1. The film begins with two brothers who are convinced they understand the situation they are entering, only for that certainty to collapse when they become dependent on the people they intended to confront. What interested you in using that reversal as the central dramatic device, and what did it allow you to explore about fear and perception?
The reversal was the very first idea. Everything else grew out of it.
I wanted to explore what happens when people who have learned to fear and hate others suddenly experience the same helplessness and vulnerability that drives people to attempt a Channel crossing.
What happens when it’s your life in danger? Your family? Your child?
But as I developed the film with my co-writer, Ayman Al Hussein, himself a Syrian refugee who made that difficult journey across Europe, another question emerged.
Would you save your enemy from drowning?
Would you save someone who had set out to harm you, perhaps even kill you? And what does your answer say about your humanity?
I find that infinitely more interesting than simply telling an audience that racism is wrong. The question is what we do with our humanity when it’s really tested.
2. The brothers set out believing they are acting from a position of strength, but once they are stranded on the dinghy, that sense of control disappears very quickly. How did you approach showing that psychological shift without making it feel as though their attitudes simply change because the plot requires them to?
I didn’t want cartoon villains who conveniently learn a lesson. I wanted two recognisable British blokes.
Walshy is genuinely angry, while Rob has rather got caught up in it. They’ve been out on the beers, had a daft idea, and suddenly they’re in the English Channel. It’s almost a classic British caper, until it all goes horribly wrong.
Their prejudices don’t magically disappear because someone saves them. That would be terribly convenient, wouldn’t it?
What changes is their experience. Suddenly these aren’t abstract political enemies. They’re human beings whose kindness they depend upon.
And Rob, as a father, is confronted with one terrifying question: What can I do to save my child?
That’s a question displaced families all over the world face every day. Yet most of us in Britain are fortunate enough never to experience that kind of desperation.
I wanted to put ordinary British men into an extraordinary situation, so they might experience the world through the eyes of the people they’d been taught to fear.
3. The film engages directly with anti-refugee rhetoric and the debate surrounding refugee small boats, but much of its impact comes from putting the characters into an immediate situation of human dependence. How did you balance the political context with the personal story so that the characters remained at the centre of the film?
I think the trick is to remember you’re making a film, not delivering a lecture.
As a father, I’m deeply troubled by the increasingly mainstream politics of hate in Britain, and what that might mean for the world my children inherit.
We wrote Rule Britannia in 2024, when the idea of anti-refugee vigilantes taking boats into the Channel was essentially a fictional warning about where this rhetoric might lead.
Now, just two years later, we’re watching it happen. Danny Tommo has taken a boat into the Channel to confront migrant crossings, and his boat even sank. It’s almost a scene from our screenplay. I find that desperately sad.
But I didn’t want to make a film that simply tells people who already agree with me that they’re right. I wanted someone with very different politics to be able to watch it and recognise something of themselves.
That was also the challenge of working with Ayman. He’s experienced anti-refugee hostility firsthand, and we sometimes disagreed about how sympathetically to portray the brothers. Those weren’t just creative disagreements. They came from fundamentally different lived experiences.
I think the film is richer for them.
You can disagree with someone’s beliefs without denying their humanity.
That’s something we’re in danger of forgetting.
4. There is a strong irony in the fact that the people the brothers initially see as a threat become the people who are able to save them. How important was it to allow that irony to emerge through the circumstances of the story rather than simply stating the film’s message directly?
Absolutely essential.
The irony is so enormous it doesn’t need underlining. These men have gone out to stop a boat of refugees, and now those very same refugees are saving their lives.
Why? Because leaving them to drown would be inhumane.
What more is there to say?
I’ve actually re-edited the film recently to remove some of the more expositional dialogue. When we wrote it in 2024, we felt we needed to explain who these men were. Today, the political climate means audiences understand almost immediately.
And I think the film is stronger for trusting them.
I’m not interested in telling audiences what to think. I want to leave them with questions that stay with them.
The best films don’t close an argument. They open a conversation.
5. The two brothers begin the film with a shared sense of purpose, but their experience on the water creates a very different kind of pressure between them. What did you want their relationship to reveal about the way fear, certainty and group identity can affect the people closest to us?
There’s something fascinating and rather sad about the way men influence one another, particularly men who feel angry, disenfranchised or left behind.
Walshy is the driving force. He’s angry at the world and has found people who give that anger a direction. Rob is different. He’s a dad who’s rather been swept along by his brother.
They’re not some terrifying paramilitary organisation. They’re two ordinary British blokes who’ve been on the lash and had a stupid idea.
But stupid ideas can have terrible consequences when they’re fuelled by hatred.
And bringing Rob’s son along changes everything. Suddenly there’s a child in danger.
People rarely fit neatly into categories of good and bad. Often they’re frightened, angry, vulnerable people looking for somewhere to belong.
Sometimes the need to belong can be more powerful than the courage to disagree.
I think that’s true of two brothers in a fishing boat, and of the much wider political movements we’re seeing today.
6. The English Channel and the overloaded dinghy create an increasingly confined environment as the story develops. How did you use the physical conditions of the film to intensify the characters’ emotional and moral situation, particularly as the confidence they began with gives way to vulnerability?
We shot in the English Channel over two days, and at times it was absolutely terrifying.
I wanted the danger to feel real because it is real. People make these crossings in appalling conditions, often with their children, and it’s easy to forget what that means when we’re discussing immigration from the comfort of our living rooms.
I even asked the crew to put me into the sea so I could experience the cold myself. I spent time rehearsing the drowning scenes with Tom Page-Turner in a cold swimming pool, building his confidence and preparing him for the physical demands of the film.
Once the brothers are on that dinghy, there’s nowhere to retreat to. Their swagger disappears. They’re frightened, powerless and dependent on the people they’ve been taught to fear.
It made me think about shark films, actually. That sense of being tiny, fragile human beings in an enormous, hostile environment.
The sea doesn’t care about your politics.
Out there, we’re all just human beings trying to stay alive.
7. Michael Jibson, Tom Page-Turner and Anton Valensi are carrying a story in which much of the tension comes from the characters’ changing understanding of what is happening around them. What were you looking for from the performances, and how did you work with the actors to make those changes feel grounded and believable?
My background is in documentary filmmaking, and before that I was a youth worker, teaching vulnerable young people to use cameras to tell their own stories.
So I’ve always been interested in performances that feel unmediated, where you don’t sense the heavy hand of the director.
I wanted Michael, Anton and Tom to give us real human beings, not political symbols.
Michael is extraordinary because Walshy’s anger feels genuine. You sense the human being underneath all that noise. Anton brings a very different energy to Rob, a man who’s been swept along by events rather than driven by the same convictions.
And Tom had an enormously demanding role. We spent a lot of time preparing him, making sure he felt safe and confident enough to inhabit those frightening moments truthfully.
I work collaboratively and quite immersively. I want actors to bring things to their characters that I haven’t thought of myself.
The moment a performance feels like someone delivering the director’s message, you’ve lost the magic.
I want to feel I’m watching people, not watching a point being made.
8. Ultimately, RULE, BRITANNIA is concerned with what happens when people are encouraged to see others through fear rather than through their shared humanity. When you were making the film, what did you most want the audience to confront about the assumptions that shape the way we see people we believe are different from us?
How much of what I believe about other people comes from what I’ve experienced, and how much comes from what I’ve been told?
I spent much of my early career working with refugees and asylum seekers. I met people who’d survived unimaginable things, lost their homes, their families, their countries.
And what struck me wasn’t how different we were. It was how much we had in common.
We all want our children to be safe. We all want to be loved. We all want somewhere to call home.
Working with Ayman brought that home again. Here’s a filmmaker who’s lived through the experiences that Walshy talks about so casually. And yet we sometimes saw things very differently. We challenged each other’s assumptions, which is precisely what I hope audiences will do.
When we wrote this film, we imagined a possible future. Two years later, elements of it are happening before our eyes.
I don’t want my children growing up in a country where hatred is normalised, where frightened people are encouraged to blame other frightened people for their problems.
But I don’t think we change that by shouting at one another.
I believe in stories. I believe in empathy. And I believe in cinema’s ability to let us experience the world through somebody else’s eyes.
That’s the real ambition of Rule Britannia.
Not to make people agree with us. But to make it a little harder for them to hate one another.
WATCH THE FILM HERE: https://vimeo.com/1237861323/6d24e162bb?share=copy
