Why cinema craves Northern realism...

Grimsby’s place in the annals of film can be traced back to 1901 and a short entitled Herring Boats Arriving at Grimsby. Nearly 40 years later the sea once again played a part in the town’s cinematic heritage when Irish actor Niall MacGinnis played a rescued fisherman in The Last Adventurers.

There has been a smattering of other movies, not least Atonement, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, Shane Meadows’ This is England and the John Cleese comedy Clockwise. Since then the town has been the poor relation of its Yorkshire neighbours, struggling to establish itself as a focal point for filmmakers.

Until now.

Pleasure Island depicts the return to Grimsby of Dean, a taciturn soldier with an enigmatic past. He receives a chilly response from his elderly father and discovers old friend Jess to be working as a pole dancer to support herself and her young son.

What’s more, both Jess and his old dad appear to be embroiled in the town’s drugs underworld, much of it controlled by businessman Miles. Soon Dean is squaring up to Jess’s boss, to his own father as he unravels his secrets and to Miles, the resident Mr Big.

Writer/director Mike Doxford set his debut feature in Grimsby and Cleethorpes. The spur, he says, was a conversation with actor/producer Ian Sharp, with whom Doxford had collaborated on a couple of earlier projects.“I’ve got a vague idea for a movie,” announced Sharp. “And I want to set it in Grimsby.”

Actors are known for their loyalty to their roots. Sharp’s reasoning was slightly different as he hails from Scunthorpe. But there was something to his insistence that interested Doxford, a 28-year-old Somerset native.

“I said, ‘Okay, let’s go and have a look.’ I hadn’t been to part of the world before so I didn’t really know what to expect. We drove up and I was just blown away.

There was so much beauty to capture, so many untapped resources and locations that we could put in a movie. The beaches were just stunning.

“We realised no one had made a movie round there and we wanted to be those people. We wanted to jump in there, meet fascinating people and put that all on screen.”

But Doxford and his cast – Sharp plays Dean with Gina Bramhill as Jess – sought to offer a different perspective on the standard thriller. Not for them the formulaic plot of the hero riding into town to clear out the bad guys.

Instead they focused on normality, realism and the sense of bad things playing out against a very ordinary backdrop.

Pleasure Island is defiantly independent, receiving zero funding from bodies such as the British Film Institute or Film North. Instead the budget, which Doxford identifies as “less than a million” was augmented by co-opting the support of local people.

There was, he says, no issue with the potentially problematic content of the script. Moreover the council, eager to assist, offered up municipal buildings as a unit base.

“The key thing to remember with any movie that has a difficult storyline is that it’s not just Grimsby or Cleethorpes, it’s the same everywhere,” observes Doxford. “That’s what we said to them: it has difficult elements for the characters but actually we want to show off the beauty of where they live.