Pre-production

Barry Skolnick was working with Ridley Scott Advertising when he was approached by Matthew Vaughn. Matthew had seen the Nike Sports commercial he shot with Sean Bean for Sky Sports and immediately wanted to know who was behind it: "To my mind the ads captured in 90 seconds the emotion of what I thought a film should be. Barry has an understanding of soccer, which is second to none. This understanding I saw as being crucial to the making of Mean Machine."

It was a timely piece of television viewing. Matthew was looking for a director capable of dealing with the demands of bringing football action and drama to the screen.

A meeting was arranged through a mutual friend and they immediately clicked. Barry explains: "I love his philosophy on film-making. I like the way he bucks the trend - he's British and he thinks the Americans do it right. He's unashamedly happy to make a movie because it's going to make money, not just because he wants to make a great movie. His enthusiasm bit me straight away. As a producer he's incredibly astute - he understands film-making, he understands pace, he understands characterisation. He can see it in the script and he can see it in the editing."

'Mean Machine' was never going to be an exact remake of the original. Re-locating the story from a US penitentiary to a UK prison and trading American Football for English soccer took it far enough away from the original for it to stand-alone. "I don't feel that in anyway we were plagiarising the original," says Barry. "It really has got it's own personality. I spent a year and a half working with the writers to develop the script. I knew the emotions of the scenes and the pace that I wanted. We could have started shooting 6 months earlier but I wanted the script to be absolutely right."

"Mean Machine" was shot on location in Oxford and London during throughout April, May and June 2001. The majority of prison scenes were shot at HM Oxford Prison. A favourite site for film locations, HM Oxford Prison went out of service in 1997. This large Victorian structure houses over 150 cells on four levels, with original iron staircases and suicide nets. The tower dates back to the 11th century and was home to the hang mans noose.

Whilst offering the creative team some wonderful compositions, the team played on the austere, institutional uniformity of the prison to enhance this sense of hyper-reality. "We tried to keep everything outside the prison very warm to heighten the sense of municipal coldness inside." says Russell, "What we wanted to achieve overall was the harsh, cold grittiness of such 70's British classics as 'The Sweeney' and 'Get Carter' and the semi-documentary style of photographer Nan Golding to create a look that was very ana-line - drained, monochrome aluminium colours."

Recruiting the talents of Production Designer Russell De Rozario and Director of Photography Alex Barber, the team set about creating what Barry saw as a very linear prison scape. "I wanted to create a hyper reality. I thought the film should look very linear."