Drugs are a world where no one wins - new Worthing film

Michael wrote the gangster film and coproduced it with director Can Somer.

The film focuses on a London industrial estate where a cocaine dealer is concerned that the illegal activities of a new nearby neighbour will expose his own activities, but his attempts to disrupt and destroy the neighbour’s business ignite gang warfare that stretches from London to North Cyprus.

Michael said “This is the first feature film that I’ve written and been able to take into production. It’s been a great experience and I look forward to seeing how audiences react to it.

“It is a crime thriller about gangsters and drugs and murder. It is about a person who is running a drugs business who gets concerned about the activities of a neighbouring business, and he ends up setting up a gang war.”

Michael draws on his own experiences – on the right side of the law.

“I did 30 years in the Met. I retired in 2007. I'm now 66. I used a lot of that experience. I worked with a lot of informers and you learn about the criminal world from that. For a while I was the criminal drugs intelligence officer in Peckham and again you learn a lot.”

And among the things he learned was a degree of empathy and understanding: “You get a lot of drug dealers who actually hate the crime. A lot of them got into it because of the circumstances. Addiction is an illness, and that's just the nature of how you get into it. But it's just so difficult to get away from it. Lots of them that I spoke to just really regret the first time they did it, that they took drugs or had a drink, and now they're just trying to get money for the next injection or the next lot of cocaine. I have a degree of understanding. It is about the circumstances of when they first did it. It is usually down to low self-esteem or to peer pressure. That can be part of it. It's can be about wanting to fit in with other people, so yes I do have a lot of sympathy. I met some very intelligent people who are drug addicts. I met some who weren't intelligent at all but basically they are just human beings that have made a mistake in life and find it all very difficult to unravel. For me the message of the film is that there are no winners. You can be the top of the tree but you are not the winner. Everything can be taken away in a moment.”

The film runs about 90 minutes and was filmed in east London and south-east London, and Michael is delighted to say that there was strong interest in it when he took it to Cannes.

“We have got one more scene to do. We took it there incomplete. We were hoping to have finished it by then. But the upshot from Cannes is that we've got six different companies that are interested in it. They all like the trailer that we showed, and they are all interested in what we were trying to do and what we were trying to create. It's a very unique gangster film. I put a lot of my personal experience into it, and I'm very confident that we're going to get a deal on the table.”

The hope is to shoot the final scene and complete the final edit by the end of July: “There are lots of people in it. We did it on a micro budget of £100,000 which we are wanting to recoup plus a little bit more. We would love to be able to put some money into the next film that we do.”

As for when people might be able to see it: “It is very difficult to say. Once you pass it to the distributors, then it is their job. Some of them might put it out straight away while others might say that they want it to go to a few film festivals first while others might just hold it back for a bit and then put it out in their own particular time slot. With six companies interested, it's very difficult to say what will happen, but I'm hoping it will be on the screens this year.”