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Best friends Georgie and Ali, played by Lola Campbell and Alin Uzun, in Scrapper.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Madman<\/cite><\/p>\n \u201cSorry,\u201d she says in a thick north London accent. \u201cI\u2019ve got, like, diabetic shakes so I\u2019m quickly making some yoghurt so I don\u2019t pass out.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s the kind of quirky honesty that Scrapper<\/em> is full of. The whimsical comic drama is about a plucky and resourceful 12-year-old girl, Georgie (played by first-time actor Lola Campbell) who lives alone in a flat after her mother\u2019s death. She watches TV with best friend Ali (Alin Uzun) in a baggy West Ham football shirt, steals bikes for food money and cleverly cons social workers that she is being looked after by an uncle named Winston Churchill.<\/p>\n But everything changes when a 30-year-old man with a sketchy past and a bad Eminem hairstyle, Jason (Harris Dickinson, looking unrecognisable from playing a male model in Triangle of Sadness<\/em>), turns up and says he\u2019s her dad and wants to stick around.<\/p>\n Scrapper\u2019<\/em>s setting in a rough area of London has drawn comparisons with other English working-class films. But it\u2019s much more upbeat \u2013 with magical realist touches \u2013 than the tough films of Ken Loach, Andrea Arnold and Mike Leigh.<\/p>\n Regan, who grew up in Islington in inner London with her mother and grandmother, came to filmmaking by shooting music videos for local rappers from the age of 15.<\/p>\n \u201cAll my friends were grime rappers or drill rappers at the time and they lived locally to my nan,\u201d she says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t cool enough to rap so they got me a camera and got me to start filming their videos. So I got into that for about six or seven years.\u201d<\/p>\n These music videos taught her to be adaptable.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re like the weird arty kid that\u2019s gone off and made a film\u201d: Scrapper writer-director Charlotte Regan.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Corey Nickols\/Getty Images <\/cite><\/p>\n \u201cYou can have ideas but whether or not the rappers want to do them is a different story,\u201d she says. \u201cSo you have to roll with the chaos and learn how to edit off the bad footage that I\u2019d got.<\/p>\n \u201cI often get asked what it was like directing Harris Dickinson, but after telling 50 rappers on a rooftop what to do as a 15-year-old girl, Harris is the easiest of all the tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n While Regan is reluctant to talk much about her nan and parents, she says her childhood was nothing like Georgie\u2019s in Scrapper, <\/em>except for a similar joy in the council estate community.<\/p>\n \u201cLola who plays Georgie, and Georgie, are much cooler than me,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s not like a cheeky biopic or anything like that \u2013 it\u2019s incredibly fictional.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s more just the joy of those kids\u2019 outlooks and I was drawn to how kids grieve, because I was grieving my dad and my nan [who both died before Regan made the film].<\/p>\n \u201cI just found I was connecting more with how we help children deal with grief and how present they are emotionally.\u201d<\/p>\n Scrapper<\/em> turns on the bolshy charisma of Campbell, who was discovered in a street casting session.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was during COVID so Lola sent in a tape talking about her favourite discount store, just going on and on about it for ages,\u201d Regan says. \u201cI instantly said to Theo [Barrowclough], my producer, \u2018it\u2019s the Home Bargains girl\u2019, which is the shop she was talking about, \u2018and we can\u2019t make the film without her\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cBut then she came in for an audition and wouldn\u2019t look us in the eye and was super nervous, in [the way that] that TikTok generation can perform in front of a camera, but put them into a room and it floors them.<\/p>\n \u201cSo we started going to her house every week, having cups of tea for months, until she deemed us worthy of her friendship. She\u2019s very mature in that regard \u2026 much more of an adult than me.\u201d<\/p>\n Regan, 29, is part of a rising generation of young British women directors that includes Charlotte Wells (Aftersun<\/em>) and two close friends, Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean<\/em>) and Molly Manning Walker (How To Have Sex<\/em>).<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not like a cheeky biopic or anything like that\u201d: Harris Dickinson and Lola Campbell in Scrapper.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Madman<\/cite><\/p>\n \u201cJust being surrounded by so many of us making the same thing at the same time is, like, such a help,\u201d Regan says. \u201cIt does feel like a great time for British cinema, definitely.\u201d<\/p>\n But even after her Sundance success and working as one of three directors on the coming Apple TV series The<\/em> Buccaneers<\/em>, an adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel about rich American girls trying to find aristocratic English husbands in the 1870s, Regan considers herself very much an outsider in film and TV.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t have any family or friends who worked in film,\u201d she says. \u201c[It\u2019s been] very alarming sitting in rooms with groups of the poshest people I\u2019ve ever met in my life. Well, I guess that\u2019s the film industry. But I\u2019ve found people along the way.\u201d<\/p>\n Her supporters have included English directors Ben Wheatley (Meg 2: The Trench<\/em>) – \u201cgod knows why, I\u2019ve never done anything for him\u201d – and Edgar Wright (Baby Driver<\/em>).<\/p>\n Regan is still so new to the film biz that she is thrown by a question about how she came up with the idea for Scrapper<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s weird,\u201d she says. \u201cI wish I could come up with an arty answer to this because it is a regular. I still just never know the answer.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d always been a bit sad watching that English working-class British cinema and how, like, depressing it always was and how defined people were by their hardships and their trauma.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I\u2019d always wanted to make a working-class film that was allowed to be joyful. But beyond that, I honestly can\u2019t remember a thing because we\u2019ve changed it so much.\u201d<\/p>\n Regan says Scrapper<\/em> was originally about a teenage boy and his grandmother who go on the run from drug dealers.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was much more of a Guy Ritchie shoot-out kind of film,\u201d she says. \u201cSo while this has always been my first film, it\u2019s changed draft to draft.\u201d<\/p>\n Regan is finding the same thing with two films she\u2019s been writing. \u201cOne day they\u2019re savage horrors, the next they\u2019re fantasies,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m terrible for changing my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n But what\u2019s been constant lately is that Regan remains unsure where she fits in.<\/p>\n Scrapper star Lola Campbell, who was cast after sending in a video talking about her favourite discount store. <\/span>Credit: <\/span>Madman <\/cite><\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t feel part of the film world and you don\u2019t feel like you totally belong with all the middle-class friends you\u2019ve made,\u201d she says. \u201cBut you also don\u2019t quite feel like you belong where you came from any more either, because you\u2019re like the weird arty kid that\u2019s gone off and made a film.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a constant identity crisis that I have every time I go to a family wedding and every time I sit in a middle-class meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n The weird arty kid still gets calls from her rapper friends asking if she can shoot a music video.<\/p>\n \u201cOn average it used to be like once a week, but now it\u2019s every three or four months I get a random phone call,\u201d Regan says. \u201cIt\u2019s great. I still sometimes delve back into them because they\u2019re very fun creatively. There\u2019s lots of freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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