Turning a drug dealer into the lovable hero of your film without glamorising his trade is a difficult task. But Eran Creevy has pulled off all these feats as the first-time writer/director of Shifty.
A suburban British thriller, it tells the story of an intelligent Asian dealer whose successful trade supplying crack to pensioners and cocaine to intellectuals is thrown into chaos by the growing perils of life in a town closely related to Harlow in Essex.
"There is no hiding it: Shifty is inspired by someone – in fact, most of the characters are inspired by people from my home town," says Creevy. When he returned to Harlow a few years ago to visit his old mates, they bumped into the real Shifty. Creevy's friends had often told him stories about this menacing dealer who would also quote Dickens and Shakespeare. This time, a car pulled up and a crack deal went down in front of them.
The girl in the passenger seat was someone Creevy had "fancied massively" at school. Now her face was horribly scarred, so he asked Shifty what had happened: "Apparently she got whacked out of her face on heroin and melted on to a radiator. She leaned against it and the paramedics had to come and peel her off." That incident became the first scene he wrote for his debut film.
Creevy is too cheerful to paint his childhood as "a tale of woe-is-me", but it was unusual. His maternal grandfather was Sri Lankan, and his mother only came to Britain with the family when she was seven. They settled in Harlow when it was a thriving new town. "It must have looked amazing – futuristic and space age – but now it looks like a shithole," he says.
Creevy was brought up by his mum as a single parent and he got caught up in "casual racism" directed against Asian teenagers in the town. "Knee-jerk violence" and drugs were part of their lives. Creevy was glassed in a pub one day, and there is a sizeable scar on his forehead from a street fight when he was 19 when a bloke smashed a paving slab over his head. "I thought I'd been shot at the time," he says. "I spent a lot of my time quite scared as a teenager in Harlow."
Creevy is a great talker: full of energy and endearingly open. After university, he blagged his way on to the set of the film Layer Cake as a runner by claiming that he could drive (he still can't), and polished the plot for Shifty while temping. More film jobs followed, including helping one of his heroes, Woody Allen. It was partly the disappointment of working with Allen, who he found "very closed off", that spurred him to make Shifty. "You meet your heroes and hold them in such high esteem – then you realise they are just flesh and blood, and are winging it as much as you will be if you make a film."
Creevy winged it with an 18-day shoot in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, five minutes from the famous Elstree studios where his producers wangled some free facilities. Shifty has a budget of just £100,000, funded through Film London's Microwave scheme for "micro-budget" filmmakers. From the rising-star lead actors Riz Ahmed and Daniel Mays (brilliant as Michael Myshkin in the Red Riding trilogy) to humble runners, everyone was paid the same basic wage.
"Communism," as Creevy laughingly puts it, worked. "We had the best time ever. Even though it was a very serious film, I try and run a light-hearted set. At the end of the day, it is just a film. You aren't curing cancer."
Creevy began corresponding with the dealer who inspired his character in prison and sent him the script, seeking (and getting) his blessing for the project . "'One of the main reasons I'm writing this film,' I said to him in the letter, 'is you are an enigma – you are a nice guy, you're somebody's son, you're very intelligent, I have great conversations whenever I meet you, and yet I go back and work in the film industry and you go back and push crack,'" he says.
Creevy is about to update him on events in another letter. "I really want him to see the film. I would've liked him to be around while all this is happening. I feel obliged to keep in touch with him and hopefully we can carry on having a relationship – but he lives such a precarious life, he is always on the move . . . I don't want to reveal too much information about his life or it could be me getting firebombed in my flat." He chortles loudly.
Creevy's fictional character is more likeable than the man he was based on (who pointed out he would not be so emotionally attached to his family and friends), but the film still packs a hefty moral punch. The plot may occasionally be clunky, but there are plenty of authentic touches, from the coked-up white-van man to the trainers stacked neatly on their boxes in Shifty's bedroom.
Creevy is currently drafting a werewolf picture, The Blocks, and has completed a script for a film called Welcome to the Punch. He hopes it will be an identifiably British film with huge action sequences of something like Michael Mann's Heat. It sounds ambitious, but Creevy says he is taking small steps – if he was offered a £150m film right now, he would turn it down. "It's like Sarah Palin. She got offered the job but she shouldn't have taken it. I don't want to be the Sarah Palin of the film world when it all goes tits up."
Shifty is out now