‘To succeed meant to leave’: inside the jolting film about Brummie estate kids knocked flying by demolition

‘You end up as ghosts’ … Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Daryl McCormack, Jay Lycurgo and Lola Petticrew in I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. Photograph: Chris HarrisView image in fullscreen‘You end up as ghosts’ … Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Daryl McCormack, Jay Lycurgo and Lola Petticrew in I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. Photograph: Chris Harris‘To succeed meant to leave’: inside the jolting film about Brummie estate kids knocked flying by demolitionThe novel had no hero, no dialogue and little action. So how was I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning turned into such a funny, rousing and acclaimed film? Director Clio Barnard reveals all

As a kid in 90s Birmingham, Keiran Goddard would gather with his friends to watch the tower blocks coming down. That’s what passed for entertainment back then. Controlled explosions, collapsing buildings. The demolition of Shard End’s postwar council estates marked the end of one story and the start of another. It was a dust-blown display of regeneration and progress. The housing that replaced it would be an improvement. The people of east Birmingham would move on to better lives.

Goddard, specifically, moved on to study English at Oxford University. He now lives in London and writes books for a living. Physically, he has left his home town far behind. Emotionally and spiritually, not so much. “So I feel quite splintered,” he says. “I’m not sure anyone ever really leaves the world they grew up in.”

Goddard’s Birmingham-set second novel has just been made into a film. Enda Walsh wrote the script; Clio Barnard called the shots. Set in and around Shard End, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is a jolting, stirring ensemble drama in which a tower block’s demolition serves as a kind of societal big bang, spinning five childhood friends into a fraught adulthood.

When writing the book, Goddard identified with the character of Patrick, the idealistic graduate turned zero hours delivery driver who argues that decent housing is a basic human right, not a capital asset. But he’s also like Rian, the group’s breakout star, who made a killing on the stock market and bought a sterile London flat. Rian is the chief investor behind a new apartment complex that is to be built on the bones of the old estate. The film shows it rising in time-lapse leaps and bounds, just as historic strains set to work on Rian’s close-knit gang of mates.

View image in fullscreen‘Joy in itself can be its own positive protest’ … Clio Barnard. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/the ObserverThe story scaffold may be simple, yet the drama that follows is anything but. It’s nuanced, thorny and possibly irresolvable, with no easy answers or obvious hero to root for. Goddard wrote the book as a series of interior monologues then delivered it to his agent and editor in a spirit of wild optimism. “I said, ‘You know, I think it’s got some cinematic potential.’ And both of them replied, saying, ‘There’s no dialogue and not much happens. It’s got the least cinematic potential of anything that we’ve seen.’”

Read moreThe film was a challenge, Barnard admits. It’s about the pull of the past and the sharp edge of the present, stitching an intimate human story against the broader social canvas. “It feels to me that there is an equality in this group of friends,” the director says. “And that the antagonist is the system, which is a hard thing to represent.” She was fired up, however, by its brand of political rage and its fine-grained depiction of an embattled working-class community. “Also, it made me laugh,” she adds. Shared jokes are the glue of all successful friendship groups. Rian’s mates mock his lifestyle – his posh girlfriend and big fridge – but they are ruefully, lovingly pleased for him, too.

Barnard has always been drawn to the margins of the UK. She likes outsiders, pariahs, survivors and scamps. She made an eye-catching debut with 2010’s The Arbor, a brilliant lip-synced documentary about the Bradford-born playwright Andrea Dunbar, who died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 29. The Selfish Giant was arguably harsher still: a devastating coming-of-age drama, foraging for scrap metal on the tatty fringes of town. One hesitates to say that she has since lightened up. All the same, 2021’s Ali & Ava – an interracial love story, as tender as a bruise – and I See Buildings at least come with an air of hard-won optimism.

“I think that’s been a conscious choice,” she says. “With Ali & Ava, I wanted the audience to leave with the feeling that they were able to act. And what I got from the group of people in this film was a massive amount of compassion and hope. I see a lot of Keiran in [the character of] Patrick. And Patrick’s a hopeful person. He believes that political change is still possible.”

The world has now slipped seriously out of whack, she admits. “Just look at the protests in France at the moment. There’s an economic imbalance everywhere. It’s hard to find a regular income and a roof over your head, especially for young people. But hope in itself can be an active resistance. Joy in itself can be its own positive protest.”

View image in fullscreenTender as a bruise … Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook in Ali & Ava. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/AlamyAs for the film industry, that’s arguably out of whack, too. I See Buildings lands in the UK fresh from a triumphant unveiling at the Cannes film festival. The international critics adored it. The Guardian’s own Peter Bradshaw gave it a five-star review. But Barnard’s film might also prove to be among the last of a dying breed. It’s a blast of impassioned old-school social realism, folded in amid a glut of studio sequels and mythic heroes’ journeys, crying out to an audience that may no longer exist.

Read moreGoddard begs to differ. Like Patrick, he has hope; he puts his faith in the people. “We’ve seen it in publishing where the types of issues – the economic precarity – that traditionally affected only working-class communities are creeping more into middle-class society,” he says. “That means there’s a greater middle-class appetite for these kinds of stories. ‘Oh, you know that thing you’ve been moaning about for years? Well, it’s happening to me now as well.’” On the most basic level, he adds, the maths doesn’t add up. “The fact that the lives that are most frequently lived are the ones that are least frequently depicted. Economically, that’s stupid. You can’t simultaneously hold the view that people want to relate to stories and that the stories about the most common lives just aren’t viable. Those two things cannot be true. They can’t coexist.”

Probably every human life is one of explosions and upheaval, and it can take a while for the dust to settle. Nowadays, Goddard has a clearer view of who he is and where he came from. He is a product, he says, of Blair-era social mobility: the beneficiary of a fleeting, fitful period of wealth redistribution. He was told that if he worked hard and behaved he might one day, God willing, rise out of his class. “That was always the story,” he says. “To succeed meant to leave.”

In I See Buildings, Rian (played by Peaky Blinders star Joe Cole) winds up as a square peg in his fancy London apartment, pining for the streets, pubs and friends that he has left behind. Goddard can relate. “I’ve been very lucky. I’m not the victim here. As far as there is a right side of the equation to be on, I’m on it. The structures that enabled me to be here no longer exist. If you ran my life again now, it wouldn’t be the same. But yes, I think it does cause problems. You’re never truly accepted, and you can never properly go home. So you end up as a ghost, haunting the edges of two lives.”

A film of his book could have been a disaster, he knows. “There are a number of different flavours of wrong,” he says. It might have wound up as poverty porn, or an earnest slab of liberal doggerel. It might have involved flat caps and misery, or poured out eight pints of mindless, bleary-eyed hedonism. Instead, he thinks that Walsh and Barnard have improved on his work. They’ve made the tale funnier, more rousing and hopeful.

Best of all, Barnard filmed it on the streets of Shard End. Goddard’s brother Tom helped integrate the crew with the community. The Crown social club served as the chief base of operations, where an open casting call drew as many as 800 local people. In a traditional story arc, the wayfaring hero eventually returns home. Odysseus arrives at Icarus. Dorothy wakes up in her cosy Kansas farmhouse. The social mobility kids, Goddard feels, have been denied their third act. It’s the price they must pay for all the advances they’ve made. “But there was something very moving about going through this whole journey and literally returning to the estate I grew up on,” he says. “That was beyond special. That doesn’t normally happen. It’s as though, out of nowhere, I’ve been gifted the rare opportunity to close the circle and go home.”