Love actually

But Nick Love says Bournemouth Film School "saved my life" when he came here in the mid-1990s.

Back on his old stomping ground to spend a day with film production students at the Arts Institute, the 38-year-old writer-director visited film sets and hosted a seminar.

Relaxed and approachable, there's nothing starry about him and he couldn't be happier to be back in the cradle of his career.

"I was going nowhere, but this is the place where I became absolutely obsessed with making films and that's what's so great about it - it allows you to do that," says the energetic Londoner, who is champing at the bit to begin shooting his update of classic 70s British TV police drama, The Sweeney, this summer.

"I'm really pleased with the way it's shaping up - the script's good and it looks like we've got Ray Winstone to play Regan. He wants to do it, and I'm chuffed. It's the ultimate."

Nick was asked to spend the day in Bournemouth by an old friend whose son is on the course.

"I rushed to do it. This is the place to massage talent and bring it out.

"I think I was a good student. I mean I was arrogant, and wanted it all, but I got really obsessive about films.

"I was always into it, but here I was able to take it to the next level - we'd sit up in the library until 11 at night just watching as many films as we could.

"I think it helped being a couple of years older. I was 24, 25 when I came here, and on the wagon by then."

Brought up on a south-London estate after his middle-class parents split up, Nick didn't go to school after the age of 14, and was into heroin and petty crime by 15. By 17, a close friend had been killed over a drug debt, and Nick was sent to Maudsley for psychiatric treatment and drug rehabilitation.

It worked and he hustled a job as a runner for a film production company, was briefly a model (for Calvin Klein), then came back to the film world before ending up in Bournemouth in 1994.

"I was lucky in that I'd worked in films since I was 17, so I knew the industry, but there's a lot of good mates from Bournemouth who went up to town and were out of the business in three months because the reality is they couldn't afford to live there."

Nick's films have earned him a variety of soubriquets, from "Spokesman for a Generation" to "King of the Chavs", and although he doesn't shy from them, none sit very well.

He has only made four films and, so far, has told the stories he knows, stories that speak loudly to a generation of British urban working-class men. His debut, Goodbye Charlie Bright, is a rites of passage tale about a group of mates on a housing estate.

"I had a couple of very close, emotional friendships, growing up that mark you for life," says Nick. "So it'll be a while before I make period costume dramas, but at least with The Sweeney, although I'm turning London into a battlefield again, I'm on the right side of the law!

"I was taught here (in Bournemouth) that you should make films about what you know, and growing up on a south-London estate I saw what was going on. I was a casual and drifted into getting into punch-ups at football matches."

His second film, The Football Factory, tackled hooliganism with brutal realism. It also displayed a human warmth that largely went unnoticed by mainstream critics who accused it of glorifying the lifestyle.

"It's about belonging. Like the Chavs thing they throw at me - I don't like what the Daily Mail means when it uses the word, but it's an important youth movement - just as punk was.

"I was a casual with all the smart clothes and that; it's what every generation does. Just kids wanting to belong, looking for a family, and that's the only tribe left for them."

The Business followed the life of a south-London boy on the Costa Del Crime in the 1980s. With meticulous attention to detail, it was savagely funny, undeniably laddish, but yet knowing enough to maintain a strain of humanity.

His most recent film, last year's Outlaw, was arguably his most controversial yet. Focusing on a disparate group of disaffected men who take the law into their own hands, it has echoes of Taxi Driver, Death Wish and even Natural Born Killers as the vigilantes end up feted by the media.

Some saw it as a morality tale for our times as Tony Blair prepared to jump ship, others lambasted it for revelling in the same mindless violence that prompted Love to make the film.

"It did what I set out to do and I stand by it - of course I do," he says. "I've got another little film I might swerve off and make if The Sweeney drags on too long. It's called Little Gangster and it's about these kids of 12, 13 and 14 who've gone way beyond Chavs and are running wild.

"Outlaw came out of newspaper headlines and these lawless kids are in the papers at the moment, that's why I'm interested in it. Now that I'm getting on a bit, on the one hand I'm thinking they should be rounded up and shot, while on the other I feel the kids have run out of options."

It's interesting to catch Nick on the verge of making The Sweeney, his first film with a major studio, 20th Century Fox. He's as ferociously engaging and articulate as ever, but in previous conversations he's talked a mile a minute and proudly declared his outsider credentials.

Not that he is hiding anything now, but the process of shepherding a £10 million budget movie is much different to the £500,000 it cost to make The Football Factory.

"Fox have been great, but big corporations move slowly. They know they've got me for 18 months, but after that I'll get bored and move on. That's why I've written Little Gangster - I like to get in, get set up, shoot overnight and release it the next week.

"Having said that, sometimes you have to wait. Fox did a survey recently and found that 70 per cent of people they asked wanted Ray Winstone to play Regan and nobody else got more than five per cent. There's no one else could play the part so if it means waiting, I'll wait. Anyway, I'm seeing him tomorrow and we'll get him."

Or, as Regan would have it: "All right Tinkerbell, you're nicked!"

'Andsome