Cass: Interviewing Jon S. Baird, the director of the movie ‘Cass’ for the Toe-to-Toe section of the Cass Pennant website.

Q1. Why the film ‘Cass’ and how it come about is your first question.

Jon: Right. We’re sitting in New York having a beer, so this is a good time to do this interview. We’re getting towards the end of the post production process and it’s been a very hard journey. A lot harder than I ever thought it was going to be, but probably a million times more enjoyable as well. I’d heard of you (Cass) when I was younger, the Intercity Firm and all their exploits. I thought a lot of the films that had been done about hooliganism hadn’t really gotten the point , so I made a short film, ‘Casual Life’ and through that got a job on ‘Green Street’. When I met you on Green Street and you gave me your autobiography I honestly wasn’t expecting much. I just thought it’s going to be another one of those, but when I read the first few chapters I thought this isn’t really a football book to me, this is more an identity story of a guy and sort of rags-to-riches - you know story of redemption. So that was why I was interested first of all. It was real and an interesting story, but it had also a lot more elements that made it more appealing for a universal audience too.. There was no second opinion, two chapters in, phoned you up and I said, I hope you don’t think I’m taking the piss or blowing smoke because there’s a lot of people who do that in the film industry. But I thought to myself, this is a story I wanted to do because you know reading about your childhood and some of the things that you had overcome, I could kind of relate to in my own childhood, not through race or anything, but for different private reasons. I thought I can tell this story in a way that is personal to me and that’s why there was never a need for a second opinion, I was always 100% committed to it.

Q 2: Your background, Jon, and how you got into film-making, your route.

Jon: I graduated from Aberdeen University in 1996 and I moved down to London and started as a runner, working for an independent production company. My first job was to go to the boss’s house and pick maggots up off the kitchen floor and take them down to environmental health department. I said to myself, what the fuck am I doing? But then I thought, no this is what I want to do and to cut a long story short, worked my way up from there. I got a job at the BBC, became a researcher, then an assistant producer, then a director, and then decided to do my own short film, ‘Casual Life’, which eventually led onto ‘Cass’. It’s been a twelve year journey since I started. I honestly think that’s the only way, in this industry. To know your job properly and to get respect from everybody you have to start on the bottom rung.

Q3. What was your first film and can you tell us about that then?

Jon: My first film was a short film called ‘It’s a Casual Life’. I was working at the BBC and I wanted to do drama directing but they would never let me do it, because I was working in the comedy department. So somebody said, what you’ve got to do is do a short film or show an example of how you can work with a dramatic performance. Because I grew up in Aberdeen and had gone to the football, I knew a lot about the casual lifestyle. It’s a story set in the present day about a guy who looks back on the times he’d had before and how it has all changed. I put it together mostly on my own and with help from Dougie Brimson who wrote the script. It took three months to complete and it was extremely low budget. The film was screened at quite a few festivals and fortunately I was quite successful with it commercially and it sold quite a lot on the DVD. Just about enough to cover the cost of making it. It got a lot of good reviews in the press because we invited a lot of sports journalists along to see it just before the England-Turkey game. They were expecting to see something that was quite exploitative and I’m sure they were ready to slate it, but those that usually would of didn’t take that approach and gave it some great write ups.

Q4. So ‘Casual Life’ was your first short film, which is fair to say it received critical acclaim. So that obviously brought you to the attention of ‘Green Street’ which is quite, well almost a Hollywood made film. Can you tell us what you learned from your time from ‘Green Street’ and was it directly through ‘Casual Life’ your involvement on ‘Green Street’?

Jon: The director of ‘Green Street’ visited the set of ‘Casual Life’ to see how we approached the fights and from that asked me to be involved in ‘Green Street’ as an associate producer. I didn’t have any say in the script or story. My role was sourcing the clothes from the manufacturers, putting a lot of extras together, advising on how they would dress and things like that. It was being pitched as a major film because Elijah Wood had just done ‘Lord of the Rings’ and he was really big business which helped open a lot of doors for me when working on the product placement.

Q5. Do you think that gave you an added drive to make your own film? What did you learn from ‘Green Street’?

Jon: I think I learned a lot from working on ‘Green Street’, both good and bad. I also met a few individuals who I brought with me to work on ‘Cass’ along with some that had worked on ‘Casual Life’. A lot of people slate Green Street and I’ve got my own personal opinion on it, but I think that the thing I learned most was about the film business and how people conduct themselves. Most importantly though, how to put a film together.

Q6. So Jon, it’s clear you’ve got a football fan background, as with most people involved with the film ‘Cass’. So what is your team and your best football trip memory, and your best game?

Jon: My team’s Aberdeen. I’ve been in London for twelve years and I used to live in the East End of London when I first moved down, so the first team I went to see was West Ham. So I would say my English team would be West Ham, but my real team, the team that’s in my heart is Aberdeen. I was born in Aberdeen. I grew up in Aberdeen. I went to university in Aberdeen. It’s in my blood. From the age of about five years old I went to see them with my dad, right until the time I moved to London. Without a doubt, my favourite memory was watching them in the European Cup Winners Cup final, 11th May 1983, beating the mighty Real Madrid 2:1. I was at the game and it would have to be my longest lasting memory as a child.

My favourite away trip was when I got a bit older, because you enjoy everything that’s associated with going away for football. I would say it was either Euro ’96 or France ’98. I had a fantastic time travelling to both…… and that was with Scotland obviously!

Q7. Coming up to the film you’ve just completed, you’re not only director of ‘Cass’ but you also wrote the script. What was you looking to reflect in making this film and writing the script, and how much material is espoused from the book to weave into the script – just a generally question really around the story.

Jon: I think it’s really difficult when you adapt an existing piece of work into a film because there’s a lot of stuff that works in books, that doesn’t work in a visual medium like a film, so you’ve got to be very selective. It took a year to write the final script of ‘Cass’ because I’d written so many different versions of it. There’s a lot of characters and events in the film that are real and we used the real names, but there’s also some who are either based on one person or football team, or based on an amalgamation of a few. The childhood was based on the true facts. Your first game at Wolves, the gauntlet of hate and getting placed in Barnardo’s: that was all true along with your prison sentence and how you were shot. Some of the football stuff is obviously an amalgamation of things but I don’t view it as a pure football film as I keep telling people.

Q8. Now you’ve made the film, looking back, what was the funniest story, and the best memory making this first feature film.

Jon: The best memory was probably day one when I met you in the morning and I sort of looked at you and just thought, fucking hell, this has been three years and we’re here now, so let’s not fuck it up. We’d had so many knock-backs along the way but we knew the kind of people we were, the kind that won’t give up. The best memory was when it actually came together and we’re standing there thinking, you can’t take this away from us because we’ve worked our arses off to get here. The funniest thing that probably happened was when I went to Los Angeles to sell the script. There were two companies that we were supposed to be meeting who had read the script and we were eager to see how they reacted to it. We’d been out the night before and got in at five o’clock in the morning, a massive session. So we’re at the meeting, and are sitting there, myself and the producer Stefan, basically shaking with hangovers from hell and running to the toilet to be sick. These guys arrived and I think they thought that we were trying to be really cool, but it was just because we couldn’t speak. I think they thought that we were trying to be these young maverick film-makers when the truth of it was, we were shitting ourselves and really nervous and just trying to concentrate on not spewing up on the table in front of them. Anyway they both offered to buy the script and after they’d left we looked at each other and said, what the fuck was that all about? Is that how it happens? That was probably the funniest thing because we weren’t expecting it at all, we were expecting them to say, the script’s shite and you’re a pair of fucking dreamers. That’s probably why we went out the night before and just got wasted to deal with it.

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