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Writer-director Brett Gregory<\/strong> on his bleak, moving, semi-autobiographical feature film, \u2018<\/a><\/em>Nobody Loves You and You Don\u2019t Deserve to Exist\u2019<\/a>, which tackles austerity, class, and mental health. Images are taken from the film. An interview with Brett is here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Although I was born on an RAF base in Buckinghamshire, I was raised on a run-down council estate in a Nottinghamshire mining town from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. After my alcoholic stepdad was arrested for assault for the umpteenth time, my mum became a single parent on benefits with three children. We had no money: we ate salad cream sandwiches, we used the local newspaper as toilet roll and I could only afford to go to the cinema once over this period, and that was to watch \u2018Tron\u2019 at the ABC Cinema in 1982 for my 11th birthday.<\/p>\n Every other movie I watched was either on a black and white portable television in my bedroom or on pirated VHS tapes on the colour television in the living room downstairs.As a result, I have no spiritual affinity with cinema-going or any of its mystical rituals like many other filmmakers claim to have. With television however it\u2019s a different story. For example, in 1982 I also grew aware of the power of the British State by following Newsnight reports about the Falklands Conflict throughout the spring. This was far removed from reading about World War I or World War II in history books; this was seemingly happening in the present tense right before my very eyes.<\/p>\n It was around this time as well when I became fascinated by a puzzle book called \u2018Masquerade\u2019. The author, Kit Williams, had buried a bejewelled golden pendant in the shape of a hare somewhere in England, and in the book \u2013 which told the story of Jack Hare \u2013 he\u2019d hidden textual and pictorial clues to pinpoint the pendant\u2019s exact location. I never solved the puzzle, and the treasure was discovered by way of fraud in 1988. The 2009 BBC documentary \u2018The Man Behind the Masquerade\u2019 tells the story.<\/p>\n In 1984 the Miners’ Strike broke out and, as hundreds of working-class communities were torn apart across the Midlands and the North, I then became aware that the British State would attack its own citizens just as readily as it would foreign entities. Watch video footage of \u2018The Battle of Orgreave\u2019 online and you\u2019ll see what I mean.<\/p>\n Such familicidal tendencies were further demonstrated in the mid-1980s when Margaret Thatcher\u2019s Tory government launched a completely unhinged and homophobic public health campaign using the slogan: \u2018AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance\u2019 which infected an entire generation of adolescents with paranoia, distrust and self-doubt. The original leaflet is archived by the Wellcome Trust.<\/p>\n Surrounded by all this new knowledge and real life horror, it\u2019s no surprise that by this point I\u2019d started to read Stephen King novels and Clive Barker\u2019s \u2018Books of Blood\u2019. In turn, I\u2019d also begun to take the family\u2019s Jack Russell, Shandy, on three hour long walks across farmers\u2019 fields and to a nearby forest, as faraway from civilisation as possible.<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t a monk however, and would lead a double life by hanging around the front of the shops on the estate with older teenage lads in the evening: learning how to smoke, how to spit, how to swear, how to be angry and how to tell stories \u2018that had better be fucking funny!\u2019 When everyone eventually wandered home, I\u2019d then return to my bedroom and switch on the Acorn Electron personal computer which my mum had bought on hire purchase to keep me quiet.<\/p>\n Interestingly, if you wanted to play \u2018free\u2019 DIY games like \u2018Tomb Hunter\u2019 or \u2018Spy Raider\u2019 on a personal computer you had to type in hundreds of lines of BASIC code which were published in magazines like \u2018Electron User\u2019. However, if you made one single error \u2013 missed out a number or a letter or typed a colon instead of a semi-colon \u2013 then the game wouldn\u2019t work. Little did I know at the time but this painstaking transcription process taught me extremely close reading skills and these would later prove very useful when I studied literary theory and literary criticism as a part of my BA and MA degrees in English Literature in the 1990s and, in turn, when I began to write, direct and edit short films in the 2000s.<\/p>\n In 1988, while writing a crappy \u2018Twilight Zone\u2019-style short story on a second-hand Olivetti typewriter in the kitchen, I noticed that Thatcher\u2019s Tory government had now begun to mute all television broadcasts that featured representatives of Sinn F\u00e9in, a practice that would only end in 1994. It was at this very moment when it was confirmed for me that I didn\u2019t live in a free society, and I probably never had.<\/p>\n Why was I was being denied access to this information? Why was I being denied the opportunity to make up my own mind about things, or gauge how I felt about such things? Or consider how I should or should not react to them? Or even learn from them? Furthermore, what other information was being withheld from me? What else didn\u2019t I know? And why?<\/p>\n Naturally, as a young man desperate for answers which he was never going to receive, I grew frustrated and started searching out alternatives to the mainstream like I was on some sort of survival mission. I began to read the work of \u2018troublemakers\u2019 like George Orwell, Edgar Allen Poe, Jack Kerouac and Oscar Wilde, as well as whatever biographies I could lay my hands on at the local library in town.<\/p>\n In turn, I also started watching Moviedrome on BBC 2. A late-night television series which started in 1988, it was basically film school for poor people. Subversive film director Alex Cox (\u2018Repo Man\u2019, \u2018Sid and Nancy\u2019) was the presenter. He would enthusiastically discuss the origin, production, style and themes of films which I\u2019d never heard of. These films would then be screened, and I\u2019d suddenly feel my imagination expand, feeling a little less insane and a little less alone. Science fiction classics like \u2018X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes\u2019, \u2018The Incredible Shrinking Man\u2019 or \u2018The Fly\u2019 (with Vincent Price), and newer experimental fare like \u2018The Man Who Fell to Earth\u2019. Rugged 1970s films like \u2018Five Easy Pieces\u2019, \u2018Point Blank\u2019, \u2018Badlands\u2019 and \u2018The Parallax View\u2019.<\/p>\n What this four-year study programme of \u2018cult\u2019 films taught me, as well as the literary books I was now rifling through on a regular basis, was that it wasn\u2019t simply what you thought that mattered but, if you desired to feel vaguely like yourself on your own terms, then how you thought was just as necessary.<\/p>\n After finishing my BA and MA about eight years later I started claiming housing benefit for this damp, solitary bedsit I was confined to while I worked part-time at the library at the University of Derby for the next six years. The main reason for this was so I could have free access to all the books which I\u2019d never had the opportunity to read while in formal education. I gorged myself on Jorge Luis Borges, Dante Alighieri, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Bukowski, Gustav Meyrink, Jean Genet, Umberto Eco, James Joyce, Knut Hamsun, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Primo Levi, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alasdair Gray and Franz Kafka.<\/p>\n After watching the attacks on the World Trade Centre on television on September 11, 2001, I realised that the human race and its leaders were never going to improve during my lifetime, and so I decided I might as well study to be a teacher, sharing what I\u2019d learned, before it was too late. In 2003 I then managed to secure a job teaching A Level Film Studies and A Level Cultural Studies at a college in Manchester.<\/p>\n These recollections of my early personal and cultural life form the basis of my aesthetic approach in \u2018Nobody Loves You and You Don\u2019t Deserve to Exist\u2019. For example, as well as the myth of Sisyphus and Hieronymus Bosch\u2019s \u2018The Garden of Earthly Delights\u2019, the narrative structure is loosely based on Virginia Woolf\u2019s \u2018To the Lighthouse\u2019, and the Lacanian phallocentric \u2018I\u2019 – which is associated with this novel\u2019s subtext. In the film, Young Jack even points to the Stoodley Pike monument at one stage and exclaims, \u201cAnd that big tower looks like a lighthouse, dunnit?\u201d<\/p>\n In turn, different types of storytelling are addressed to try and understand how and why these represent, and even help to construct, who we think we are. For example, there are numerous \u2018storytellers\u2019 present throughout, but who is telling the truth? What about gossip, rumour, poor memory or falsehoods? Who should we trust? The dominant third-person narrator; the newsreaders on the mobile phone; Boris Johnson; the Granny\u2019s voicemails; the female interviewees\u2019 recollections; the protagonist as a boy, as a youth or as a man; Brett Gregory the screenwriter or Brett Gregory the director?<\/p>\n A copy of Kit Williams\u2019 \u2018Masquerade\u2019 appears in one of the opening scenes as an intertextual prompt. The characters Young Jack, Jack and Old Jack each tell the audience that they\u2019re looking for their missing dog, Shandy, who keeps getting lost while chasing rabbits. So all three \u2018Jacks\u2019 are chasing an invisible \u2018Jack\u2019 Russell who, in turn, is chasing the fictional \u2018Jack\u2019 Hare from \u2018Masquerade\u2019 in the hope that this will ultimately lead to\u2026 what? Treasure? The Truth? The Prelapsarian Past? This idea of losing oneself within oneself is also flagged up in the opening Borges\u2019 quote from \u2018Labyrinths\u2019 and reiterated in the print of M.C. Escher\u2019s \u2018Relativity\u2019 which appears on one of the doors in the protagonist\u2019s flat.<\/p>\n The monologues delivered throughout were written to function as the characters\u2019 streams-of-consciousness, rather than spoken words, since what they\u2019re saying and how they\u2019re saying it is far too complicated to be deemed to be a part of the social realist genre.<\/p>\n In these ways then the film is structured like a working-class modernist novella and, I suppose, this is why a general audience finds it difficult to understand. If my name was David Lynch, I presume people would be inclined to put more effort in.<\/p>\n This said, I have great faith that the film will find a wider audience over time. Co-producer, Jack Clarke, who\u2019s around twenty-five years younger than me, has promised to make sure the film is still available to audiences long after I\u2019m gone.<\/p>\n \u2018Nobody Loves You and You Don\u2019t Deserve to Exist\u2019 is currently available here <\/a>on Amazon Prime in the UK and the US.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Film](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/Film_Still_1.jpg\")
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