Today's much-anticipated Shane Meadows release is his first filmed in London rather the Midlands. It didn't all go exactly to plan, as JO ROBERTS discovers...

"WORKING in London's harrowing, really," said Bafta-winning film director and celebrated son of Nottingham Shane Meadows.

"If someone isn't reversing up the road in a digger, they're coming out with a ladder and sticking it in your scene and saying, 'Right I want £500 or I'm not moving my ladder because that's my windows and I want to clean them now!' I've never known anything like it.

"How anything gets made in London I'll never know."

And despite the fact that Somers Town – Meadows' follow-up to his Bafta triumph This Is England – is crucially set in the inner-city London district of the same name, he still manages to get a shot of his beloved home turf shoe-horned in; the opening scene features Nottingham train station.

It's only a passing glimpse as protagonist Tomo, a runaway played by This Is England revelation Thomas Turgoose, boards the train to the capital with all his worldly possessions. But it is not the only role Nottingham played in the finished product – the film was edited here too.

Already this year's winner of respected industry gong the Michael Powell Award for Best British Film, Somers Town carries the weight of expectation with film fans. Yet surprisingly it was commissioned as a piece of PR by Eurostar, which explains the prominence of St Pancras Station and later Paris in the plotline.

Meadows is the first to admit he had some doubts about that.

"It was first put to me in the spring or summer of 2007, when I was told that Eurostar wanted to make a film about kids, possibly in Paris or London – places that the Eurostar went to.

"When I heard it was a feature film with commercial backing, I thought it wasn't really my cup of tea.

"The idea of getting into bed with someone I'd never worked with – my worry was that it was going to be shots of blokes in trains smiling, patting kids on the head and saying, 'Have a nice day on the Eurostar!'" said Meadows, who is actually no stranger to commercial ventures after directing Asda's recent TV advert for school uniforms.

"I said they should speak to Paul Fraser, the guy I'd co-written with, because he's worked on a couple of kids' feature film scripts that are currently in development.

"And I said, if they wanted to develop that, then maybe I'd look at it further down the line.

"A couple of months later, I heard from Fraser that they were going to make a short film and would I mind looking at the script? It was fantastic. I was quite baffled that they were willing to give me carte blanche to make it as if it was my own film. Barnaby Spurrier, the producer, did a great job in being very clear from the start with Eurostar that we had to treat this project in the same way as my other films. That meant he got me total control over script, cast, the final cut and the music. Eurostar just left us to it."

Despite being Meadows' first experience of working with a foreign language (roughly a third of the film is in Polish with subtitles), Somers Town comes back to one of the filmmaker's favourite themes: outsiders ultimately finding belonging and acceptance through friendship.

"I fell in love with the script when I saw the relationship between the two boys," said Meadows, 35.

"This idea of this rough, renegade kid from the Midlands and a sweet, artistic lad from Poland, who's quite lonely.

"They get forced together and fall in love with this French waitress. It reminded me of a lot of New Wave French cinema, and I thought, 'I'd like to have a go at it.'"

The director – whose partner is expecting their first child any day now – says he felt like an outsider himself in the unfamiliar production environment of London.

"It's like swimming upstream. For the first week, I was pulling my hair out.

"The night before we started shooting, I was coming back from the shops with a couple of bags of shopping, to try and save some cash – they'd put me in this really nice flat, but in all the restaurants pasta was, like, £385! So I went to this local supermarket, come back with these two bags of shopping, then fell down a pothole outside this pub in front of loads of people.

"I broke a bone in my foot, so the next day, I came into work with this great big massive Wayne Rooney air-boot thing on, and then I caught the flu.

"I was having a nightmare. I was thinking all the signs were telling me I shouldn't be doing this project.

"Sometimes that can happen and the film turns out to be rubbish, and sometimes it doesn't – and luckily it went that way."

Somers Town is released today.

jo.roberts@nottinghameveningpost.co.uk