''I was feeding the one with the Datsun''

[fatself]

Shane Meadows


The director of This is England on skinhead culture, why he dislikes his film Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and how he wrings amazing performances from untried actors

Read part two of the interview

Wednesday April 25, 2007
Guardian Unlimited


'I knew I was never going to find the kid I wanted in a stage school.' Shane Meadows at the NFT. Photograph: Linda Nylind



Jason Solomons: I'm Jason Solomons and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this extremely special screening to kick off the NFT's retrospective of one of the finest talents in British film-making, the rawest and most explosive talent and I should know that because I've just been hanging out with the rawness and the explosiveness out there. Ladies and gentlemen, Shane Meadows. You can tell from the applause that they loved the movie. Where did you find him?

Shane Meadows: We found Thommo [Thomas Turgoose, who plays 12-year-old Shaun] after - I'd been searching for two or three months - and Louise was casting the film. I think we'd got pretty much everyone except for the main character. I knew I was never going to find the kid I wanted in a stage school but I hoped I'd find them in a drama school at least, just in the sort of hope that I'd be able to get one that half-wanted to be an actor so that they'd make it to the end. That didn't happen, and so we called in this guy called Des Hamilton who was a specialist street caster and had found the kid in Rat Catcher - and got a really great reputation for going out into council estates and real areas and giving out cards and getting kids to come to auditions. Thommo was one of those who was found. There's a project called the Space Project in Grimsby, which is for kids who maybe aren't in school or aren't in school a lot, which Thommo wasn't at the time. And he just turned up on this tape, and I watched this tape, which is actually on the website that we've set up for the film - thisisenglandmovie.co.uk. You can actually see that very first audition. And I saw this tape and it was like looking in a mirror 20 years ago and seeing myself: you know, this little kid who was obviously smaller than every person on that tape but had more balls than anyone on there and I wanted to meet him. And I met him and he scared the life out of me because I thought: "I'll be lucky to get five days out of this kid, never mind a whole shoot." But he proved us sort of wrong and right at the same time and he made it to the end and obviously was worth every second.
JS: I think so too. Well done Thommo (applause). That's me clapping a Man Utd fan. He's had a right go at me about Arsenal backstage.

Thommo (from audience): You said I was six years old!

JS: That's showbiz darling. You'll learn. I don't know how you do it but you do wring fantastic performances out of non-professional actors or actors that we haven't seen that much. Do you think you have a special relationship with your crew? Because that's the most raucous green room I've seen in my entire life. Pizza has been flying and insults have been flying. It's an extraordinary atmosphere but people backstage have been saying it's exactly the same on your sets.

SM: I suppose I learnt a massive lesson when I made Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. I didn't realise that I had a process and I had a technique for making films and it wasn't until I got it wrong that I figured out what I should be doing. So that was like me going to college or film school. I managed to just get it wrong, and it's not that I detest the film but it just doesn't seem to fit with the others - and that's what taught me, to be honest. After that, Dead Man's Shoes was a reaction to that and the film Midlands was supposed to be, believe it or not. If you see someone like Thommo in a role, you can pick the kid in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but it's not believeable in the same way. Picking big stars for things: it's very difficult to buy someone as a skinhead if it's someone that you know. There's two sides to it: If it's people that you've maybe not seen before that lends itself to the belief that this is a real group of friends, and the other thing is that their appetite is insatiable: they don't care that we haven't booked caravans, they don't care what the food's like, they want to be on set, they want to be acting and they want to be part of making a film. And everyone knows on my films - I tell people at the very beginning - that you might come in with the main role but if you don't put the effort in your role will shrink and someone else's will grow in your place. So everyone knows on a daily basis that they have to be working all the time and people who maybe haven't made it yet are the right kind of people for that kind of working, I think.

JS: Nevertheless, you seem to have this ensemble: we saw Andrew Slim come on earlier who's been I think in six of your films. Is it because you have this unique way of working that means it takes a certain type of spirit to be able to gel with you?

SM: I remember, I was doing Dead Man's Shoes and we were stopping by this lake and there were these birds that used to come in - as in flappers. Paddy was going to this like little family of ducks that were perfect and preened, little baby ducks, mummy and daddy and that, and I picked this little retarded duck. And Paddy said: "That's you. You always go for the little orphan. You pick the one that no-one else is going to pick." I thought, well Paddy's not going to feed it. Paddy was feeding the pretty little family, two-up, two-down with the Mercedes - and I was feeding the one with the Datsun. So I think it's just inherent in my nature. With Thommo, we made a pact early on: we knew that if we just used him for the film, and then left him, where Thommo had come from in Grimsby, to go back to that life would have been hard. So we made a pact early on, because we obviously liked him anyway, that it couldn't be one of those film experiences where we just leave him at the end. So he's been coming and seeing us and that relationship has developed. It was the same with Andrew on Romeo Brass. If you get involved with people and ask them to give you their heart and soul you can't just sort of expect them for six weeks and then drop them like stone.

JS: I certainly think that that has come off the screen in This Is England, which I think is a wonderful work about growing up and about England and Britain. I've said to people that that was my youth up there even though I wasn't a skinhead and didn't grow up in Uttoxeter. The specificity of it I think appeals to every single person because it's every detail that's right in this film, from the boots to the music to the fences to the estates. How did you get that? Because it's a period film. It's only about 24 years ago but feels completely vibrant and completely now but nothing feels merchant ivory if you know what I mean.

SM: Sure yeah. I suppose, I didn't know I was a film-maker at that age but I was absorbing things - I am that kind of person. I frighten my mum and dad with the things that I remember from my childhood. My memories are so vivid. The skinhead thing was the first time that I was part of a gang and I went from being this woolly haired little kid with a reindeer jumper on, getting shoved into in the queue. There was this thing that my sister started going out with a skinhead and there was this way he used to walk and to carry himself: he looked incredible. They called him Pecker because he would walk down the street like this (mimes woodpecker movements). The lads, the craic that they were having, the fact that there was no jobs but they had this arrogance about them, that was like: "We don't give a flying fuck that we haven't got a job. We're going to cause you so much bother and we're going to let our voices be known." And that kind of energy has disappeared from youth. You look around the streets now and you can spot a chav and a skate kid but apart from that there doesn't seem to be any separation with kids any more. At that particular point in time there would be a kid dressed up as Adam Ant and another as Boy George. You know they were wandering round, these people, and they were really proud of what they believed in. And so, I remembered that: the 80s for me wasn't this kind of soundtrack of Now That's What I Call Music, it was much more than that. Being a film-maker I obviously remembered it a certain kind of way. The main thing is that I look at that film and they feel like my old friends. That was the first thing: I didn't want it to be this Romper Stomper style alpha male, mistreating girls, you know all that kind of thing. I remember the girls being as hard as the guys in that situation and as frightening as the guys if not more so. I wanted the gang to be all shapes and sizes as my gang was. Uttoxeter wasn't big enough to have a really cool gang of skinheads: it had a fat one, a thin one, a long one, a small one etc.

JS: The clothes and the music are integral to a film like this. You get one detail wrong and the whole edifice crumbles. How hard did you work with that, or was it simply instinctive to know that it's Toots and the Maytals' Louis Louis, not the one from Animal House?

SM: (Laughs) I think being a skinhead at that time, at 11, 12 years old, I think the first time you buy records, those memories stay with you and you remember those times and why you bought them. The very first record I bought was Candy Girl by New Edition. I went in and said: "No it's the new edition" and the man said: "No the band's called New Edition", so I had that argument and then I met Pecker and he sort of saved my life really. He took me under his wing. He was buying Who records, Yardbirds, Small Faces alongside educating me about roots and skinhead culture. We'd buy Toots and the Maytals, Desmond Dekker and then we'd go and see someone like Desmond Dekker in Nottingham. You know, this guy was completely aware of that part of skinhead culture.

JS: Because most people will associate it with a punk movement or a more kind of violent movement than dancehall or a kind of reggae influence.

SM: The thing that was put across to me was that I could be a skinhead because I was working class. It wasn't a rich boy's game. A pair of Docs, a pair of work jeans, white shirt, braces if you'd got 'em, shaved head and that was the job done. It was like, I'm being told at school that I'm a sack of shit, I'm going to sweep the streets or I'm going to be emptying bins, but these people make me feel alive: we've got our own music, I understand my culture, it goes back 15 years and that was really attractive to a kid. When I looked at making this film I went out to try and find a film about skinheads that had been made and I was almost hoping there would be one made so I didn't have to make one but with Romper Stomper, American History X and Made in Britain, which was more of a television film, you've kind of only got that one side. If I wanted to go and pitch a film it would probably be much easier to get a British Romper Stomper made than This is England, with piano music in it: something far more sensitive. But I realised there was a huge gap there, so if I was saying to people that I used to be a skinhead people were thinking that I used to be a racist, and I was not a racist.

JS: You have been an autobiographical film-maker and this one is probably your most autobiographical yet but it's taken you four or five films to get there. Were you scared of 'fessing up? "I was a teenage skinhead!"?

SM: It wasn't that I don't think. There was a documentary about Dead Man's Shoes where I spoke about this evening where I went to this flat with a skinhead - and I was a skinhead myself - I'd sort of done everything I could do. I had smoked this, and drank this and took this and took that. I thought I was going to be a hardcase, I was going to be a sort of super crook of the 20th century but that wasn't working out, I was getting caught pinching John Lowe darts sets and I had the worst record of crimes. One I got away with was pinching damsons from a fruit shop. The woman rang my mum because she liked me and I got home and there was a big line - the damson police - waiting for me. So that was not going anywhere. I thought I was something that I wanted. I wanted to be like this guy who had been in fights and in prison. And I wanted to see a real fight and I got taken and shown one for my own benefit and it was the most horrific thing I'd ever seen in my life. Seeing myself talking about it on television I realised that that was when I moved onto a different path and started walking a different way. I wasn't scared of it, you know I've still got the tattoos.

JS: So if we go back, because I remember when I first met you it was 10 years ago and I was introducing a selection of your shorts, one of which was Smalltime, which was about those days when you were nicking John Lowe darts sets, so let's go back to Smalltime and have a look at that.

[runs clip]

[fatself]

Shane Meadows part two


Wednesday April 25, 2007
Guardian Unlimited


Audience watch Smalltime.
JS: What year was that?

SM: I shot it in 95 and it came out in 96.

JS: Your themes are quite established: there's dialogue, there's the cheeky monetary exchanges, nicking stuff. There's you in it as an actor, which we haven't seen for a while. Did you want to be an actor-director at that point?

SM: No, not at all. The first films that I made I made by myself. I got chucked out of college for financial reasons and I was supposed to be doing a job to pay my debts off that summer and I actually ended up doing volunteer work at a film centre in Nottingham. Everyone was away, all the students had gone off to wherever they go in the summer and I was at home and Wimbledon was on but all the people I liked had been knocked out. So I got this camera and I was on my own and I started acting in front of it and making this very early, clumsy version of Where's the Money, Ronnie?. And I went back and this guy let me have use of the edit sweet and I chopped it together and he thought it was OK. By the third month I'd made a couple of films by myself. I was actually really comfortable acting in front of me but obviously I had obviously always been really petrified of acting in front of other people. And so something within me clicked and I thought if I could make myself feel comfortable doing that, maybe I could make other people feel the same way. Half the problem with people when they start making films is that a new director will get told he has to work with a certain producer and can't work with people he feels comfortable with. And I worked outside of the radar really. I made mistakes but they were at least mistakes that I was comfortable with.

JS: Were you using friends, family?
SM: There were no actors, no. It was like the single mother next door, the girl who had just had a kid with her fella, Jimmy round the corner, who was er... I don't know what he was. He smoked a lot of weed and he could play this incredible thing on the guitar but nothing else. He turned up in five or six of my short films. So basically I acted with people and then ultimately by Twenty Four Seven I stepped back and pushed them in because I didn't want to be an actor, it was something that I had to do out of necessity. I sort of showed them my films initially and they said they'd love to be in one of those. That's what I've tried to get over to other people: that maybe instead of trying to follow the traditional route, maybe there's someone in your family, an insane uncle or someone you have access to and that's what you need to do.

JS: The scripts are written by you but are also improvisational on the set. You draw out of them.

SM: Yeah, I think Once Upon a Time in the Midlands was the one time I tried to write a story rather than something from my own experience. I can't carry on making films about my own life forever but I need to care about the people that are in the film rather than it being a fabrication. That's what I learnt from that. That's why Dead Man's Shoes, although it wasn't about very specific people, it was about something that meant something to me and that comes through in the film and I think in This is England. Making a film takes a really long time and you need to really believe in what you're doing or you give in.

JS: Would you say stick up for your own ideas or take the ideas of those who pretend to know better?

SM: If you care about it and the people in the film you know to some degree then how could someone prove you wrong? I learnt that if these are people that I know they are my people, not your people, so how can you tell me what to do with them?

JS: After the short films you went to do Twenty Four Seven, which having done these bright, hyperreal shorts, was quite downbeat compared to the low-life upbeatness of the short films and you made the brave decision to film in black and white. What made you make that decision?

SM: I give Steve Woolley a lot of credit because he asked me what I was going to make, said: "What have you got in your locker?" And I told him about this guy Nathan who set up a football team for kids. This guy was a bit haunted, as much as he was incredible there was something sad and vulnerable about this guy. He's still in Uttoxeter now and I wanted to pay homage to him really because I realised that he believed in all of these kids and they were shitting and pissing on him from a great height.

JS: Is that how you pitched it to Bob Hoskins?

SM: I was honest and I said, for me it's this study of loneliness. It's this person who's floating around and trying to help other people as a way of avoiding the hole in themselves, you know?

JS: And after Twenty Four Seven you did A Room For Romeo Brass, which stars one of the stars of This is England, Andrew Shim?

SM: Yeah, I went in with a white family, looking for a white child but Andrew was the person for the part. It's all about connection and chemistry. I got told at the audition by the guy who was running the place that the one person he couldn't recommend was Andrew. But I instantly wanted to like him and he was absolutely phenomenal. I had to pick the right person for the part and I thought I was going to get asked about that but nobody did, because they gelled as a family.

JS: Shall we have a look at Romeo Brass?

(runs clip)

JS: Wonderful film, wonderful memories. It always astounded me that no-one ended up seeing that film. It kind of reminded me about everything about growing up. And that was captured in that clip there. You can feel the atmosphere. Is that something that when you're working do you say: "No, that doesn't feel right, it doesn't reflect the actual childhood I had. I'm going to wait for the actual shot that works for me"?

SM: Especially in Romeo Brass it was as much about Paul Fraser, who wrote the script, and my life with him growing up. He had a bad back and had to spend about two or three of his life in bed. I sort of signified all the characters that I hung around with in one person. I kind of disappeared. I let him down and I did turn up in his bedroom and laughed at him because his hair was this long and he was about 42 stone. That was something very specific to me and him. It was that period just before you hit pubity, with the porno mag thing: his dad had the best collection of natural ladies and I needed those magazines. Only Andrew in the auditions could portray that desperation (laughs).

JS: Romeo Brass is also known because the relationship between the two kids is disrupted by the arrival of a threatening presence, which is something you've brought into your films since then. That presence in Romeo Brass was Paddy Considigne, who can't be with us tonight. Tell us how you had this relationship with Paddy, who we'll see later in Dead Man's Shoes.

SM: Me and Paddy were at drama school together. I'd had a motorbike accident and had to go back a year and ended up in Paddy's year, which was quite fortuitous. We were a nightmare for any teacher, murder. We were too big for that place really. There was a lot of talent there but no-one knew how to harness it.

JS: He was always the actor?

SM: Yeah. I thought I was going to be an actor and then Paddy did this New York cop in the canteen one day and it was so good that I thought: "Oh I'm never going to be an actor." We ended up being in a band together, me and Paddy, we toured and then we fell out. I didn't see him for a few years and he came back from college and I'd made Twenty Four Seven. I said to him: "I've worked with these people and a lot of them are not actors. I know how talented you are and if you're ever interested I'm doing another film next year and I'd love you to come to an audition." We weren't not speaking, although that close bond we had had was dissipated. But I showed him the films and I think when he saw what I'd made in his absence he thought he'd like to have a go. And he came to the rehearsals for this part of Morel. And Paddy came to all the rehearsals, and because he was having to rehearse with all these kids he was getting the best background for his character. We brought this accent in and once we did that it was kind of like magic. We'd be buying some petrol and he'd be chatting the lady at the counter up as Morel: "I think I need to be dating you, lady." And he'd be off on one and everywhere he went he'd be this character. And so this actor was born who had no idea what he was meant to be doing but was so Stanislavsky it was frightening. And he became the lynchpin of the film because he was involved from such an early stage. As I said if you're good enough a part will grown and that was one of those cases.

JS: I think it's an extraordinary debut for anyone. I was surprised when your next film Once Upon a Time in the Midlands didn't have Paddy in it but it had Robert Carlyle and Ricky Tomlinson and Kathy Burke and Shirley Henderson and there was a launch for it in Cannes and it was going to be the biggest film ever... and it didn't happen. I still like the film but you refer to it as your low point even though it was your biggest budget and biggest stars.

SM: Yeah it's like that boxer, you just go in one time lazy and assume you'll be able to pull it off and do the same thing you normally do. The people I was working with were great and they loved my work and they'd seen the things that I'd done. But the producer and myself disagreed almost from day one about everything. Unlike Mark Herbert, who I work with now, she was fighting against everything. In the end, if you don't care about something, you just give in. And I said: "Just do what you want with it, put ribbons and candy on it and do what you want, I don't care." The difference between that and then doing Dead Man's Shoes was like: "I'll hever ever let myself be like that again. I'll fight for every inch I can." And you get that mentality. It's all about budget: If you've got £20m to make a film about a sock you're in trouble. If you've got less than a million to make a gangland thriller they're going to leave you alone.

JS: Dead Man's Shoes was the start of your relationship with the new Film Four and Mark Herbert who you work with now. Let's have a look at Paddy at his most threatening in Dead Man's Shoes.

(runs clip)

JS: You can hear the music in there. The threat of Paddy Considine. And there's the comedy of the European middleweight champion getting up and driving a bad car. It kind of encapsulates all your work there: England and it's seedy side and it's crap side as well.

SM: Yeah, every moment of joy in my life usually stunk of sadness. Every time I was just about to get somewhere someone stuck a dart up my arse. That's how I remember growing up in Uttoxeter. When things were at their shittest people seemed to be at their best and when things were at their best people seemed to be at their worst. That's just kind of inherent in my personality. I remember a lad in Uttoxeter's nan died and he had a car nearly as ridiculous as the one in Dead Man's Shoes which she'd left him and he would drive around in it and no-one was allowed to laugh because he was really hard. He loved his nan so deeply and that's Uttoxeter you know - it's a nowhere place and an everywhere place. It was the times we couldn't afford electricity and the rent that I remember being the best. My life's always been filled with that sort of bitter-sweet sort of tragedy. Like in Romeo Brass where Morrell puts a knife to the kids' throat; things could always drop back and that's how I remember things.

JS: Those are those moments where the psychopath turns into your friend or then turns into a complete nutcase, which we see in Combo in This is England - that kind of knife edge part.

SM: I didn't realise until recently... I went to Watford with this kid. Everyone at school has a friend who comes from outside, who's Scottish or a Geordie and this guy was an incredible thief. He took me to Watford when we were 14 and I fell in love with this girl when I was down there - or I thought I did - who was 17. Her ex-boyfriend was 21 and was a maniac, a psychopath, although now as an adult I realise he was an idiot. He basically put the fear of God into me and threatened me and said he would kill me if he saw me again. But I wouldn't go. I had these very strong feelings of love. One night I was on her sofa with her and this face appeared at the window and this psycho kicked the door in and started smacking the shit out of this girl. I was only 14 but tried to fight him. She called the police and the police turned up and beat the shit out of him and gave him a really good hiding and took him away. I thought it was all over and was walking down the street one day and he jumped out from behind a car with a fucking great knife and basically kidnapped me for a few hours to this house. This woman he'd been married to turned up at the house and she'd got two of his children - it was the most bizarre thing. She came in and said: "Hello Charlie" and I thought: "Has she not seen that knife?" She came back in five minutes later and said: "Do you want a crispy pancake sandwich? Chicken and mushroom?" And then she said to me: "Do you want a crispy pancake sandwich too?" And I thought: "Are you fucking serious?" He's holding a knife to my throat. And he let me go just after that, so that's, kind of like, if you want any explanation of where those things stem from, that's one of them.

Question 1: How do you balance the technical side of using untried actors?

SM: When Thommo first came on set he'd obviously only been in a rehearsal room in Nottingham before and there was a great boom and cameras and everything. But it didn't take him long to get used to that. I think the way I get round it is to work with the actors before we go on set. We always get it how we want it first, if it takes five minutes or five hours, and then we invite everyone else in. In my films it's easier for non-actors I think.

Question 2: What was the decision behind using the Falklands and particularly the montage scenes at the beginning?

SM: The basic premise behind the Falklands was two things. One, as an adult looking at the material from that time - the archive - as a kid I remember it was sort of like a World Cup campaign but actually people's dads and children died in this thing. And when I saw the people we were actually fighting against the shame that came over me was unbelievable. We looked like we'd got paratroopers over there but theirs looked like they had literally been pulled out of school and dropped on an island to fight. And that for me was parallelled in the nature of a beast like [This is England's] Combo and all that rage. And I felt a lot of shame for that, because I had been there with all the other kids waving flags and saying: "Kill them all, they are evil". The film is this microcosm of that sort of behaviour, hating something and not knowing why you hated it. And that's what the National Front represented to me. If it was about jobs and "you're taking food out of my child's mouth" that's one thing. But it wasn't. It was about the spices and the smell and the religion and the fact that they couldn't integrate. They couldn't stand that they were much more unified family-wise and looked after the old people. So the film was a microscosm of these much bigger ideas and at the end of it Combo is just looking at him and he's just jealous. He assumed that because he was black he wouldn't have a father and he jumped to this enormous conclusion. But the fact that I've got an 18 certificate for one act of violence in which no-one even dies...

JS: It's interesting that you mentioned that. Local councils can overturn this and you're trying to extert that pressure throughout the UK. How hopeful of that are you?

SM: Not massively hopeful. Some people have overturned it. At the end of the day I'm not calling these people buffoons or idiots: it's not an easy film but I think there's far more danger of copycat violence with films which don't show you the consequence. You look at films like Natural Born Killers which spawned this thing and it's just like, kill this person, whack him, kill this person to music, roll on another 15 corpses. Whereas one person getting beaten up in a flat in this film has a repulsive effect, so that's why I'm a bit gutted, because I think it has the complete opposite effect of what they're talking about.

Question 3: This film has much bigger themes than previous ones. Is it going to have ramifications on what you do next?

SM: I know what you're saying. I'm sat here thinking exactly that. I can't make another one about me because me's not interesting enough to pull another one out but there's four or five stories around me at the moment which aren't really based on myself any more. But it really depends on how this film does Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I want to make this film about the history of the gypsies which I made a documentary about some time ago but if I haven't got the financial clout then I have to use Brad Pitt as the king of the gypsies or something. It's a case of what the world will let me make and being able to do it how I want to do it. I could make anything, but I don't want to have to have Ted Danson in it.

Question 4: There's a lot about father figures in your work. What is it in your opinion that makes a good dad?

SM: My dad was a great dad. He was a long-distance lorry driver and I idolised him. I thought he was Elvis Presley until the age of about nine. I don't know how you denote a good dad, I suppose it's probably the child at the end of the day. There's plenty of people out there who can have children who are the worst parents and plenty who can adopt a child and give it the best possible start.

JS: On that note I think we all need to go and dance to some Trojan music: Toots and the Maytals et all. The party's on in the film cafe. It is to celebrate what I think is a wonderful film. It's This is England and the director has been Shane Meadows.

[Dave]

That's a great find!

Anyway, I'm not having a go, but it would have been easier to link to the pages wouldn't it?

PART 1

PART 2

Perhaps you don't know the sneaky technique for making stubborn links work!

Are you going for the world record for biggest tag image on your posts ever? Nice work though! ;D

[RydCook]

"Perhaps you don't know the sneaky technique for making stubborn links work!"

I dont know this one! How's it done?

[Dave]

ryd22 said:

"Perhaps you don't know the sneaky technique for making stubborn links work!"

I dont know this one! How's it done?

Not sure a demonstration will work cos the site will think I'm doing a link so you won't see the code!

Let's have a go.

Click the URL button (The globe one under the italic button), you get:


After the L of the first url (but inside the bracket), type an equals sign =
Directly after the equals sign (no spaces between any of this) paste in your troublesome web address.

Next... in between the two sets of brackets type whatever you want to be the clickable link. Type CLICK for example.

Have a practice on this thread if you like.

[RydCook]

LIKE THIS?!

[grak]

that picture scares the living shit out of me.