“The stables is really close to where I went to school,” Lawson explains. “I got in touch with them and said: ‘I’d love to make a Western with the kids that you work with.’ It was also a cinematographic challenge – to make a Western in a tight space, without the expanse [that you would typically get in the USA].”
In preparation for the film, Lawson sat down to watch “40 or 50” classics of the genre and found certain threads running through them. Aside from the classics and clichés – revolvers, cowboy hats, bourbon, etc. – he saw thematic consistencies, which he realised lined up with the story of the Stepney and its community.
“There are these thematic pillars to the Western, and if they don’t have them, it’s not a Western anymore,” he says. “They all have a frontier narrative, so the idea that land is up for grabs and they tussle over it – typically it’s a racist version of that historically, but the way I’ve mapped that onto Stepney Western is a gentrification story, so it’s the coffee shops instead of rancheros on horses.”
Throughout the film, there are visual hints towards the changing urban landscape in the centre of Newcastle, with an early scene featuring an archive voiceover that lays out plans for the “Ouseburn Development Strategy”. The area has been circled as a site for regeneration plans for decades, but it’s not only the types of businesses or properties springing up that are different, but also the people. Last year, Stepney Bank itself was saved from closure after launching a fundraising campaign, as costs have soared and income has tightened.
