Georgie is a 12-year-old girl who lives alone after the death of her mother, whom she adored. She with great ingenuity makes social services believe that she is with her uncle, a guy named Winston Churchill, and she pays the rent on the house thanks to the bicycles that she steals and buys from a neighbor. On her calendar he crosses off the different phases of grief that she has gone through and shares pranks with the only friend he has of hers, Ali, a little older than her.
Georgie is, what we would say, a very clever girl who has had to mature suddenly, too much for her young age. But all the gear she has set up to go unnoticed turns upside down when a young man in his twenties with Eminem-like bleached hair appears who claims to be her father and moves into the family home. With this original story Charlotte Regan weaves her first feature film, Scrapper, which hits theaters after winning the Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival and accumulating fourteen nominations for the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA). “It is an enormous challenge and I feel very lucky because not everyone can have this privilege,” this young 29-year-old filmmaker from a working-class family tells La Vanguardia.
Regan belongs to a new generation of filmmakers who have cut their teeth in the world of short films and music videos. “I think we’re finally being allowed to make films. I have friends who have gotten used to making their films with mobile phones, which is a bit more accessible to begin with. We still have a way to go in terms of accessibility but when I go to festivals now , the movies I see are much more diverse than they were five years ago.”
Starring newcomer Lola Campbell and Harris Dickinson, recently seen in The Triangle of Sadness, Scrapper is a social film that can recall battered childhoods like that of The Florida Project or Beasts of the Southern Wild but with a much lighter tone. And above all, it has a lot in common with the success that its namesake Charlotte Wells achieved last year with Aftersun, a film about the nostalgic relationship between a father and his daughter who could pass as siblings.
If drama predominated in Wells’ story, humor stands out in Regan’s film, leaving aside any maudlin notes for the sake of imagination, rap music, the garish colors of the houses in the suburbs of London, and statements to camera of different characters around Georgie talking about her.
Here, the girl is the one who acts as an adult and the father behaves like a child in his attempt to start a new life with a daughter he has just met and whom he wants to impress. They had her when they were teenagers and he decided to ignore any responsibility and went to Ibiza. “I haven’t been to the island, it was Harris’ idea because he knew someone who handed out club tickets there.”
The director explains that Scrapper is like a ‘coming of age’ but “in reverse” because “Jason needs to mature and Georgie needs to behave like the girl she is.” She confesses that at first she intended to make a Guy Ritchie type of film. “The first draft had chases and shootouts. I don’t know where that came from or why. I think I always wanted to make a movie about the working class that wasn’t depressing because the ones I’d seen were made by people who had no idea,” notes Regan, who rewrote the script until he knew that the film could really work. “During the writing process I lost my aunt, my grandmother and my father. The pain suddenly crept into the script, so it was like going to therapy for free.”
The filmmaker speaks wonders of little Campbell, “the best human being I have ever met in my life.” She believes that if she ever manages to convince Daniel Day-Lewis to work with her, “Lola would still be the best performer on my list. She’s very instinctive, we found her after the pandemic. We spent a year and a half looking for girls.” “It’s curious, because Lola is part of a generation, that of TikTok, that is capable of dancing or acting for millions of strangers on the internet but is embarrassed to do so in front of a traditional camera.” Most of her work had to do with helping her lose her fear in front of the camera, “because as soon as I met her I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role.”
Regan assures that there are no artists in her family and that they did not watch movies. “She wasn’t like one of those great young American directors who had a super 8 camera since she was little. My grandmother said that cinema was a stupid career and that it would be better if I left it to be a waitress,” recalls the director. However, that same grandmother sneaked her into the cinema one day to see The Lord of the Rings and she came away fascinated by it. She acknowledges that she has seen little cinema, “only in the last 10 years,” and is honest by saying that Harry Potter is her favorite, “which shows my unrefined taste,” she concludes with a laugh. Scrapper will not be refined but she does demonstrate the full potential of a talented filmmaker who has many things to say.