Football fight club

Lexi Alexander: Her hooligans aren't heroes
10 April 2012

The knives were out for Green Street before filming began. Here was a movie about London football hooligans funded by US cash and starring doe-eyed Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood.

Worse, the film was to be written and directed by a young German woman making her feature debut.

Stories came out that West Ham United had been duped into giving access to a film crew intent on glamorising violence, while Danny Dyer, star of last year's soccer-yob drama The Football Factory, declared that any film starring Wood would not be tough enough (hobbits being fairly useless in a post-match ruck).

The fact that Green Street changed its title from The Yank to Hooligans before settling on West Ham's home address fuelled the suggestion that everyone involved was bound, by their nationality, situation or gender, to get it wrong about our beautiful game and the violence that sometimes disfigures it.

Those who hoped to see the movie go down should feel sick as parrots today. Green Street takes a grown-up look at both the brutality of hooliganism and the exciting camaraderie that membership of a team's "firm" bestows. Wood is very good as the innocent dragged fists-first into the Green Street Elite run by Charlie Hunnam's charismatic Pete.

The violence is as kinetically exciting as the footage of West Ham at home and yet the film leaves the viewer in no doubt that while friendship is great, violence is dumb.

All credit, then, to director Lexi Alexander. It turns out this slight 31-year-old from Mannheim knows exactly what she's talking about in terms of film, football and fighting.

"My brother took me to my first football match when I was five, and I quickly acquired a passion for it: once you've walked into a football ground, you know there's nothing comparable to it," she says.

A martial artist since the age of eight, Alexander found herself teaching karate and kickboxing to some of German club VfR Mannheim's premier hooligans at the age of 15, and persuaded the firm to adopt her as a sort of mascot.

"My brother and sister and I were latchkey kids, with a singer mother and no relationship with our father," she explains, "and being in a firm is often about filling a void at home. For me, it was like having 50 big brothers."

She witnessed vicious post-match riots, but never took part. "Nobody wanted to fight me," she says. "There's no gain in winning against a girl, or potentially getting beat up by one! But what I did do at an early age was to document everything. I kept a diary. I had a camera and I shot pictures of them."

She never found the fighting exciting, but wanted to convey in her film the visceral thrill that led boys, who later became doctors, teachers and pilots, to trade blows on a Saturday afternoon. "You can say that this behaviour is disturbed and utterly destructive, but how can you get the audience involved if you don't show the thrill?" she says.

"One of the things I'm proudest of is that a lot of women have liked the film, and told me they finally understand the appeal of this behaviour to men." Alexander left Germany, aged 19, after winning a kickboxing competition in Long Beach.

Chuck Norris presented her with her prize and, on learning that she'd also done some acting, suggested she could become the female Jean Claude van Damme. He recommended her to an acting school in Santa Monica and sponsored her green card application.

"I look back now and think, what was I doing, moving to Hollywood with $2,000 and a duffel bag?" she says. "But there is no money in martial arts competitions and in Hollywood there is an outlet for those skills. And I have always been pretty fearless." She supported herself by teaching kickboxing, and lived off hot dogs and cans of tuna from Mobil gas stations because Mobil had unwittingly issued her a credit card.

One day she was asked to direct her acting class in a scene and it was, she says, "like a light going on". She funded her early directing efforts, extreme sports documentaries and short films, by working as a stunt woman on movies like Mortal Kombat and Batman and Robin.

"It was a great job, and for years I enjoyed it," she smiles. "The only problem is, when women fall out of cars or down stairs on film they always have skimpy outfits on, whereas men are fully clothed, so they can wear padding. After a while, it became painful." When her 40-minute short film Johnny Flynton - a study of rage in the boxing world - was nominated for an Oscar in 2002 and producers started calling, she immediately sat down to write Green Street.

The decisions fell into place. The film would be set in Britain because "hooligans are the same all over Europe and South America, and I had no interest in making a German-language movie". She needed an American protagonist to make the characters ignorance about football plausible. She had doubts, she says, about casting Wood "because he is Frodo. But he was the best fish-out-of-water I could have found, and he has no ego about standing back and observing rather than going for the big, shiny, flashy role." Much of the dialogue was improvised or embroidered by the actors, with Tottenham fan Leo Gregory helping out the non-Londoners. (Charlie Hunnam's occasional lapses into Dick van Dykery are the film's weak spot.)

The actors, Alexander says, had no problem with her gender or nationality. But the real hooligans who worked as extras and consultants were another matter. "Whether it was because I was a woman, or German, or an American film director, there were moments on the set when they tested me," she says, "but when I told them I needed their help, they made it their mission to get the film done. All my life I have evoked this protective behaviour from guys like that, not purposely, but because I don't mind admitting when I don't know about a subject or when I need help."

She also charmed West Ham. "It's an urban myth that we scammed them - they are not that stupid," she says. "I promised them it would be a film that fundamentally opposed violence, and they read part of the script. They were worried when some paparazzi shots came out of the more graphic scenes, but when they saw the final product, they were happy."

There is, as you may have gathered, Rhineland Steel at Lexi Alexander's core. She is currently in post-production on Life and Lyrics, a film featuring Ashley Walters as a rap MC who falls for a girl from a rival London crew, which she took on to fill in time before taking on Disney's big-budget gangster movie Labour Day.

"I knew I needed to make a studio film, not for any financial reason, but because as a filmmaker, and especially as a female filmmaker, you have to break through the glass ceiling," she adds. "I want to push myself into that A-list club of directors who can go to the studio with a script that is not commercial, and maybe a bit controversial, and get them to finance it. That is my goal and I will not stop until I am in that place." Judging by past form, I bet she won't.

  • Green Street is out on 9 September.

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