Charlotte Regan’s BFI Film Academy masterclass and insights for young creatives

Writer-director and BFI Film Academy alumna Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Regan notices the empty spots in the modern British cinematic canon, wielding the magical realism of her narrative worlds to colour them in. Her young, daydreamy female protagonists – like Georgie from Scrapper (2023) – bring charm to their adversities. Her debut feature followed a 12-year-old latchkey kid as she attempts to make sense of her world and her place in it after her mother’s death and the sudden return of her father. It marked Regan’s transition from music videos and short films to feature-length cinema. Her latest work is a BBC1 crime series called Mint.

At a BFI Film Academy masterclass this April, Regan joined production designer Amy Maguire and cinematographer Christopher Sabogal to discuss the show, which was described by host Rógan Graham as “a Romeo and Juliet-esque contemporary Glaswegian crime-drama romance”. 

Discussing how they came to work together on this project, Regan recalled a stressed first encounter with Maguire while they were filming the first series of Apple’s Gilded Age drama The Buccaneers (2023-) and quickly formed a camaraderie. She met Sabogal while working across music videos and commercials, a field where he is a prominent DP. “He was always on my list and said no to so many jobs”, she says. Eventually, they worked together on a few commercials, with Mint being their first long-form project together. When you’re building a team, you have to trudge through some difficult working relationships, says Regan, “but then you find the Amys and the Chrises”. 

All three got their starts working on music videos, which, as Graham noted, shows through in the experimentation and texture of their new show. Regan wasn’t really into cinema. She grew up watching and making hundreds of Grime videos with her friends, getting paid sometimes, but mostly bartering. Directing didn’t appear viable as a career, and her grandmother agreed, imploring her to respond to the job ad for the café down the road. “I don’t know how to make anything, Nan, and I drop things a lot. So, I was like, ‘that’s not going to work, is it?’” 

She had no idea what to do with herself (“the GCSEs were looking rough”), but happened upon an advert for the complimentary BFI Film Academy programme, which she says introduced her to cinema, the plentiful roles behind the camera, and friends she’s still in contact with today. 

Reminiscing on their amateur work, before “the burden of everything you know”, as Graham defined it, the trio spoke about the ironic freedom of financial constraints. Maguire spoke about the overwhelming possibilities and temptations money promises, often stifling the clarity and creativity that are often borne out of limitations. Indeed, it was the blind spots within the crime genre that inspired Regan to write Mint.

She professed her love for gangster films and TV shows, “but I was always wondering what the women were up to. You see them so briefly, and usually they’re doing something like making a cup of tea, and then they’re gone.” What was happening in between shootouts, and what were these women discussing and feeling?  

According to Maguire, the show was to be told through the “naive, magic-seeking eyes” of Shannon (Emma Laird), the daughter of a significantly notorious crime family. And so to capture her fairytale perspective, they avoided the social realism stereotype of “everything [feeling] quite grey and downtrodden”. Instead, they discussed “pushing the colours as much as [they] can and having a cinematic stamp”. 

According to Graham, the brawls in the series are “not your typical gangster fights”, and in this the team was guided by Shannon’s overactive imagination and the incredible fight scenes of Justin Kurzel’s version of Macbeth (2015). Maguire’s art department created breakaway safety glasses and rubber versions of all the weapons for some of the clashes. 

Discussing cross-departmental collaboration, Maguire deemed the moment you leave your echo chamber, “compiling as much as you can and seeing where that aligns”, as the most rewarding part of her role. In those early conversations, where you’re dreaming together, exchanging moodboards and references, anything seems possible. Yet by the time it reaches the editing room, only half of it is how you envisioned it, says Regan. She credits editor Mdhamiri Á Nkemi (another BFI Film Academy alumnus) with rescuing the rest.

The audience Q&A segment approaches. “Before you ask something, can you tell us your favourite biscuit, as well?” Regan requests. 

An audience member (whose favourite biscuit is a “choccy” Hobnob, which Regan finds suspicious) asks her how she deals with notes she doesn’t necessarily agree with. Regan says she struggled with how to find her own voice among so many experienced seniors on her debut feature. She felt that if she didn’t have a “really elegant answer” for why she disagreed with a critique, she wasn’t fit to contest it. But now she has gained confidence and learned to communicate when feedback doesn’t instinctively sit right with her. 

Another attendee (Maryland cookies) asks how Regan decides which ideas to develop further. With her debut feature, Regan says she was saddened that working-class films were disproportionately depressing; “it wasn’t really the world I remember growing up in, where everyone was actually full of incredible humour, and it was a happy place to live on an estate.”

As Regan persists in filling in the blanks of contemporary British cinema, we eagerly await to see how Mint will bring life to the underexplored narratives of the organised crime genre.  

Mint is on BBC1 and BBC iPlayer from 20 April.