The story of the making of the 2005 British film Breakin\u2019 the Cycle is surely more compelling than the film itself. Nobody can say for sure, because a rough cut was confiscated by the Met police and the raw footage was considered lost. But the film\u2019s origins and subsequent unravelling is extraordinary. Two of Hackney\u2019s most notorious drug dealers try to go straight and become movie producers. It\u2019s a strange combination of comedic chaos, an accidental stabbing, drug money and shootouts, big dreams of making a different life through art, and, ultimately, tragedy. The film-makers had to navigate real-life gang warfare, and an elitist, perhaps racist, film industry.<\/p>\n
The cast included the rapper Lethal Bizzle, and Bradley McIntosh from the pop group S Club 7. If McIntosh was desperately trying to escape his clean tween pop image, he wasn\u2019t the only one trying to escape something, though the stakes were far higher for others. Colin Browne, the leader of the Hackney gang Love of Money, wrote the film while serving a prison sentence for cocaine smuggling, and directed it; he had plans to take it to the Cannes film festival. Browne would be killed shortly after filming had finished.<\/p>\n
The story is told in a new BBC Radio 4 podcast, Shadow World: Breakin\u2019 the Cycle, by Lewis Albrow, the film\u2019s editor. Over the last 20 years, he stayed in touch with D, Browne\u2019s right-hand man who was also involved in the film, and who would go on to serve a prison sentence for drug dealing. \u201cOccasionally, he would contact me and say: \u2018One day we\u2019ll finish this film, honour Colin\u2019s legacy.\u2019\u201d After prison, says Albrow, \u201che came out a changed man. The time was right to go back and ask him questions \u2013 was he really truthful about wanting to get out of it? How does he feel about the damage he did? How did he pursue a new future? I think his answers to all of those questions are deep, truthful and fascinating. He really is the central voice in the podcast.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now an established editor and director, back in 2005 Albrow was trying to break into film editing when he answered an online advert. Did it feel chaotic from the start? \u201cBecause I was so green, I didn\u2019t quite know what to expect either,\u201d says Albrow. \u201cI knew it was low budget, so everything\u2019s kind of scrappy. For instance, the sound was all over the place and some of it was unusable, but that got better as they got better.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bradley McIntosh had been cast as a drug dealer. At the time, S Club 7 had come to an end and he was working on solo projects, \u201cmore R&B, trying to find a way to get out of that pop bubble and be taken a little bit more seriously. I thought [the film role] was a great opportunity for me to cross over.\u201d He had acted in the S Club spin-off TV shows and film, but this was his first serious role (Albrow says \u201che delivers something amazing\u201d).<\/p>\n
J-Rock of Big Brovaz was one of the stars of Breakin\u2019 the Cycle. Photograph: BBC<\/p>\n
McIntosh was more familiar with Browne\u2019s world than his teen pop image suggested. \u201cGrowing up around certain people, I was familiar with certain lifestyles. You see drug dealers and people that are gang members and stuff like that.\u201d He didn\u2019t know about Browne and D\u2019s life at first, and thought the film was based on people who, like him, they had just seen around. \u201cI don\u2019t think it actually clicked until maybe halfway through filming that it was based on [their] true story,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
It was a fun set. \u201cWe became a family, lots of laughs every day. But there were some incidents that were kind of scary.\u201d Filming on an estate in east London with his castmates J-Rock and Randy \u2013 from the south London hip-hop group Big Brovaz \u2013 some young men thought they were filming a music video on their patch. \u201cThey were like: \u2018They can\u2019t come round here. You got to move, otherwise we\u2019re gonna start petrol bombing the cars.\u2019\u201d McIntosh smiles over Zoom. \u201cI could see that Colin was pretty annoyed, but he did the right thing.\u201d The cast and crew, he says, weren\u2019t \u201caffiliated with that lifestyle. I think in Colin\u2019s world, he wouldn\u2019t have wanted to show any sign of weakness, but he said, \u2018Look, we\u2019re gonna go, but we are gonna come back,\u2019 and we did. But the next time, they had a bit of an entourage, backup.\u201d<\/p>\n
Albrow\u2019s job \u201cwas to deliver [Browne\u2019s] vision. It was his voice, but I had to understand it. When you call a gangster film Breakin\u2019 the Cycle, you are setting your stall out \u2013 this is a hopeful message. His central philosophy, I suppose, was about understanding that in his world it\u2019s about everyone trying to escape. And that\u2019s not my world.\u201d He had long conversations with Browne about his life. \u201cHe\u2019s like: \u2018You\u2019re a white middle-class man walking around [west London suburb] Hounslow, I\u2019m a Black man who\u2019s grown up in Hackney. We\u2019ve had very different lives, and we see the world in a very different way.\u2019 But he was on a trajectory. It was his first film. He comes out of prison and makes it. He went: \u2018I want to do something. I\u2019ve got to do something right.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The transferable skills between drug-dealing and film-making are surely an entrepreneurial spirit and a refusal to be intimidated. \u201cThere\u2019s an uncompromising thing going on,\u201d says Albrow. \u201cColin was a businessman. His business was a bad business that hurt people and hurt the community, but [he had] film-making potential as a businessman and as a creative.\u201d Many first-time film-makers plunge in without much fear, says Albrow, but Browne and D were also tough. \u201cThey were not scared of much. Their job in their criminal business was to scare others.\u201d They both survived years in and out of prison, points out Albrow. \u201cIt\u2019s a tough place to be. They\u2019re going to go out and make a film, and they\u2019re going to gangster the industry \u2013 whatever pushback they got from a fairly elitist, slightly closed group of the film and TV drama industry \u2026\u201d For instance, when they tried to hire an expensive camera to shoot on and were refused, they simply went out and bought one.<\/p>\n
Neither McIntosh nor Albrow knew that Browne and D continued to deal drugs while making the film. \u201cThey did a good job of keeping it from us. I think that\u2019s called good professionalism,\u201d says McIntosh. \u201cI guess it\u2019s a weird one, right, calling it professionalism?\u201d Albrow says: \u201cI believed they were ex-gangsters and they were out of that life. It\u2019s not until now, 20 years later, going back and talking to D, that I understand what was going on. They were running two businesses at the same time, and getting out was not as easy as they thought. They were making a film about getting out of that life, at the same time as actively trying to get out of that life. That\u2019s what makes this story so interesting and such a rollercoaster.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both say the film doesn\u2019t glorify gang violence, or the lifestyle. The original director had come from music videos, but he left a third of the way in and Browne took over. It changed, says Albrow, from being quite posturing to a \u201cheartfelt, tender story about friendship and relationships. It\u2019s about the connections between these people, their loyalties, betrayals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Browne\u2019s death at the age of 38 \u2013 he was shot and stabbed after intervening in a dispute \u2013 was shocking. Albrow and the rest of the crew tried to carry on, but then D was arrested and went to prison and the film fell apart. By then, says McIntosh: \u201cIt\u2019s not about the film any more \u2013 someone\u2019s lost their life. It\u2019s about someone, a dad, a brother. But, in hindsight, it would have been nice if we had got that movie out.\u201d It might have taken its place among London-set crime dramas, such as Bullet Boy<\/a> and Rollin\u2019 with the Nines, that came out at a similar time.<\/p>\n Albrow remembers D picked up the footage from him before he was sent to prison, and for years he thought a copy of it had died on an old hard drive. Not long ago, a specialist managed to resurrect the drive \u2013 \u201cthat was a wonderful day\u201d \u2013 and now he has access to everything that was shot. For the past six months, Albrow has been editing it and hopes to put it out. The principal message of the film, says Albrow, is about \u201cchanging your life, and how to break out. You\u2019ve got to have a reckoning, and you\u2019ve got to make amends. I think Colin was ready.\u201d<\/p>\n