“It was dance as action rather than as aesthetics”: Stephen Daldry on Billy Elliot

Stephen Daldry’s debut film Billy Elliot dances a fine line between sentimentality and serious intent. A grimly evocative portrait of a colliery village in the northeast of England during the 1984 miners’ strike, it’s also a joyously old-fashioned tale of a young lad, the eponymous Billy (Jamie Bell), realising his ambition to become a ballet dancer despite the disapproval of his striking father. Determinedly realist throughout, full of carefully observed moments and quietly affecting performances, the film also features some of the most exuberant dance sequences in recent memory. Yet put in terms of a Hollywood pitch, Billy Elliot’s Ken-Loach-meets-Flashdance premise doesn’t sound the most appealing of prospects.

The achievement of Billy Elliot is that what could so easily have been an unhappy mix of showbiz wish-fulfilment and social realism ends up a moving, sure-footed film. Scripted by Lee Hall (who grew up in Newcastle during the strike), it portrays the acrimonious background of the miners’ conflict with assured economy – in the colliery village where Billy lives, police in riot gear are forever milling around, lurking at the edge of the frame as a constant threat. There are impressive performances from first-time actor Bell as well as from Gary Lewis and Jamie Draven as Billy’s dad and brother, quick-tempered men, embittered and deflated by the experience of the dispute. When they discover Billy has been using money allotted to boxing lessons to pay for his ballet class (run with dry sarcasm by Julie Walter’s Mrs Wilkinson) it’s a betrayal too far: Billy’s dad erupts, banning him from lessons; his brother picks him up, stands him on the table and yells, “Dance, you twat.”

Dance is just what Billy does, letting his frustration rip in the cramped backyard of their house. To the angry, urgent strains of the Jam’s ‘Town Called Malice’ he kicks against the brick walls before breaking out into a stunningly choreographed routine that propels him through the empty streets before he collapses in exhaustion. It’s an exhilarating sequence: bouncing off outhouses, pounding the dusty tarmac with his heavy boots, Billy’s energy is infectious and gloriously expressive – and the number knocks spots off any of the muddy dance routines in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark.

Inevitably nothing quite matches the feral panache of this extended dance sequence; once Billy overcomes the big emotional hurdle of winning his father’s approval, it’s as if the film awkwardly soft-peddles the strike. But on the whole Billy Elliot justifies the faith producers Working Title placed in Daldry, a critically acclaimed theatre director who’d yet to do anything in film, when they signed a three-year deal with him in 1997. When the film played to enthusiastic audiences in Cannes this year, the press inevitably fixed on the fact that here was another British director who like Sam Mendes (American Beauty) and Nicholas Hynter (Madness of King George) had made a successful transition from stage to screen. Perhaps best known for his production of An Inspector Calls, Daldry acknowledges he’s part of a “little bubble of theatre directors” working in movies and cites the establishment of Woodfall Films in the late 50s by playwright John Osborne and theatre director Tony Richardson as a precedent. Both Richardson and Osborne were closely associated with London’s Royal Court theatre, of which Daldry was artistic director from 1992 to 1997. Relaxed and good-humoured, his conversation displayed some of the charm that no doubt helped him obtain millions of pounds of lottery money for that theatre in 1996.

Edward Lawrenson: The plot of Billy Elliot could almost be a parody: a young lad dreams of becoming a ballet dancer against the background of the miners’ strike. What drew you to the story? 

Stephen Daldry: I put on a play about the experiences of women during the miners’ strike in a pit village outside Doncaster during the dispute, so I understand the background. And I felt I could do something with the emotional rhythms of the script – Lee Hall has a fantastic way of writing for kids and I recognised the story’s emotional truth. 

How did you balance the political context and the emotional drama? Was there any pressure on you to tone down the politics? 

No, not really. The police get quite a hard ride – in most outdoor scenes you’ll notice they’re there and their presence builds up until the big set piece where the village is under siege. It’s true we don’t go into the detail of the politics of the strike; that would be a different film. This is all seen from a kid’s point of view. The starting point was a famous photograph of riot police with their shields and two little kids coming back from school just walking in front of them – we used the image in the film. You get a juxtaposition between the harsh reality of the strike and the kids’ own world. 

When Billy has his interview with the Royal Ballet School they wish his father good luck with the strike. It’s an easy sentiment. 

It’s all that crappy liberal southern “Oh, the miners, y’know, poor people, good luck, see you later,” meanwhile back to Hampstead Garden Suburb… It was a swipe at the liberal establishment which the dad picks up on, saying, “Fuck you lot, for your patronising sympathy.” 

The dance sequences are very feral, very physical. 

I’d worked with choreographer Peter Downing before on a theatre piece and I knew I wanted to use him. We decided the key point was that the kid has to find a language of self-expression so we used bits of his world – boxing, football, and so on – in the dance. And there’s an emotional logic to it – in the scene where his dad discovers Billy in the boxing hall and the kid dances for him, for instance, it’s actually a conversation, Billy is talking to his father through his dance. It was dance as action rather than as aesthetics; dance as conversation rather than as abstract; the kid expressing himself rather than the brilliance of the finished product. 

There’s something very apt about the opening where Billy dances to a T-Rex track: glam rock was all about playing with traditional notions of gender identity. 

I love your logic, and I’m sure I’ll repeat it. But to be honest it was because Lee and I like the music and ‘Cosmic Dancer’ was a great song to start the film with. 

The production of ‘Swan Lake’ Billy dances in as an adult is very similar to Matthew Bourne’s version where the swans were played by men. Why did you choose it? 

I thought it would be interesting given that it reinvents the ballet by messing about with gender. And I always liked the idea of little Billy growing up to be Adam Cooper, who was in that production. And it was playing when we were filming.

How did you find Jamie Bell to play Billy? 

We saw about 2000 kids over several months. It was a tall order: the kid has to come from a specific geographical area, has to act well enough to hold down a movie – with a bit of charisma on top – and has to have the dancing ability to get into the Royal Ballet School. And the determination to persevere through a gruelling process – the kid’s in every scene, so we wanted to get one who wouldn’t be bored after three days or by two o’clock in the afternoon. Because Jamie had been dancing since he was six he had the tenacity to see it through. And the support of his mum to make sure he stayed online, as it were. Stuart Wells, who plays Michael, had never acted before; we found him in a skateboarding park in Whitley Bay. I much prefer working with real kids because with stage-school kids you have to unpick what they think they’ve learned.

How closely did you work with director of photography Brian Tufano? 

It was vital. It was Danny Boyle who recommended him; he said, “Oh, Brian’s great, especially on your first film… keeps you out of trouble,” which is exactly what he did. One of the things we discussed was not making an overblown use of the camera, which is often the way with first-time directors. I wanted to avoid that spurious search for style over content and I tried to move the camera only when it was important to the narrative. One of the models I took here was Mike Leigh. 

You’ve been reported as saying your sense of control over the film-making process wasn’t as absolute as in the theatre. 

I was used to running my own theatre, which means I was used to total budgetary control. And in the theatre I know intuitively where I need to spend money and where I need to pull back. In the movies I didn’t have that intuition, there wasn’t a lot of money and it was controlled by other people. 

A lot of the references in the film are very British. How well is it going to travel? 

I showed it in Croatia at a film festival with subtitles and the audience seemed to go with it entirely. And it’s getting a 250-print release in Germany. After all, it’s a universal story. I don’t think viewers will be put off by the locality, though I must admit I’m put off by the fact that I can’t understand more than half of what they’re saying in the American films I see. 

When you signed this deal with Working Title in 1997 you talked of a sense of renaissance within British cinema. Three years on, is that still true? 

I’m not an expert, I can only talk about this subjectively. There’s a strange little bubble of theatre directors moving into film at the moment; we all know each other and talk to each other. The last time theatre directors moved into filmmaking collectively as a generation was Woodfall Films: Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and so on. For my money it’s mostly about opportunity and for whatever reason there’s a degree of confidence that allows that to happen. But whether it’s a renaissance in quality is for other people to say.

► Billy Elliot is back in UK cinemas from 28 September.