Georgie is a 12-year-old girl who lives alone after the death of her mother, whom she adored. With great ingenuity, he makes the social services believe that he lives with his uncle, a guy named Winston Churchill, and pays the rent on the house thanks to the bicycles he steals and buys for him from a neighbor. On the calendar, she crosses out the different phases of grief she has gone through and shares mischief with the only friend she has, Ali, a boy older than her.
Georgie is, what we would call, a very smart girl who has had to mature suddenly, too much for her young age. But all the gear she has set up to go unnoticed takes a turn when a young man in his twenties with bleached hair and an Eminem look appears who says he is her father and moves into the house. With this original story, Charlotte Regan weaves her first feature film, Scrapper, which arrived at the box office after winning the Jury Prize at the Sundance festival and accumulating fourteen nominations at the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA). Regan, 29, belongs to a new generation of filmmakers who have matured in the world of short films and music videos. "I think we are finally being allowed to make films. I have friends who have gotten used to making movies with cell phones, which is a little more accessible to begin with. We still have a long way to go, but when I go to festivals, the films I see are much more diverse than five years ago", he comments to this newspaper.
Starring the debutante Lola Campbell and Harris Dickinson, recently seen in El triángulo de la tristeza, Scrapper is a social cinema that can remind you of shaken childhoods like The Florida Project or Beasts of the Southern Wild. But above all, it has a lot in common with the success that Charlotte Wells achieved last year with Aftersun, a film about the nostalgic relationship between a father and his daughter who could pass for siblings.
If Wells' story was dominated by drama, in Regan's film there is a more humorous and funny tone, leaving aside any tears in the name of imagination, rap music, the bright colors of houses in the suburbs of London and the nonchalant on-camera statements of various 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 left for Ibiza. The producer explains that Scrapper is like a coming of age, but "in reverse" because "Jason needs to mature, and Georgie, to behave like the girl she is". He confesses that at first he intended to make a type of film similar to Guy Ritchie's. “The first draft had chases and shootings. I think I always wanted to make a film about the working class that wasn't depressing, because the ones I'd seen were made by people who didn't know what it was about," says Regan, who rewrote the script until he learned that the movie 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 says wonders about little Campbell, "the best human being I've 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". "And it's funny - he adds - because Lola is part of a generation, that of TikTok, which is able to dance or act for millions of strangers on the internet, but which makes her feel ashamed in front of a traditional camera”. There are no artists in Regan's family and they didn't watch movies. "I wasn't like one of those great young American directors who had a super 8 camera as a child. 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 to see The Lord of the Rings and came away "fascinated".
He admits that he hasn't seen much cinema, "only since the last 10 years", and is honest in saying that Harry Potter is his favorite, "which shows my unrefined taste", he concludes with a laugh. Scrapper may not be refined, but it does demonstrate the full potential of a talented filmmaker who has a lot to say.
