
problem. I loved the fact I was never treated any differently. But at the
same time, I wished I had my mum to phone and say, ‘I’m so sorry, she’s
gonna be late today.’”
Smith tells it a different way, describing her as “hard to handle” and
intimating that she was not a team player; and in her early teens Morton
started attending raves and taking ecstasy and LSD, which can’t have made
her easy to engage.
She didn’t audition for Rada because she didn’t have the required GCSEs, or
the train fare. “I was just not educated enough for them.” At 16 she lived
in a hostel for the homeless and was put on a YTS hairdressing training
scheme. “I got fired,” she smiles. She was drifting, angry, occasionally
violent, stole for food, but she also began to reinvent herself, a process
that probably continues to this day; which account of her early years you
get might depend on how she feels when she is divulging it. She told one
interviewer she was “completely” close to wrecking her life with drugs; to
me she claimed she always knew she’d be absolutely fine in the end.
“As a child I had a serious anger problem, but from the age of 16 I’ve been
trying to turn bad things into positives. I never doubted that I would be
all right. Whether that meant I had a loving partner and children but I
lived on a council estate and read poetry...or I lived on my own...or I
travelled.”
Having watched her harrowing film, you better understand Morton’s firmness in
her dealings with the world. She enjoys control because for the early part
of her life she was, like Lucy, powerless. She takes herself seriously
because for too long nobody assumed the girl without a single GCSE had
anything smart to say. She demands that you grasp the precise meaning of
what she is telling you — sometimes taking a breath and then talking very
slowly, as one might to a small child — because her lack of schooling hurts
and has made her determined to speak knowledgeably on her areas of
expertise, never to sound like a movie-biz airhead, or a poor kid made good.
In her film she makes us wince at Lucy’s silent suffering, but says she wasn’t
trying to tell the world about her own traumas. “I am not Lucy, and she is
not me. Okay?” But she knows what it feels like to be a lost child, asking
the reasonable and unanswered question “Why can’t I live with my mummy?”.
What she underestimated was how hard it would be to watch her own film.
“Every time I see it, I’m in floods of tears — it’s so close to me. It’s
still very raw.”
In the past Morton has campaigned to keep children’s homes open, but the one
she depicts is chaotic, dangerous (an older girl is sexually abused) and so
ineffective that you wonder whether a better campaign wouldn’t be to shut
such places down. She insists, and probably rightly, that for some children
a home is the best option. “I remember as a child feeling that some of my
residential social workers were of very low intellect. But I wouldn’t be
here today without them.” Was she abused in care? “I’m not going to talk to
you about that.”
Where some seekers after realism would have employed real kids for such a
gritty subject, she cast only actors in her film, on principle. “Film-makers
go into kids’ lives, stay for six months, give them lovely catering every
day, make life a dream, it’s all cameras and da-di-da — and then they
disappear, leaving a gaping hole. If I was going to make a Ken Loach-style
film, maybe I might have needed the raw material, but I’m the raw material
here.”
