Zed Nelson, renegade film-maker

We’re a golden age for long-form documentaries.

Yet The Street still stands out as exceptional: hilarious, shocking, heart-warming and heart-breaking in about equal measures. A poignant look at a community in change, it was made by Zed Nelson, an award-winning photojournalist and author of books such as Gun Nation (an examination of America’s deadly love affair with the gun) and Love Me (about the global beauty industry). 

The film was shot over a four-year period in Hoxton Street, near Nelson’s home in the East End of London. He set out to make a record of gentrification, as developers and hipster cafes moved into the street, and traditional communities were swept aside. But what he found in the end was more complicated. Bursting with great stories and characters, the film is entertaining and easy to watch, but nonetheless poses important questions about our cities, who they are for, and how we want to live in them.

Although primarily a photographer, Nelson had made a few short films for TV before, starting with Shelter In Place, an exposé of the petrochemical industry in Texas. “I literally bought a video camera and unpacked it from its box on the plane to America, read the instructions and then made a film,” he says with a laugh. “It was a steep learning curve!”

The Street wasn’t commissioned, or even funded, at least initially. It was just a project Nelson decided to do. His story is inspiring for creatives of all kinds, because it’s about just getting out there and doggedly making the work you want to make, not waiting for permission, an invitation, a budget, or even pre-planned idea of the film. It was made simply because he wanted to make it, and is all the better for that.

So how did you make The Street?

There was no grand plan. I just started filming. Hoxton Street was familiar, and local to me. The end of the street used to just be empty sky, but the City of London is just a mile away, so now there’s a kind of like New York skyline of glittering silver and steel skyscrapers rising up. It looks like an army, laying siege at the end of the street. So it was quite a strong visual image. You can literally see change and gentrification coming. 

But the street had somehow retained its original character, while all around it had been transformed. My plan was just to observe and capture the changes as they happened, to capture the anatomy of gentrification. So I started filming, and as the story developed, somehow three-and-a-half years went by! And in that time, these extraordinary things happened. First the vote for Brexit, and then Grenfell tower burned down. What began as a story of gentrification and change became much more interesting because of the political context.

When did you start to realise what strong characters and stories you’d got?

To be honest, there were a couple of times when I thought the film had gone off the rails. When Brexit happened, I didn’t think, ‘Oh, this is interesting. This is good for the film.’ I thought, ‘This is the end of it.’ 

The film was about gentrification. And Brexit was going to hold that back to some degree, even if only temporarily. And it did. It slowed everything down. So it radically changed the storyline, and I almost stopped filming. I kind of gave up. 

Then, several months later, it was like this light came on. I thought, ‘This doesn’t destroy the story that I was trying to tell. It actually partly explains Brexit.’

I think Brexit was a very British backlash by people who felt they’d been overlooked or ignored, left out of all the benefits of globalisation, gentrification and wealth.

Suddenly, what I’d been filming in Hoxton Street felt like a microcosm of what was being felt all around Britain. People had lost their industries, their communities. Their way of life had disintegrated, and they could see a small group of people who were benefiting from the rapid change.

How did it feel when you thought you’d lost your film? And what reignited the spark?

There were many times I thought it wasn’t going anywhere, that it was impossible. Even before Brexit, I had this major conundrum, which is that trying to make a film about gentrification isn’t as easy as you think. I’d read lots of books as research, and I realised that they were quite dull, and you’d come away with almost nothing concrete. It was like trying to catch smoke in your fist. 

Obviously, there are manifestations of it – like hipster cafes. But as I started filming these, my characters confounded me. Some of the so-called evil gentrifiers turned out to be nice, funny people. Many of those cafes are small, independent businesses, run by people who are putting their heart and soul into it. Plus, they serve good coffee!

So my simple narrative of good and bad started disintegrating. And then some of the original inhabitants – who I might call my heroes – turned out to be racist. Nothing fitted into neat compartments. 

How do you get past that?

At one point, I went to interview the woman who runs the Bethel Tabernacle Church in Hoxton Street, essentially a black church with a black congregation. I asked her how she felt about the changes, expecting her to say what everyone else up till then had said: it’s not like it was, our congregation has gone, families have moved away.

But she actually said, ‘Oh, it’s so much better! When the church first came here, the cross was torn down and vandalised, and we had to have security guards.’ 

I started to wonder if I was actually making a pro-gentrification film, by mistake. So I went into the doldrums again, until I realised I didn’t want to make a film that over-simplifies everything. Life is full of contradictions and paradoxes. So I decided to be honest, and show it all.

My feeling now is that some change is good. I don’t think we should try and hold on to everything. I like the fact it’s more multicultural, less violent. And less racist! But it doesn’t mean that all the pubs should be closed down and made into private apartments. Or housing estates should be emptied and redeveloped as private blocks.

So to go back to your question of what it’s like when you hit a brick wall. It’s depressing, especially when you’re working on your own. Which I was. I was director, producer, camera and sound person. You’re relying entirely on yourself to keep the momentum going. Which is quite hard, when you hit these creative dilemmas and obstacles.

What kept you going?

I once heard someone talk about queuing up in the Soviet Union during Communist times. You’d wait hours to buy something and you’d want to give up and go home, but by then you’d invested so much time, you stayed. Making a film, to some degree, is like that. You think, ‘I’ve spent a year and a half on this. I can’t give it up now.’

I was by no means sure that it was going to be of interest to people. That was the other hard thing. Most projects I’ve worked on, I’ve been pretty sure that people will eventually be interested, that there will be an audience. On this I was less certain, because it wasn’t concrete. It was a shifting thing, that was hard to pin down. I didn’t think it was going to end up in cinemas for months, and draw a really good audience. That’s been a really gratifying surprise!

Do you feel vindicated now?

More like relieved! But as a documentarian, the work we produce doesn’t just have a value now, it’s for the future. If it describes who and where we are now in our contemporary lives, that will become more and more fascinating to look back on, to help people understand how we were behaving and why we were doing things.

So I was absolutely convinced that the film would be fascinating to an audience in 50 years time. I was just less sure that it was going be interesting now.

With that in mind, I approached the Museum of London. They gave me a small grant, and acquired the film as part of their permanent collection. It was only a small amount of money, but the fact that they’d acquired the film before they even saw it, that was a big incentive.

So you had to be creative as a producer, as well as a director?

Yes, in terms of raising money and finding a distributor. But also with contacting characters, doing interviews, getting release forms. That was an enormous part of it.

Filming is easy, and fun. The problem with documentary is that you can build up quite a lot of material, and then bury yourself in it. You need weeks and months to go through it all, and extract the bits that are interesting. That was the hardest part.

The edit itself was seven weeks. I worked with a really nice, professional film editor, so it was a pleasure. But the bit before that was agonising. I had a terabyte of material on a hard drive, and I had to view it, log it, and cut rough timelines for each character, working out who contributes something interesting to the film. That was a long, lonely process.

How do you motivate yourself to do that, when you’re not being paid?

You just go a bit mad for a while! It kind of took over. I avoided doing it for about six months. I even fantasised about simply not doing it, just letting it all fall apart and never mentioning the film again. That was genuinely an attractive option.

But I just couldn’t live with myself if I did. You spend all this time with these characters… It’s vital to be working on a film that you care about, with themes and subjects that are important to you. Plus there’s my stubbornness, and the Russian queue syndrome, which are equally important. 

But working this way also gave you a lot of freedom.

Exactly. If you work for TV now, you have to pre-describe the film before you’ve even made it, when you’re trying to pitch it to get money. Most TV commissioners now want to know the exact narrative arc that the film is going to take, who the characters are, and what the ending is. Which doesn’t encourage thoughtful, observational film-making.

Because I made the film in a slightly renegade way, I didn’t have that. There were no restrictions, which was a joy. When the editor asked how long it had to be, I said, ‘It has to be as long as it deserves to be, no more.’

Then as we worked on it, at a certain point we both agreed that it was going to be feature-length. In the finished film all these characters interlink, but in the edit room, all the walls were plastered with tiny photographs, stills that I’d printed out showing different characters and scenes. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. There are about 50 speaking characters in the film, and it was woven together like a tapestry.

Was money ever a motivation in this?

Definitely not! The Street has been a great success by documentary standards. It was in cinemas for over four months, it had over 210 screenings, and it got great reviews. But I’ll be lucky to break even on it. It doesn’t make sense, commercially. But this has always been the way for me.

I’ve always done personal projects, because I just have to or want to, I think they’re interesting or I want to learn about something. You don’t really earn a living from them, but sometimes they contribute in some way, or they help your reputation. 

So it’s just about getting out there, and doing the work?

Stories like this don’t spring up, fully formed as ideas. Before The Street, I did a project about Hackney, my part of East London. I did a photo book that was gentle, reflective – almost like a visual poem. I could see the area was changing. And I was sick of travelling, so I wanted to just do something on my own doorstep.

Out of that, I started thinking more about gentrification. And then a girl was killed on Hoxton Street. She was shot through the window of the Chicken & Pizza restaurant by two young men on bicycles. It was gang-related, and she was an innocent bystander. That same week, I’d been photographing Hackney hipsters on the opposite corner. And I thought it was interesting and terrifying that those two worlds could inhabit the same place.

Then I did a story for magazine about billionaires in Britain, which also started me thinking about inequality. So the film grew out of all of that. You don’t just suddenly make a film about something; you ease your way in, and build the knowledge and the interest in the subject. You can’t just suddenly have this grand idea. You need to be doing different things that interest you.

What’s next, for you?

I’m working on a photography project now, which might be like a two-year project. It’s loosely about humans, and our relationship with the natural world. So that’s very broad! 

I’m not sure how I’ll fund it, yet. My motto up till now has always been, don’t add it all up. Don’t do any budget forecasts. Don’t work anything out. Just get on with it!

The Street is now available on DVD or to view online via Amazon Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, BFI Player, iTunes, Google Play and SkyStore. Click for home-viewing links, or to view the trailer.