Guardian Review of Once upon a Time in the Midlands

A stocky figure in a baseball cap and a Hawaiian shirt so noisy it shrieks, Shane Meadows doesn't fit conventional ideas of the glamorous young film director. Amid the chi-chi bustle of Soho, he looks less a Wardour Street meteor than an uncomfortable day-trip tourist - which is pretty much what he is. Shane does not much care for London - 'this fucking place' as he refers to it at one point - and apart from six months in the capital when he was 'miserable as sin', he's remained true to his East Midlands roots.

Uttoxeter, Burton on Trent, Nottingham, Sneinton, Calverton - washed-up mining villages, chintzy suburbia, forgotten chunks of rust-belt Britain - have been the unpromising backdrop for every Meadows film, all 40 of them if you include the numerous no-budget shorts that announced his arrival as a fresh force in British cinema a few years ago. He's back there again for his new film, Once Upon A Time In The Midlands, the third part of what he jokingly terms a 'Midlands trilogy' begun by his 1997 debut, TwentyFourSeven, and the follow-up, A Room For Romeo Brass (1999).

More upbeat than its predecessors, with a starry cast that includes Robert Carlyle, Kathy Burke, Ricky Tomlinson and Rhys Ifans, it is the film that Meadows hopes will finally bring box-office returns in proportion to his feted profile in the media.

'I wasn't planning to make another film in the Midlands,' he says, 'but neither of the other two had much commercial success, and we [he and his co-writer and lifelong friend Paul Fraser] wanted to have one more go and plant the flag. I'm waiting for the key to the city: out of the four major films made in Nottingham - there's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - we've made three.'

Given that Midlands is, like its predecessors, populated by losers, low-lives and semi-detached dreamers, one wonders whether Meadows isn't in danger of making the same film over and over again, a feeling not helped by the appearance of a knockabout fight scene recycled from an early short, Where's the Money Ronnie? In fact, Midlands marks a clear shift onwards from the claustrophobic TwentyFourSeven and the dark-hued Romeo Brass into more colourful, comedic territory.

It is, as Meadows knows all too well, a desperately needed shift. Despite critical praise and boasting Bob Hoskins in the lead role, TwentyFourSeven barely covered its modest £3m budget. Romeo Brass, released on a scant run of 10 prints, did even worse - a great shame considering the resonance of its black-humoured but pensive study of suburban psychosis and incipient paedophilia.

This time round, Meadows is clearly relying on his stellar cast to lend him some commercial muscle. That they are happy to do so, despite being on 'very low wages', is for Shane 'a compliment; even though my films haven't been widely seen by the public, it's gratifying to discover that people like Rhys and Robert knew my work'.

While his cast turn in splendid performances - Burke, in her swansong role as a thespian (or so she claims), is particularly and scarily fine - Midlands doesn't have quite enough story or script to be a great movie.

The western angle, played out chiefly through Ricky Tomlinson's country singer, proves to be a piece of decoration rather than an intrinsic theme. But if the plot - a love triangle which has the swaggering Carlyle pitted against a gauche Ifans for the love of the perpetually red-eyed Shirley Henderson - lacks mileage or surprise, the characters are an amiably nutty reflection of millennial Britain.

Will it keep Meadows in business? It deserves to. Although he seems to have been around a long time, he's still just 30, and one of the few original voices to emerge from British cinema in the past decade. In person, he is also one of the industry's fastest talkers and most unassuming characters. 'I've made three films and in terms of making my next, I'm no further forward, reputation-wise, than I was when I started - probably further back,' he says ruefully.

Though this film will probably save Meadows, it could not save its distributors, Film Four, from extinction. Ironically, Film Four's demise will probably help the film, as they pull out the stops for their last hurrah. Still, 'it's a disheartening time for the British film industry', he reflects, before running down an all too familiar list of complaints; a lack of backers, a lack of imagination, and the stranglehold of Hollywood, which out-muscles home-grown product with its budgets and asphyxiates it at the multiplexes which it controls.

'How do you compete with budgets that start at $30m? The only way is with character-driven stories. People complain that's all they get from British films, but we are forced to work around intense performances. I'm not complaining personally, as £3m is still a lot of money, but the budgets to promote American films here are routinely higher than what we get to make a film.'

The current downward spiral of British film, following unrealistic hype about its prospects, follows a regular pattern and, in his opinion, hasn't been helped by what he terms 'minute-made fiascos that sucked up huge amounts of available money... Without being rude to filmmakers here, a lot of people were given funds before they were ready to make a film, people with a one-page treatment and a short made at film school. It seems like everyone decided, let's make a gangster film, or a Full Monty style comedy.'

Meadows argues that he served his own apprenticeship making dozens of shorts using borrowed equipment and friends for actors. He looks back on the experiences of a few years ago with some incredulity.

The first week of directing TwentyFourSeven, confronting an army of technicians and several tons of equipment, was, he says, 'the most terrifying seven days of my life - I was lucky to get away with it'.

Since then he feels he's 'lived three lifetimes in a few years'. That he's a more sanguine, less excitable character these days he attributes to marriage, which has 'stabilised' him, while he has acquired a few professional skills along the way. 'I work on instinct without much technical knowledge, so when I got my break some people thought I was a chancer and blamed their own failings on me. I've built up my own team with each film. I've also learnt to get more focused. After TwentyFourSeven I was so exhausted I could hardly move for a month. I realised I had to hold something back, because the cast demand something from you on set. When you're working with unknowns you can busk it, but when you have Robert Carlyle and Kathy Burke on your cast, you can't.'

He makes a few commercials (for booze and McDonald's) to keep his bank account in credit. Even Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, he remarks, are not above knocking out adverts for the multinationals (Loach and McDonald's? I gasp. Surely not). 'A couple of those commercials mean I can make the films I want to make.'

Exactly what sort of films those might be is not yet clear. Meadows groans at most of the scripts that are pushed his way. He may yet go off to Hollywood to make Dino Bites or some big-budget sci-fi spectacular. Don't bet on it, however, or on him leaving the Midlands.

'I'm still thinking about something medieval, maybe even Robin Hood. Whatever I do next I'd rather fail with something my heart's in because it's with you for the rest of your life. So if someone doesn't like my films it doesn't bother me - I know I did them for all the right reasons.'