Months before the publication of his latest book, Max Porter went on holiday with Cillian Murphy and a mutual friend. “I said, ‘I’ve just finished another novel,’” recalls Porter. “And they said, ‘You’ve only just done one.’ I said, ‘Well, I bang them out fast, then edit them slowly.’” He ended up reading it out aloud, giving them their first glimpse into the “sensejumbled” head of a teen delinquent named Shy, resident of a “shite old mansion converted into a school for badly behaved boys in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere”.
Murphy had become close friends with Porter after starring in a stage adaptation of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, his debut novel. It wasn’t that Porter was angling for another collaboration. On the contrary: “I felt it was unadaptable because of it being a kind of weather system in Shy’s head. Also, I was a bit worried about all my content being wrung out for adaptations.”
By the end, I was knitting bootees for one of the young actors who’d just become a dad
Fast-forward two years and Shy was out in the world. Murphy, meanwhile, had set up his own film company, Big Things, and was “trying to dream up a project” to follow its award-winning debut, Small Things Like These, about abusive church workhouses for unwed mothers in Ireland. “Myself and Max talk all the time,” he says. Both have sons. Murphy comes from a family of teachers, while Porter has a sideline teaching in prisons and spent part of lockdown mentoring boys excluded from school. They decided that they would like to do something about care. “Not anything particularly about masculinity at that stage,” says Porter, “but something to do with the care system.”
‘I wondered what I’d got myself into’… Tracey Ullman and Murphy in Steve. Photograph: Robert Viglasky/Netflix/PA
There was just one problem. “While I adore Shy as a piece of literature,” says Murphy, “I recognised that it was unadaptable.” In the background of the novel, though, was the shadowy figure of the headteacher, Steve, a benign but minor presence. “Then,” Porter picks up, “I said, ‘How about we do Steve and I just leave the book behind?’ I started again completely.”
The result is a virtuosic piece of expressionistic storytelling set in a last-chance remand school in the 1990s, where overworked and underpaid staff struggle to nurture boys written off by society. It is simultaneously a cry of rage about a dysfunctional system, cut beyond the bone by a previous era of axe-wielding Tories, and a demonstration of why teenagers like Shy are worth saving, despite their often monstrous behaviour. Shy, for example, has trashed a shop, crashed an Escort, stabbed a finger (his stepdad’s) and broken a nose (we don’t find out whose).
Porter wrote the screenplay himself – his first – with a starring role for Murphy as the embattled headteacher presiding over a rabble of boys. There was a trio of women: a fierce but motherly deputy head, a student counsellor and a timid new staff member. Before long, Tracey Ullman, Emily Watson and Simbiatu Ajikawo – AKA Little Simz – had signed up.
Casting the pupils was a bigger job. “We saw 3,500 kids,” says Murphy. One stood out for Shy. Jay Lycurgo was born in 1998, two years after the film takes place. In the mid-90s, his dad played for Manchester United, but had since switched to work in pupil referral. “I got the email saying I had the audition,” says Lycurgo, “and I was like, ‘Dad, can I come and see you?’ I went to his office and ended up going to schools for a few weeks.”
I’m interviewing them all in a rabbit’s warren of hotel rooms the morning after the red-carpet London premiere of Steve. It has been a whirlwind few days, with well-received premieres also in Toronto and Cork. “A drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in this paper, “cut with slashes of bizarre black humour.” Variety’s Peter Debruge enthused: “A profoundly moving and superbly acted diamond in the rough.”
Holiday reading … Murphy and Max Porter. Photograph: Mat Hayward/The Hollywood Reporter/Getty Images
Porter, Murphy and director Tim Mielants sit in separate rooms, looking washed out. Ullman is stuck in bed upstairs with a croaky voice, but Lycurgo and Ajikawo are in the same room, fizzing with energy and banter. They are delighted to discover that they were both rejects of the Brit school of performing arts. Ajikawo admits that she didn’t even get an audition, while Lycurgo recalls turning up with a tear-jerking audition speech he had done for GCSE and forgetting the first line. “I didn’t get in because I thought acting was crying,” he says.
The film takes place over a single day and was shot in sequence over 29 days with a two-week rehearsal period beforehand for the boys to get to know each other. Mielants, who is Belgian and talks in metaphors, was still working on post-production for Small Things Like These when he was presented with the script. It could hardly have been more different, he says. Whereas Small Things had “a very small top-of-the-iceberg dialogue over a lot of silences, Max wrote a script that built a cathedral of words on top of the iceberg. So it’s like, ‘Wow. How am I going to do this?’”
It helped that he had been suffering a midlife crisis, he adds, caused by his father’s Alzheimer’s and the death of his brother, which had sent him back to family videos from the 1990s. “I wanted to see my parents, my grandparents again. And I understood the value in seeing them talking to camera.” This experience informed the film’s grainy, handheld aesthetic, and the idea of getting every resident of the house to do an interview direct to camera, describing themselves in three words. While the boys are boisterous, Steve is tearful and lost for words. “I’m looking at him instead of trying to understand him,” says Mielants. “And that’s where the surrealness comes back.”
The film is partly a love letter to the clashing musical cultures of the 1990s. “Max was sending me all these playlists,” says Mielants. “So I was story-boarding while listening to drum’n’bass, which wasn’t my kind of music. Then I started seeing stuff upside down, which was more like getting inside the minds of Steve and the boys. I was 16 in 1996 when that music was around. And I remember the energy and all these chemicals going through your body. I felt that the visuals should represent that feeling.”
The idea of filming in sequence over a short period came from Murphy, inspired by working with Ken Loach on The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Normally before taking a role, he says: “I lock myself away for months, reading and just walking around, talking to myself and developing a physicality and a voice. For this one, because I grew up in a house with teachers as parents, and I was a relatively troublesome kid at school – not in a malicious way but just annoying – I felt I had it to draw on. And because we were shooting chronologically, and Steve is so behind the curve with everything – underfunded, lacking in sleep, with a boy who is deteriorating – I wanted to be behind the curve all the time, stumbling over words and trying desperately to hold everything together. I didn’t want to be super-prepped.”
‘It’s a love letter’ … Jay Lycurgo, left, and Simbiatu Ajikawo AKA Little Simz. Photograph: Robert Viglasky/Netflix/PA
The unspoken subtext to the film is the differences – and similarities – between the mid-1990s and today. While dictaphones, Sony Walkmans and rackety old Renault 5s might seem quaint, underfunding of the care system and the vilification of young men are only too familiar. “Hopefully what it highlights is that the problems that these kids have are for ever,” says Murphy. “They existed pre-technology and pre-internet and pre-social media. They’ve just been exacerbated by the development of this stuff.”
Teenage boys, it seems, are all too easy to write off. “I think they’re an easy target, statistically and ideologically. And certainly in Ireland and in the UK the suicide rate among young men is staggeringly and tragically high,” he adds. For all that, in person, Lycurgo seems nothing like the tempestuous Shy, he knows all too well what Murphy is talking about. “I deal with mental health every day in my own personal struggles,” he says.
At school, Lycurgo was cheeky and distracted, more interested in football than studying. It wasn’t until he was 19 that he discovered he had dyslexia and could have done with the sort of personal attention he saw in his father’s referral units. His breakthrough as Shy was to realise he could use that vulnerability. “I felt like it was a piece of me that I just had to show to everyone. So it’s not necessarily like, ‘I’ve got this character.’ It’s like, ‘OK, cool. How can I use it to respect Shy and to respect the material?’”
By the time Ullman and Ajikawo arrived on set, the actors playing the boys had boisterously bonded. “They were so feral and hostile I wondered what I’d got myself into,” says Ullman. “But as a grandmother, I get that boy energy, and their vulnerability. I began to enjoy it. By the end, I was knitting bootees for one of them who had just become a dad.”
Ajikawo had the added pressure of balancing rehearsals with the run-up to an appearance alongside Coldplay on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage, which was booked for the weekend filming wrapped. While in person, she is stylish and articulate, in the film she is a dowdy mouse. “I missed the workshops,” she says, “which I think was kind of cool and true to where I fit into the story – because I’m new to the school.”
In her other persona, as Little Simz, she wrote a song for the film. “I wanted it to feel like a 90s banger, as well as having moments of tenderness,” she says. “But also, Shy loves jungle, so let’s get some great beats in there.” The track is called Don’t Leave Too Soon. Looking at rough-cuts of the film, she realised, at heart, it was a race to save Shy from himself. She looks warmly at the actor who brought the story to life and tells him: “In the song, I was saying, ‘You want to be seen and I see you.’ It’s a love letter to you.” Which is a pretty good summary of the film.
Steve is in cinemas now and on Netflix from 3 October
