We wrote Chicken Town just as Britain was waking up with a Brexit hangover. It was our attempt to show the world that someone in the UK still cared.

In spite of all the rhetoric, much of the UK remained (and continues to remain) marginalised: the rural working class, anyone outside London, the young and old. This became our central theme: an alliance of age and youth, an unlikely partnership of the forgetful and the forgotten.

Our characters don’t harbour grand dreams of escape – what they’re looking for is a family. At its heart Chicken Town is about finding these relationships in places you least expected.

Everything in the film is low-stakes. No guns, no knives. Our characters exist in a fantasy world: it’s better than the real thing. The lads strut like gangsters but the worst they can do is poke each other in the eye (they call this ‘getting cockfingered’ but don’t try it at home).

In keeping with the themes of the film, production was a learning experience for many of the crew. I teach at film school in the east of England and invited ten of my graduates to work on Chicken Town as assistants and trainees. We teamed youth with experience: production designer Simon Scullion was just back from opening a show on Broadway; make-up designer Julie Nightingale was on furlough from Gladiator 2.

A flat, abstract landscape is one of several debts we owe to Fargo, our key film reference. Joel Coen describes Fargo as ‘film blanc’. It was shot on cloudy days – no mountains or trees – just desolate flatlands extending into the distance. Chicken Town has the same depopulated landscape, all function and utility. ‘Banal but not boring’ is how Roger Deakins describes this aesthetic.

Another visual inspiration was the social realist photography of Dan Wood. His canvas is those regional UK towns where ‘the siren song of Brexit rang loudest, where labels of right and wrong are tricky to assign – the smaller, more remote centres where the soul of Britain is now being contested.’*

A comedy about the contradictions of modern family life, a film with a heart and conscience that tries to make sense of the mess we’ve made. If Greta Gerwig and Shane Meadows had a love-child, we hope it might resemble Chicken Town.