Penny Woolcock was born in Buenos Aires in 1950 and moved to Europe as a teenager. Her career spans art, film, TV and opera. Her fiction films, such as Tina Goes Shopping and 1 Day, often feature non-professional actors. Her documentaries include One Mile Away, which saw her brokering a truce between rival Birmingham gangs. She has directed operas ranging from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers to John Adams’s Dr Atomic at New York’s Met. Woolcock also directs the Yorkshire school drama Ackley Bridge, the third series of which is now on Channel 4. She lives in north London.
What can we expect from this third season of Ackley Bridge?
In a way, the underlying story is the same. It’s about life in a small provincial town, where the Muslim community, which is generally depicted on telly as terrorists and paedophiles, is funny, resourceful, living their lives like all the rest of us. The series is saying the opposite of what you hear all the time, that we live in this very divided and divisive world. We can all really live together. I’d never done anything prime time before. I tend to do things that go out at 11 o’clock at night! But the idea of making something that had a 50% Muslim cast, and was looking with humour and humanity at working-class communities in the north of England – I just leapt at it, actually.
Do you think Ackley Bridge has a knack for anticipating and reflecting the big issues in education?
It’s not preachy, but it does have stories about gender, sexuality, domestic violence. There’s the strand about the school being an academy, and the subjects that children actually enjoy – art, drama, music – being cut. That’s part of Michael Gove’s vision, basically, and it’s very, very hard on children who aren’t academically gifted.
What do you make of British politics at the moment?
I think these are very dark days, I really do. I was filming in Halifax for three or four months, and do you know how often I heard anybody discuss Brexit? Never. Not once. I think there are huge swathes of England that have totally given up – and actually, I have. I don’t want to listen to these dreadful people and their horrible ideas.
You’ve used local pupils in Ackley Bridge, and working with non-professional actors has been a feature of your career…
I’m not afraid of people – so perhaps that’s a key thing. I also don’t condescend. It also just makes it better: those kids are not acting, they’re just being. You take your cues from them – I always go up to kids and say “what music are you listening to now?” They find it very amusing that I like grime.
What are you listening to at the moment?
Recently I’ve been going on to [urban music website] GRM Daily and listening to Daily Duppy, it’s basically freestyling with a lot of young rappers – J Hus, Abra Cadabra. A lot of the wordsmithing is really sophisticated, really clever. But it’s also distressing because the stories are of people thinking violence and criminality is the only option they have.
Musical developments such as drill music have been blamed for a recent wave of knife crime. How fair do you think that is?
I think the music is telling us something that we should listen to – I don’t think it’s making those things happen at all. It annoys me when someone like Jay-Z or 50 Cent talk about how they’re shotting [dealing] drugs on the street corner when they’re multimillionaires. But when some kid is telling that story… it’s an indictment of how we’re marginalising young people.
Do you have a sense of why we’re seeing a rise in knife crime?
It’s really simple: it’s massive inequality. For a start, why don’t you invest in mental health services – a lot of the parents of these children are not well – and in youth clubs and services, which have been cut? It’s really not rocket science
You’re also an opera director…
People are sometimes surprised I like grime and opera. But they’re telling you a story in the same way, and I like stories. And they’re both very extreme: they can be very off-putting, so you have to surrender and be very open. I’ve just come back from LA. I’m developing an opera for 2020 with Wayne Shorter, the legendary jazz saxophone player; Frank Gehry the architect is designing the set and Esperanza Spalding is writing the libretto. It’s the same mixture of chaos and creativity that you get anywhere. I don’t like being in my comfort zone very much. I’m also working on a feature film about a drug dealer, and a series about women’s football.
Is there any art form you haven’t tried yet that you have in your sights? A grime album maybe?
I can definitely say I would never become a grime artist! I’d be rubbish at it. That, and ice skating.
Ackley Bridge is on Channel 4 on Tuesdays, 8pm; the first two series are available on All 4
