Question 1

What inspired you to make Shifty?

Eran: I guess, I'd left university and got into working as an assistant director and runner on film sets and gradually, throughout the whole period, I was looking for a subject to turn into a film because I knew I was going to start writing my own films and become a writer/director.

I was looking for a topic in which I could write a movie about and turn it into a screenplay and I was looking at my heroes Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino. To a degree they've all made films about where they grew up. Scorsese had written Mean Streets and The Streets of New York and so I started looking for stories and stuff that I could turn into a film and I thought what do I know?

I know Essex and Harlow and so I thought, I'm going to write a film about my real experiences of life growing up in the suburbs in Essex because I feel that a lot of urban films tended to get it wrong, It was almost as though they had a template of British urban films and they spray over this template and the dialogue.

I wanted to do something that felt truer to where and how I'd grown up so I started to look for stories. There's certain people in my town and certain people that I'd grown up with. I'd go back to my hometown to see my parents and I'd hear some stories - things that happened - and I took inspiration from stories that I'd heard, stuff that had happened to me when I was growing up and I condensed it into one story that's like a 24-hour film.