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| Image Source: Abe Books |
Provided By: Culture Warrington
Helen Walsh, a well-known local novelist who has written several thought-provoking and extremely engaging stories, is bringing her talents to a visual medium for the first time. The Violators is her first sample of directing a film, telling a story on-screen which evokes the same emotions as her captivating novels, and being unafraid to tackle the heaviest themes head-on. The Violators will be shown this Saturday as part of the Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival, and so we spoke to Helen about The Violators and about her career so far ...
First of all, tell us about The Violators.
It's my first feature film, which I wrote as director. It stars Lauren McQueen and Brogan Ellis, two really strong female leads who give very talented performances. And it's a coming-of-age story. It's about a young girl, Shelly, who's played by Lauren. Shelly is a 15-year-old girl who has to testify against her father, and is then rehoused to a sink estate which she feels alienated from. She's looking after her two brothers, one older and one younger. She spends her days roaming around the estate; she's a bit of an opportunist, a petty thief, and soon she comes under the watchful gaze of the estate loan shark and Cash For Gold owner Mikey Finnegan, who's played by Stephen Lord. So, the drama starts there really, as it's about their developing relationship.
What influenced you to bring one of your stories to film for the first time?
A number of things, really. The Violators is born out of The Landscape. Originally, the idea was set in a place called Partington, but it was actually filmed in Birkenhead which is where I'm from. This results in a beautiful, industrial, lonely landscape which was always crying out to be filmed in my eyes. So, that was why I decided to try and tell this story visually. It was also on my agenda prior to writing novels (I also studied photography previously), but novel-writing was a much more expedient way of telling stories. It doesn't require any collaborative effort; you just go away, find a quiet place and write your novel. Putting together a film is a much harder and much longer process.
You began writing novels with Brass in 2005. What inspired you to become a novelist, and what was the reaction to Brass?
The reaction to Brass was mixed, actually. It was critically-acclaimed; it was a best-seller in Germany, and it was a best-seller in the United States, so commercially and critically it did really well. But it's quite a hard, confrontational novel; I like to write divisive fiction that flips opinions, and I think that Brass did that. It was seen by some feminists as being quite a misogynist novel, which is not what I intended, but that was how it was received.
I was always writing from a really young age. I went to Bradshaw Lane County Primary School, which is where I got some of my very early incarnations of fiction published, so I was always writing and reading from a very young age. But it was reading Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit To Brooklyn, when I was about 13 or 14; that was the thing that inspired me to write novels. He was writing about people living on the peripheries of society, and he dealt a lot with lower-class Brooklyn in the 1950s, and providing dark, edgy, challenging fiction that pushes boundaries. Prior to reading Selby, I wasn't aware as a young writer that you could fictionalise those kinds of words or create character voices in the way that he does. So, from reading Last Exit To Brooklyn, that opened me up to a whole new world of fiction, and around the same time, Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting. They were both key texts that encouraged me.
Prior to that, it's hard to say. You only really get to read the books that are given to you in school, so using Pride and Prejudice for example, that book never spoke to me on any level whatsoever. In fact, I actually hated literature at school. It was visiting my local libraries where librarians introduced me to texts that inspired me to become a novelist. I started writing when I was in my final year at the University of Liverpool, and I was lucky in a sense that I got an agent fairly quickly, and the first novel, Brass, was published within a year.
Would you say that there is a common thread between your novels in regards to the themes, or does each novel stand out for a different reason?
I do like to write about people living on the fringes of society. Or in the case of Go To Sleep, for example, you have a mother who's pushed to extremes, pushed to the edge, who becomes post-natally or psychotically depressed after the birth of her first baby. I do write a lot about transgressive females. I like to write about flawed women who are not necessarily anti-heroines, but women who are fallible. I don't think there are enough flawed women in fiction or TV; I think we like our women to either be passive home-makers or strong, independent Sex And The City-type characters. I tend to write more about damaged, flawed women.
Do you have other novels planned in the near future?
I'm currently adapting The Lemon Grove for a screenplay at the moment, which is nearly finished. As soon as that is complete, I will be starting on a new novel which I'm really excited about.
Finally, what can the audience expect when they see The Violators this weekend?
Well, they can expect to see two absolutely stunning performances from the lead female actors, Brogan Ellis and Lauren McQueen, who both jointly won Best Performance at Nashville Film Festival this year, and for fans of my first few novels, it certainly won't disappoint.
The Violators will be shown on Saturday October 15 at Warrington Pyramids Art Centre. To book your tickets, click here.
