Mullets & houses: An interview with Greg Loftin, Director of Saxon
In preparation for the Edinburgh Film Festival in June 2008, here’s a long delayed interview with Greg Loftin director of Saxon, and producer Elise Valmorbida. In competition for the Michael Powell Award in the British Gala section of the festival Saxon was one of last year’s treats.
“Does he have the full mullet, does he have the half-mullet or does he have no mullet?” One sunny lunchtime in Edinburgh towards the end of the annual film festival in August 2007 the conversation turned to poor haircuts and poorer housing.
That much derided haircut the mullet has, along with the abuse levelled at chavs, been used as a byword for out-of-time social isolation and poverty, generally from smug, richer onlookers. So when the mullet represents some of this in a film it requires a keeper.
A film that could be described as council estate film noir, Saxon follows the failings of one Fast Eddy (played by Sean Harris) as he returns to his home in search of money in a hurry. Saxon is part of the small trend of British media in the noughties that have shaken up old depictions of how the ‘working class’ is shown on screen. Led by the Channel Four show Shameless these modern day kitchen sink dramas are far more raucous than their predecessors but capture the hope in desperation more keenly. A truth in cheap drugs and hoodies perhaps… or mullets. And that specialist haircut presented logistical challenges all of its own on Saxon’s tight shoot.
Named after the fictional housing estate it is set in, Saxon was conceived from the desperation the director Greg Loftin observed in some residents of real life ones. The protagonist Fast Eddy spends his time in the film mainly being beaten up all around this evocative location. And it’s a great location which begs the question along the same lines of some 1980s housing studies about whether certain features of social housing promote behaviour or whether the people who end up living there are like that anyway. Loftin never addresses that question because he doesn’t need to. The heart of Saxon is the desperation of tenants living in appalling social housing and the rage levelled at the council because of it.
The seeds were sown for this project from Loftin’s previous work producing local government information videos on various council estates around London. “We were out there for various reasons, talking to tenants, and kicking around some of the most appalling housing estates I’ve ever seen in my life – I was quite shocked. Tower Hamlets, mostly East London, Canning Town, out that way.” The thing that struck Loftin was the sheer state of decay: “ I was around there talking to tenants at a point where their housing estates were falling apart…In other words you were walking around and there were signs saying Beware – Falling Concrete”.
For Loftin the response that stuck out was the response of residents marooned in houses and flats that weren’t being maintained. “People were in a constant rage with the council and talked of them as this malevolent force in their lives. The council was blighting their lives, all the way through in every way you could think of. Some people were raging against it, and some people were more like ‘this is our lot, we’re done for. What can we do? We can’t go anywhere from here. The council has completely fucked us over. They just want us to stay in our boxes and shut the fuck up.’ This kind of sense of disempowerment; this was such a strong feeling I felt I wanted to write something about that.”
These feelings spill over in the brilliant location chosen for Saxon - the Roundshaw Estate in Wallington. An estate due to be demolished yet still lightly inhabited, the crew had the run of it providing they left it in a decent state. Fast Eddy roams around this knackered looking place searching for a missing boxer only to be continually beaten up. More often than not by the bailiffs – Saxon’s unflattering caricatures of council housing officers who rule the estate as their own personal fiefdom. As an aside Loftin reveals that he himself was evicted from a squat by a bailiff: “So I guess this is my revenge on the bailiffs”.
Sean Harris’ natural intensity fits his character in Saxon perfectly as the film throws so much hurt at him. As Loftin describes, “For me it’s black comedy, I had this idea about a man who’s troubles were in a sense mapped on his body. You could see he was being hurt. He loses an eye at the beginning and he keeps on being hurt. The whole thing plays out over three days and over that period of time, he’s very badly damaged.”
That damage didn’t end with the broken houses or physically upon Fast Eddy – it extended to haircuts. His mullet is gradually shorn through the film - a strand here, a strand there – until he’s ready to leave Saxon. Here the similarities to that touchstone of the private eye genre – Chinatown – come into play. Where Jack Nicholson’s character there humiliatingly gets his nose cut, in Saxon Eddie loses his eye at the start and gradually his mullet too. There you have it - the mullet as a symbol of social decay and redemption.
For information on Saxon visit the website at www.saxonthefilm.com
