Paddy Considine on the “atrocities” that inspired Shane Meadows’ ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’
One of the greatest films of the 2000s was Shane Meadows‘ Dead Man’s Shoes, starring Paddy Considine (who also co-wrote it with Meadows and Paul Fraser). The film told of an older brother who returns from army service to take revenge on those who had bullied his mentally impaired younger sibling while he was away.
Discussing his admiration for his director, Considine once said, “I think I’ve been acting for nearly ten years, and he is the only director that I’ve felt I’ve had a voice through his films. I feel creative in his company; he’s like a brother. He really is. And that sometimes means that we have to spend a lot of time apart from each other.”
The actor then noted that the idea for Dead Man’s Shoes came from a time when he and Meadows were talking about the kind of malevolent occurrences that had gone on in their Midlands hometowns. “They were kind of atrocities, but they’d gone unnoticed and unrecognised,” he said. “Horrible things had happened, but they’d been done in the name of leisure almost.”
“We started talking about incidents and thought, ‘Well, nobody ever really paid for that. Those guys are still going around today,'” Considine added. “[There’s] the idea of the brother coming back after ten years and kind of making the basic bones of it as a revenge movie.”
However, while many revenge films take place in big cities, the unique feature of Dead Man’s Shoes is that it takes place in a rural Midlands town. Considine and Meadows were “thinking, ‘What if this happened in our town, instead of in Ohio or somewhere?’ So that was the basis of it, and we wrote it in a few weeks. We had about 60 pages of scenes and dialogues that we knitted together.”
That’s the film’s brilliance; it took a well-worn film trope and refreshed it with a unique setting and cast of characters. Considine concluded, “The truth of it is that we come back to what feels the most honest to us in our heart. That’s where Dead Man’s Shoes came from. We shot it in less than three weeks. That was the mentality, just a guerrilla-style, back-to-basics film with a smaller crew.”
Meadows himself once noted the kind of thinking that had led to the film being conceived after he opened up on a friend who had committed suicide after being bullied and taking drugs. “I couldn’t believe that going back ten years later, he had been totally forgotten in the town – it was as if he had never existed,” he said. “I was filled with anger against the people who had bullied and pushed the drugs on him and with despair at what drugs had done to that small community.”
