Charlie Creed-Miles plays young copper Hickock, yet he’s got more experience of the area than his boss, Frampton. ‘When we first meet Hickock, he’s investigating a shooting in a park which they decide is a random shooting and it turns out that it’s a gang initiation which has gone wrong.

“Then he meets Frampton and they slowly get drawn into the case of the gang related violence. I think Hickock’s worked himself up through the ranks and she [Frampton] has been fast tracked to her position, so there’s a little bit of angst at the start the relationship, but that slowly dissipates.’

It is Emily Mortimer’s DCI Frampton, however, who provides the main conduit into the story. ‘The middle class audience can look through her character’s eyes,’ says Thykier. ‘She is probably best known for playing those English rose type characters and so that made her perfect to be pitched into this raw world.’

The actress says that Frampton arrives from a different world. She’s a career copper used to the world of formal investigating. ‘She has decided to put herself on the front line,’ notes Mortimer. ‘There is somehow a purity to her that makes her stick out like a sore thumb in the universe of Harry Brown; the estate she’s assigned to her first day of work. Her first day of work sees her turn up at a murder scene where a young mother has been mindlessly shot.

‘As my character shows the audience, the reaction she has to this meaningless crime is one of horror; the lawlessness of it. It is not just a murder. It’s a completely meaningless murder. She wants the world to make more sense than that. She needs the world to make sense. In a weird way Harry Brown has the same feeling as her. They are two sides of the same coin. He can’t bear the senselessness of the violence in his world. It horrifies him and he has the same kind attitude to it as she does, which is why there is an understanding that they don’t realize.’

To help tell the story, the filmmakers looked for non-professional, local actors to play the youths in the film, in order to keep the film authentic. The casting directors looked at boxing clubs, local youth groups and they put the word out in the communities.

Thykier recalls that Barber spent a lot of time auditioning the kids. ‘It seemed like Daniel saw every single kid in the country. There were endless rounds of auditions. However I remember that Ben Drew, who plays Noel, really stood out very early on in the process. Certainly I think all the kids we cast were head and shoulders above everyone else.’

Daniel Barber agrees ‘When Ben Drew (Noel) and Jack O’Connell (Marky), auditioned I something in their performances and character that I really liked. It was my job to bring that out of them on screen. They are fine young actors who I think will do really well in the future.’

Casting the younger members of the cast in this way certainly had its benefits. Ben Drew comments ‘Perhaps at one point in my life I was a disaffected youth, and it was useful to draw on certain elements from that period for this role.

“’ Drew also appreciated the freedom that Daniel Barber gave them ‘Daniel was always open to suggestions for changing some of the words in the script, in order to make it more real to a younger generation. There are also a couple of scenes in the film that have some improve in there, which was great to do.’

Harry Brown is out now.

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