Rude Girl and Rude Boys – Film Producer Cass Pennant on ‘Beverley’ Short Film
I recently caught up with the film producer Cass Pennant after the screening of his new film ‘Beverley’ at The 'Southend-on-Sea Film Festival'.
With various screenings at festivals in the UK and abroad. ‘Beverley’ has since been selected in the shorts programme ‘Rebel Girl’ for the East End Film Festival. With a compendium of knowledge on football, music, and subculture fashion. These were just a few subjects that Cass touched upon when we spoke about ‘Beverley’ which he has been developing with the Writer-Director Alexander Thomas.
The story of a mixed-race teenager who battles to assert her own identity in a bleak and threatening environment during the 2-Tone Ska music period of 1980 in the Midlands.
Everyone has a story to tell. What made Beverley Thompsons resonate with you and Director Alexander Thomas?
My first production was 'Casuals' a documentary on the football subculture. I thought it was a forgotten subculture because the films seem to concentrate on violence. I wanted to pin it as a bigger interest, and involve more people, yes the violence was hardcore but the other part of the subculture is the fashion as well as following football. It was the fashion more than anything, it outlasted all the other British subcultures that fizzled out after two years but the Casuals went on for three decades. It was a subculture that didn’t come from music. You couldn’t have Punk without the music, or Mod without the music, and Skinheads without the Reggae. The football casual didn’t come from music so I wanted to make the definitive documentary on the fashion behind the violence, and I didn’t believe there were female football casuals. It left women out. What would be the point of it? They don’t do the violence but there were a few we tracked down and one was Bev Thompson.
She was now a Mum living in Brixton. When you’re interviewing someone it’s hard to take someone back to that period without them talking to you in a rather matter-of-fact way. As an author to get the best out of someone, there are two ways to get them back in the past as if it were yesterday and vividly tell you. Music can take you back and the other is taking the person back to the scene. In the film ‘Cass’ where I got shot I went back to that actual spot for the actor to feel it. That’s why it’s powerful.
I took Beverley back to Leicester she hadn’t been there for decades. The ground is gone, and the houses have been knocked down but if you walk the streets it comes alive. In my biography, I had to make the reader feel Jamaica as I did when I went for the first time to find my roots. You can’t do it in the house talking into a tape. I went into a massive field near where I live in the early hours of the morning when no one was around. Standing in this field with a co-writer talking into the dictaphone felt like the hills of Jamaica. You need those things to get in the zone.
On the train journey with Beverley, I was fascinated with football girls from the terraces. She made the confession that it was short-lived and she wasn’t always a football casual. Beverley had also been a Rude Girl. I’ve always wanted to do a film that gives a legacy to the Two-Tone era. In 1979, when ‘Quadrophenia’ was released we watched that and said that’s our lives, it wasn’t premeditated, it’s the wildness of youth; particularly males and females who go along with it in a gang. We felt it because we thought it was our lives. We weren’t Mods we were football. What ‘Quadrophenia’ did for Mod I wanted a film to do the same for Two-Tone, because in the last 6-7 years as a Father of Mixed-Race kids the far-right groups are about, the riots happened, and it’s all the same cities where the riots originally started back in the 1980s. Now, it’s the next generation. It was history repeating itself in the last five years, and then we were in the middle of a recession, and back to rule and divide.
If you take away the economic recovery in the last year, and the time I was thinking about doing this involving the period of Two-Tone from 1979-1981 there had been so many subcultures but Two-Tone hadn’t been picked up in a film. I needed a story otherwise it’s a documentary. When Beverley became a Rude Girl it was her sense of British Identity and also getting equality. She didn’t want to go with girls and could hold her own with boys.
She’s a very strong character.
She didn’t fit in one way or the other or with black or white.
What is she? A female in an all-male subculture of the football casual that is really unique. Those lads would do it for their different reasons but Beverley was doing it for a British identity. When Pauline Black, lead singer of ‘The Selecter’ came along with the unity thing, Beverley started to feel accepted as British in this country. I looked at our filmmaker Alex we had a conversation we both agreed to revisit Beverley and get her story on tape as it had such social relevance. After we completed ‘Casuals’ a year later we interviewed her. So much stuff came out that I now had the story I needed to make the film. No one is going to give us a million pounds to make a feature, so let’s make it a short that serves as our calling card. I was also working on other scripts and co-producing the film ‘The Guvnors’ which won best action movie at the National Film Awards 2015 but ‘Beverley’ meant more to me on a personal level.
Because it was more personal.
Because of the timing. I have a mixed-race daughter and son and there don’t appear to be issues but you never know. I was a bedroom kid who bottled it all inside me and didn’t want to share or talk it out. I wonder if young people through seeing Beverley’s story will say it resonates with today’s generation. I’m a bit of a 70s and 80s man but if we go with a film it’s got to relate to today’s audience. When I see this generation that is mixed-race or half-caste as it used to be known in my time it was mainly Jamaican and White English. Now it can be Turkish English, Nigerian English, or Asian English. It’s half and half of something English. The film will resonate with many but they have different takes. The similarities are there.
Beverley Thompson is like me a good talker. Alex, our Director is very talented. The three of us sat together we knew it would be a hard journey but there was no going back because financially we had nothing to do this, so we decided to crowd-fund it; work with social media and drive everyone crazy to get this made.
There’s no doubt about Nottingham Television Workshop’s legacy and talent that continually comes through. Was it always the intention to cast from there?
Everything is in London. Everything stops in London. Even when you’re trying to get work as an extra most of the actors from the North no longer live where they come from. They’re within the M25 for work. You can’t really make a film out of London. I like authentication, most British youth subcultures were started in London and the North catches up but Two-Tone was different. It was hatched in Coventry in the Midlands. There’s a lot of talent up there and I wanted to get the period right. London doesn’t have Lowry’s 'Matchstick Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs' image, or those Coronation Street terraces with those kinds of backyards or alleyways. I knew if we shot in the Midlands we’d get a lot of genuine help, whereas you would have to buy your way out of everything in London. We had to shoot around Vicky McClure she said yes but she was only free in the Easter holidays. I contacted the local papers in Leicester for casting and auditioning actors. It was a local story we gave them the story that we were making a film and needed extras and actors, then we started hiring a local crew, and found Rhys Davis, our assistant director who started to help us whilst we remained in London. He suggested casting the actors at the offices based at an independent cinema in the city, The Phoenix. He introduced us to some amateur and local acting groups and we found one in Leicester. While Alex contacted 'Nottingham Television Workshop' we also had students who wanted to be involved. The Mercury gave us another plug and we followed up two weeks later interviewing all the responses but the role of Beverley was cast in London. We had about twenty girls and got them to four all of a sudden out of the blue while we were shortlisting a contact came through for Skins actress, Laya Lewis
saying she was interested. She was always the director's first choice we found a good bunch of actors but Alex always felt there was something about Laya that was Beverley.
The Leicester Mercury has been following the story all the way through because we have a Midland-based cast. We were getting a great buzz from the actors who had come from local drama groups like ‘Your Urban Actors’ based in Leicester to act alongside a BAFTA-winning actor like Vicky McClure.
Vicky is from Nottingham and started at Ian Smith’s TV Workshop which 
continues to produce amazing new actors. Kieran Hardcastle and Tom Cowling are both from there and you can really notice the qualities they bring as the gang members. The other young TV Workshop Actor to impress is only 12 years old, her name is Sennia Nanua she plays Beverley’s sister. Look out for her as she has picked up the lead role in ‘The Girl With All The Gifts’ with a cast that includes Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close and Paddy Considine.
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