Not many directors are brave enough to out themselves as a teen racist, but for three weeks, at the age of 12, Shane Meadows fell in with the wrong crowd. He witnessed a horrific beating, which to this day fills him with shame.
The event inspired his latest film, This Is England, which documents the moment skinhead culture became ugly. It is a coming-of-age story set in a seaside town, in 1983, at the height of Thatcherism. Twelve-year-old Shaun Fields (the name is deliberately autobiographical) joins a gang of skinheads, but camaraderie gives way to tension as the National Front stir up racial hatred.
'I got into the skinheads through my sister going out with one,' Meadows tells me. 'He got me into reggae, and took me out hunting in big gangs. Then a split happened. Whereas with the first skinhead it was all parties and fun, this other guy was the one who had been to prison and came in with a much darker, political idea.'
Thirty-four-year-old, crop-haired Meadows is one of Britain's leading film directors. He made his name making low-budget, largely improvised films about working-class life. In many ways, This Is England is a prequel to Meadows' east Midlands trilogy (Twenty Four Seven, A Room For Romeo Brass and Once Upon a Time in the Midlands). His last film, the vigilante thriller Dead Man's Shoes, was nominated for Best British Film at the 2005 Baftas.
Meadows is often compared to Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, but Scorsese is his idol. He may be dealing with the mean streets of Uttoxeter but Meadows loves films with a universal message. 'I've been trying to show that, irrelevant of what situation working-class people are in, they'll make the best of what they've got.'
Full of colour and wit, Meadows' early films mirror his experience of growing up on a council estate in Uttoxeter. He was playing pool in pubs at eight, and by his teens was 'doing acid and pot with the big lads'. He was, he laughs, a rather pathetic criminal. He was caught stealing some chicken tikka sandwiches and a breast pump for a friend who had just had a baby. The main theme of Meadows' work is the nature - and failure - of masculinity. His films are full of teenage males searching for an older role model. In This Is England, Shaun, whose father has died in the Falklands, is bullied at school for wearing flares, and ostracised for being a loner. (Meadows' own father was a long-distance lorry driver who spent most of his time away from home.)
Meadows says he understands how gangs fill a vacuum for youngsters with little hope. 'When you're 13 and you've got long, straggly hair and people are taking the piss out of your trousers, and you see this charismatic group of guys in smart Ben Shermans walking down the street, you want to be like them.'
Like Scorsese, Meadows has a love-hate relationship with violence: 'The one thing I abhor is someone using their physical advantage to abuse somebody.' Filming the scene in This Is England where Milky, a West Indian skinhead, is beaten up reduced Meadows to tears.
As a filmmaker, Meadows is self-taught. Thrown off a photography course in 1994, he began borrowing equipment from a local film-making collective. Using friends as actors, he created his own brand of bargain basement film-making. His short films impressed producer Stephen Woolley, who bankrolled TwentyFourSeven (1997), which won Bob Hoskins the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival.
But what really marked out Meadows was his ability to coax astonishing performances from non-actors. Thomas 'Tommo' Turgoose, who plays the lead, Shaun, in This Is England, was first spotted in a Grimsby games arcade. 'He was the only one who asked for a fiver for the audition and we said, "That's our boy,"' laughs Meadows, who saw a lot of himself in Tommo. 'He was really ballsy and, like me, a lot smaller than his friends. He had that survival instinct.'
Previously excluded from school and diagnosed with ADD, Turgoose is remarkable in the film; indeed his acting has been described as the most charismatic British child performance since David Bradley in Kes. Tragically, his mother died of cancer just after filming, prompting Meadows and two of the film's actors, Andrew Shim and Stephen Graham, to make a gentlemen's agreement that they would always be there for him. 'Tommo is now 15 and he is auditioning for other acting roles,' says Meadows with pride.
This Is England has already won a British Independent Film Award for Best Film, beating The Queen, and a Most Promising Newcomer award for Turgoose, but in March the BBFC gave it an 18 certificate, claiming its use of 'vicious racial language... might give out the wrong message to an impressionable audience'. Meadows, naturally, is gutted. 'I really had a golden ticket in my hand. If I'd wanted to make money, I could have tapped into that whole Football Factory/Quadrophenia teen gang film. But I chose not to do that.'
Meadows has no love of Hollywood. He makes occasional commercials but still lives in Burton-on-Trent. In fact, there is a puritanical streak to Meadows, who hates filming sex scenes: 'Emotionally, I'll send someone to hell, but when it comes to a girl taking her clothes off, I really struggle.'
Although women in Meadows' films don't take any bullshit, it's the men who are centre stage. But his next film, Mary, will be about a young woman caught up in prostitution. He knows it will be a hard sell. 'The things affecting me now as a filmmaker are deeper and darker,' he says, 'but I know I can find beauty there.'
· This Is England is released 27 April