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 bullet boy interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Brit flick aims to be more than Boyz N The East London Hood. “My view is, the kids in this film, they’re kids not gangsters. Much of their life is spent doing what normal kids do but they just happen to be in an environment in which guns are around them. I definitely didn’t want to make a gangster film, I wanted to make a film about two brothers and their mum, so it became something between a family melodrama and a rites-of-passage film.”So says Saul Dibb, director and co-writer of acclaimed new British film Bullet Boy. Set in Hackney, East London, in an area formerly dubbed “Murder Mile”, it offers a gritty, tragic look at inner-city black life increasingly defined by the way of the gun. Quick to dispel connections with the slick 90s US gang-related screen sagas (Juice, Menace II Society, Boyz N The Hood), Dibb, a former Hackney resident, insists that the nature of gun crime in the UK is a wholly different beast.  “Gang culture here isn’t the way that we might think of it,” he claims. “It’s not the Bloods and the Crips, it’s more like some kid cycles across an estate on his mountain bike, knocks on somebody’s door and shoots him.” Bullet Boy attempts a tricky balancing act: attempting to draw attention to a situation that statistics show has grown increasingly worse over the past decade; yet deflect accusations that it reinforces the stereotypes, or even courts controversy for PR purposes. Certainly the casting of Ashley Walters, himself previously convicted for possession of a “lethal weapon” from his days as Asher D in notorious garage outfit So Solid Crew, adds fuel to that particular fire.  “[The character] Ricky is a lot like myself,” admits Walters. “I could relate to him because obviously I’ve been to jail, although not for the same reasons, and I’ve grown up in a similar environment, so I brought a lot of me into the part.” “Casting Ashley was a very easy choice,” affirms Dibb. “There really aren’t many actors of his age around who could carry off the role the way he could. As for the whole So Solid thing – I would have chosen him anyway.” “For me it’s about identifying with people,” Dibb continues, keen to stress his motivations for making the film. “Understanding that when these kinds of things happen they happen to people who aren’t a million miles away from us, and often in situations that we would recognise.”
Leigh Singer
Bullet Boy, on selected release 08 April 05.
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