LONDON — Harris Dickinson always knew he wouldn’t star in “Urchin,” his feature directorial debut. The charmingly quirky British actor started writing the script, about a man living on the fringes of society, several years ago with the intention of eventually getting it made. But despite critically acclaimed turns in films such as “Beach Rats,” “Triangle of Sadness” and “Babygirl” (the latter opposite Nicole Kidman), he planned to remain behind the camera when the time came.
“I knew I wouldn’t be able to,” Dickinson, 29, says, sitting on a sofa in Soho’s Ham Yard Hotel on the day of the U.K. premiere in late September. “I knew it would have been awful.”
Dickinson combed through “maybe 50 or 100” tapes to find the right actor to play Mike, a down-on-his-luck British man struggling with homelessness and drug addiction on the streets of London. Frank Dillane stood out immediately. But even Dillane, best known for TV shows like “The Essex Serpent” and “Fear the Walking Dead,” wasn’t sure why Dickinson wasn’t playing his own lead.
“Harris is such an amazing actor and he is really someone I had admired before meeting him,” Dillane, 34, says, sitting next to Dickinson. “There was a part of me, if I’m being completely transparent, that had to really know that Harris didn’t want it, so I could claim it.”
In theaters Friday, “Urchin” isn’t your standard actor-turned-director fare. It’s a serious film with ambitious scope, reflecting on subject matter that could easily be dismissed as woeful. But Dickinson has been making films since he was a kid, beginning with skate videos. He created a sketch show in his teens. Prior to “Urchin,” he’d written a play and one unproduced feature entitled “Suburb Cowboy.” This film is the culmination of years of work, an effort that was celebrated when it debuted at Cannes in May.
“That felt really special,” Dickinson says. “Having a film at Cannes — if people don’t like it, it can sink it. I wanted that to be where this journey started.”
Dickinson doesn’t recall the moment of conception for “Urchin.” But he’s long been interested in homelessness. He has volunteered around London with U.K. charity Under One Sky for the past several years, though he says he didn’t necessarily use that experience as research on “Urchin.” Mike goes through several ups and downs as he tries to get back on his feet after a stint in prison — a journey that compelled Dickinson when he began writing the screenplay in 2019.
“I can’t remember exactly where he came from — I just knew there was a character who popped up,” Dickinson says. “Mike came up as someone I wanted to follow. I guess he was an amalgamation of people I’d encountered or maybe parts of myself I was scared of. It sounds pretentious to say that he spoke to me in a way that needed to be laid out [on the page].”
As soon as he read the role, Dillane felt the pull of the character too. “I’d go inside and this voice would very clearly answer me,” he says.
He turns to Dickinson, adding, “I remember saying that to you and you made the joke, ‘What’s Mike saying to you? Does he want to go to the pub?’”
Dickinson describes writing Mike as a “blank” in his script. He was also open to how Dillane wanted to approach him. “As we went on, the specificity of every moment wasn’t necessarily fixed,” Dickinson notes. “We always tried stuff.”
“Harris’s script was tight from the beginning, though,” counters Dillane. “I remember it being 100 pages exactly. I was like, ‘F—, man, even that is very precise and clean.’”
Although the script was tight, improvisation based on extensive research into the realities of London’s homeless guided the actual production. Neither wanted to give into an intellectual analysis of any scene, so it was important for Dillane to do his preparation and then fully give in on the day. This approach was challenging, particularly in sequences in which Mike was on a downward spiral. The opening scene, for instance, sees Mike panhandling on a busy street and completely being ignored by passersby. Everyone who walks by Dillane on screen was a real person.
“We gave Frank a radio and sent him off,” Dickinson says. “He asked about 100 people for money and every single one of them said no.”
“It was intense,” Dillane acknowledges. “The most intense thing about it was how people ignore you. I mean, it’s extraordinary. And we’ve all been there.”
“We’ve all been there,” Dickinson echoes — meaning they’ve walked past people who needed help. “I’m not making a heavy-handed judgment about it either because I’ve been there. You can’t help everyone. You can’t stop for everyone.”
There are several other scenes in the film, including one outside of a pub, where Dillane approached real people, the supporting cast not knowing what he was going to say or do. Dickinson has cited inspiration from a substantial slate of heavy hitters, Mike Leigh’s “Naked,” Leos Carax’s “The Lovers on the Bridge” and Agnès Varda‘s “Vagabond” — all of which sculpted his approach. Dillane followed Dickinson’s lead and tried not to get too much in his head about it.
“You’ve got to engage in your character in those moments,” Dillane says. “You’ve got to dig your heels in and be like: This isn’t about me and my fear. This is about the scene.”
Much of “Urchin” was shot around East London. For the street scenes, the crew was reduced to around 10 people. In one sequence, in which Mike meets up with the local homeless community, Dickinson kept two cameras with huge zoom lenses hundreds of feet away from the action.
“I don’t think Frank knew when we were rolling and when we weren’t,” Dickinson says.
“No,” Dillane confirms. “But you said that to me early on in the day. Like, ‘We’re just going to roll.’”
“We had [assistant directors] dressed like the volunteers so we could signal to them and they could whisper, ‘Rolling,’” Dickinson continues. “There was a mixture of people with a lived experience of homelessness who are now off the streets and real background artists and people who were just there hanging out. Almost like a documentary, but then you’re also orchestrating it a lot.”
Although “Urchin” centers on homelessness and addiction, Dickinson didn’t want it to just be about those topics. “It’s about someone who has been through an extreme set of circumstances,” he says. “We always made it clear that this wasn’t a drug story. It’s not about his addiction. It’s about so much more than gratuitously seeing someone shoot up.”
Ultimately “Urchin” explore ideas of forgiveness and claiming agency over one’s life. Mike is neither a victim nor a villain, although he is trapped in cycles that are sadly familiar to many. To ensure they were avoiding clichés, Dickinson enlisted Jack Gregory as the film’s homelessness and drug addiction consultant. He had previously been hired by Joanna Hogg in a similar capacity for “The Souvenir” and its sequel, which co-starred Dickinson. Dickinson and Gregory became close on set and the actor told him he had an idea for a screenplay.
“He said, ‘I don’t know how long it’s going to take or what it’s going to turn out like, but I’d like you involved,’” Gregory says, speaking separately over Zoom from his home in Norfolk. “I thought that was it and then he rang me out of the blue in January of 2024.”
Gregory, a writer and podcaster who has been sober since 2014 and now works on movies, shared his thoughts on the script, and met with Dickinson and Dillane over Zoom to help with technicalities and to discuss his own lived experiences. At one point, Gregory filmed a video of himself showing Dickinson how to set up and smoke heroin. All of his guidance was invaluable to the production — and personally supportive.
“Harris made me feel so seen in a world where people try so hard not to see it,” Gregory says. “I like to call it just outside of your periphery. We’re not in the shadows. We’re not hidden. We’re there. People just choose not to see it. That’s why Harris working with me meant so much. People hire intimacy coordinators, so why not hire someone who knows about this?”
Along with working with Gregory, Dickinson and Dillane visited a prison and spoke to people in various local charities. They wanted to tell the character’s story in a genuine way that was free of tropes.
“There was always a lot of love for Mike and there was always a lack of judgment around him and the things he did,” Dickinson says. “It was a test of people’s tolerance of him — of an audience’s tolerance for him — and testing our own kind of patience and morality with a character like that. We’re not blaming him or the institutions. We really made sure that we invited a lot of people in from all of the different fields: probation, homelessness, addiction, social work. Once we had that foundation, it then felt like we had the permission to go elsewhere creatively if we wanted to.”
For Dillane, the key word was dignity, he recalls.
“Once you start digging into these ailments that some people have — addiction, mental health, not that much money, nowhere to live — and the reasons that people are in situations they are in, they often deserve empathy,” he says “If you’ve gotten to the point where you steal someone’s phone, it must have usually gotten pretty dire. It has been my experience when looking into Mike that people are people. Desperation has its own language.”
At moments, “Urchin” veers into surreal territory, exploring the landscape of Mike’s mind and occasionally shifting between reality and fantasy. The ending is almost dreamlike. Dickinson admits that he could have “gone weirder with it,” but was reined in by his collaborators. He wanted to find a balance between being conscious of his audience and his own conception. “It’s a little pretentious to think that you’re only making a film for you,” he notes.
“It’s a collective thing. I can’t taper that for individuals, but I can certainly be conscious of pacing and understanding. I don’t think I’m aloof enough to not have that in my mind.”
Gregory, however, says he understood Dickinson’s artier touches on a personal level. “As somebody that’s lived in that mindset for many years and as someone who’s battled with addiction since I was 10 years old, that’s how my mind is,” he says. “We see the world differently. I understood it and it never felt cliché.”
Despite Dickinson’s singular vision, the journey to making “Urchin” wasn’t straightforward. Getting financing for a film about homelessness was difficult. Eventually, Dickinson and Archie Pearch, his producing partner at Devisio Pictures, convinced the BFI, BBC Film and Tricky Knot to come onboard.
“It’s not necessarily the kind of film people wanted to throw their money at,” Dickinson says. “And if I’m being honest, there was probably a general rhetoric of ‘You’re just some actor who wants to have a go.’ I get that, but it’s been a long ambition and [there was] a deep care and a lot of love and time. It was probably there before my acting career was there.”
“He really had to convince people that he is a filmmaker and this story was important,” says Pearch by phone. “We were trying to do something that was daring to be different. … To take something that could be seen as a bleak social drama and really elevate it and push the boundaries beyond what you might expect. We’re trying to take risks.”
Dickinson is currently in production on a series of four biopics about the Beatles directed by Sam Mendes — he’s playing John Lennon. But he hopes to keep writing and directing and has a new idea (which he won’t share with me). “I think I need to sit on it a bit and see how it develops,” he says. “I won’t have time in the next year but I will eventually.”
Dillane, meanwhile, is shooting a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” playing John Willoughby. He can no longer hear Mike’s voice inside of him. “Again, this sounds mental, but there was a physical leaving of my body,” Dillane says, with mixed relief and sadness. “I felt him go and I didn’t have to live with him rattling around in my head every day.”
As our interview comes to a close, Dickinson sits up to attention. “I think despite all of the hard themes and hard experiences we’re talking about, what’s important to know is that we also had a good time,” he says. “There was a lot of love, a lot of friendship, laughter at times. And I think that spirit shows in the film.”
He pauses and then adds, “I’ve been making short films since I was a kid. That is the best thing, when you can get on your level of excitement and build something and get everyone to feel the same way that you do about it.”
“I could feel that, absolutely,” Dillane says. “It did feel like coming to work and playing like kids. We tried things and did things and it was like playing.”
“Urchin” is a challenging film, hovering between hope and desperation. You want Mike to be OK, even if the reality of his circumstances resists an easy ending. It may yield conversation or perhaps a longer look at the homeless person you pass on the street.
But Dickinson and Dillane want the viewer to feel whatever they feel. There are no easy answers.
“We weren’t trying to preach anything,” Dillane says. “Because if you’re preaching something, it’s like you’re somehow better off. There is nothing to preach. It is what it is.”
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