Scrapper director calls teen star Lola Campbell the next Steven Spielberg

Director Charlotte Regan and actors Lola Campbell and Harris Dickinson speak to Yahoo UK about their experience making British indie flick Scrapper. Scrapper is in UK cinemas from Friday, 25 August.

Video transcript

- I was talking with Harris and Lola earlier. And they were saying how you kind of gave them a lot of freedom on set. You allowed them to improvise a lot, which I thought was quite nice. But I wondered, why was that important for you to do that? And also, did you want them to kind of draw on their own experience as a tool to kind of inform their characters?

CHARLOTTE REGAN: Not so much their own experiences. Particularly with Lola, we were always keen to be like this is fiction. And you know, we don't want you to feel how the character feels. It's like very separate from real life. And nor are they at all the chara-- you know, Lola would not be seen dead in a football top or a tracksuit. She's the most stylish like 13-year-old I've ever met.

So they weren't very close to their real characters. But I don't know, I think it's just maybe how I've always worked because it's like you're like employing actors and they can do a much better job at acting than you can. So improv just gives them the chance to like create and take ownership over the role. And Lola, in particular, is incredible with improv and all the best dialogue I would credit to her within the film.

She would change other people's lines and they would be better than my written lines, you know? I'm hoping she's gonna be like Steven Spielberg in 20 years, or whatever, because she's a much better filmmaker than me, for sure, yeah. She'd tell me shots were bad, you know? She'd get involved in it all. It was great.

HARRIS DICKINSON: Charlotte, sort of, allowed us to move away from the script whenever we felt like it.

LOLA CAMPBELL: Go with the flow.

HARRIS DICKINSON: Go with the flow. So it makes it easier because you don't sort of feel confined by anything.

LOLA CAMPBELL: Pressured to perform.

CHARLOTTE REGAN: Yeah, yeah. We just-- we just did what we wanted at times. Sometimes, you would go a bit-- you would go on these tangents and end up somewhere completely random. But often, those were the good takes.