MEET ME IN MARGATE

Trouble seems to follow Pawel Pawlikowski around. Mrs tried to ban his film about the Bosnian war. Then came his documentary about the leader of Russia's far right. So when he turned up in Kent to shoot a feature film about asylum seekers, the mud began to fly. Fiachra Gibbons on the making of Last Resort.

It looks like a dump, that's
what it looks like

- from "Margate", the closing chapter of Graham Swift's Last Orders. You have to feel sorry for Margate. There it is, stuck out like an untended boil on the backside of Kent, disowned by its solidly respectable neighbours, Ramsgate and roadstairs, whose facades seem pulled in a permanent rictus of displeasure and embarrassment

at its coarse proletarian pleasures. All through the 1980s, London councils dumped the mad and the bad - their undeserving poor - into the empty bucket-and-spade guesthouses along its broad bay. Even they didn't stay. To top it all, there is Tracey Emin. "Margate made me what I am," the artist once declared. But she won't be bringing charges. "Because to me, Margate is beautiful, romantic, charismatic, sad, eccentric and screwed-up... You don't lose your virginity there, you have it broken into." Like its most illustrious daughter, Margate has had to learn to trade on its own tackiness. Buster Bloodvessel, the gargantuan ska singer, opened a hotel near the front called Fatty Towers as a taste-free retreat for lardy lovers. But despite the reinforced beds and the gut-buster breakfasts ("2,000 calories in every bite") it too closed down.

Fatty Towers may end up, like most of the old Regency hotels in the Cliftonville area, providing a home for refugees, though the ?20 worth of food vouchers they get each week wouldn't keep its former residents in bubble and squeak.

Close to 3,000 asylum-seekers have been left to stew in one small district of this town of little more than 45,000 people. Such a glaring example of how, in the words of William Hague, England has been turned into a "foreign land" has inevitably attracted Ann Widdecombe as well as the National Front, which has held six rallies in Margate in the past year. Neither Widdecombe nor the Front drew enough supporters to outnumber the police.

For, while the locals may not welcome the influx of refugees, they know that even if the flocks of lonely Afghan and Albanian combining "realism and warmth", how the film "leaves you with a feeling of having glimpsed something essential about the way the world is now".

Back in Margate, those councillors who had actually seen the film were breathing a sigh of relief. "I am getting sick and tired of councillor Ezekiel's promotion of untruths," councillor Johnston said. "Unlike him, I have had a preview of the film which is a tender, gentle love story. There are some remarkable shots of the seafront which can only re-emphasise what we all know - that we have a stunning bay." Councillors also point out that the name of the resort in the film has been changed to Stonehaven.

Richard Nicholson, the council's Labour leader, and the man behind the plan for a �7m arts centre dedicated to the town's other great artist, JMWTurner, thought it might even enhance Margate's new arty image. "The story centres on the desperation of a young woman with a young son, abandoned when they reach a foreign country. Obviously, the director needed to invoke this feeling of isolation, and by clever use of parts of Margate in the off season was able to portray this to good effect. I do not think this will harm Margate in any way. This film could actually encourage more visitors who will be pleasantly surprised when they arrive (to find not only the evocative locations used in the film, but many other fine aspects of Margate and Thanet."

Pawlikowski wasn't confident of a positive local reaction when he started filming. "Back then I called it Russian Lover or something like that. It would have been asking for trouble, just crazy, to put Last Resort on the clapperboard. Many people in Margate were suspicious of us at first and you can't blame them. They thought we had come down to put the boot into them, to take the refugees' side. The locals generally don't like the refugees and they don't want them there - things are tough enough for them. They assume the refugees get all sorts of benefits English people don't get, which is rubbish, of course."

Pawlikowski wanted to create an imaginative landscape in which Tanya (played by the Russian actress Dina Korzun) and her son Artiom (Artiom Strelnikov) felt both lost and trapped in a kind of Stalag Butlin's, fenced in by arbitrary, unexplained rules, barbed wire and bureaucracy, a landscape without cars or other means of escape, where large groups of sad, unshaven men, Kurds and Afghans, wandered aimle.ssly all day observed by CCTV cameras.

"When I first when down to Margate," he said, "my first contact was with the Roma, the Gypsies, who were the only refugees really who interacted with the locals. Even with them, what struck me was how little their world extended beyond what they called Margatta. They would make epic journeys to a strange place at the far end of their known world called Greyvas End. You don't have to be there long to realise that most of the asylum-seekers are clueless peasants. They are Kurds and Afghans mostly. Some have not even lived in cities before. They are all stunned, many don't move because they don't know what to do. When the local Margate kids go round spitting at them, you can see their shock because they come from cultures were people have manners, where strangers receive hospitality. To me, they looked like they were living inside a Kafka story."

In a typical touch, Pawlikowski cast one of those spitting girls - who could have stepped from the scrawled pages of one of Tracey Emin's lurid teenage diaries - as one of the prepubescent gang who introduce 10-year-old Artiom to the joys of smuggled Belgian vodka and cigarettes, and the first, disturbing stirrings of sex.

In this Kafkaesque Ingerland where caffs sell batter without fish and meat pies without filling, and where you don't get change from your food vouchers, Tanya and Artiom are befriended by Alfie, a skid-row fixer who works on the slot machines down the arcade and who introduces the boy to the rudiments of English ("10 Benson & Hedges, please") and the correct way to mix his chicken tikka.

When he first landed in Margate with his skeleton crew, Pawlikowski had little more than a loose semi-autobiographical story to go on. (He came to Britain from Poland with his family when he was 12). "Initially Alfie [played by Paddy Considine, a former boxer who made a startling screen debut in Shane Mead-ows's A Room for Romeo Brass] was to be a much more ambiguous, slighty threatened character, but the chemistry with Dina was magical. Paddy is a real phenomenon. We all lived together during the shoot, that is part of my method, so we were able to improvise scenes and come up with new ideas in the evening and over dinner. I am an insomniac, too, so I just kept writing all night sometimes. That is the way I like to work."

Like its director, Last Resort is a very peculiar animal. It mixes gritty realism with a very un-British dreamlike quality which transcends the grimness of its setting. The handheld, documentary sequences of refugees huddled in shuffling queues for a solitary phonebox or the interior fug of greasy spoons are cut with beautiful, lingering wide-angle landscapes to create the eerie perspective of people who spend their days peering out uncomprehendingly at the strange country beyond their windows.

"I'm interested in the forgotten places, the dumping grounds," says Pawlikowski, " the places we have taken out of our mental picture. I want people to see images of lives that will catch them off balance."

Surprises is what Pawlikowski is all about. He really surprised the BBC with his last project, Twockers. They commissioned him to go off and make a documentary in Halifax and he returned with a haunting TV film about a boy burglar who befriends a pregnant teenager, a kind of hyper-dysfunctional Kes crossed with the Lord of the Rings. It may sound unutterably depressing -three tabloid "Rat Boys" sitting on a settee above a sink estate discussing in their own skroaty slang what old dear to do over next - but it wasn't. Even the break-ins looked balletic. "The kids we found and improvised with knew what they were doing," he says.

The only tragic thing about this beautifully-crafted gem was that it could never have been made by a British director. Pawlikowski makes no bones about his belief that, with a few notable exceptions, British film-making sucks. "I see all these guys running around that are all technique. They have nothing to say and the stupid thing is that they are not even curious and they don't care. They make films the way you and I go to the supermarket, picking this image and that style off the shelves. Everything is either plot, plot, plot or style, style, style and when they try to do something that reflects life or tells a story it turns into some awful issue-based thing. It is really frustrating when you want to see something original, something different. Most of the really interesting film-makers in this country are over 50."

Pawlikowski has a great Polish love for argument, for taking extreme positions that can't possible be held and clinging on for the hell of it. "My big problem is that I'm really a feudalist - the world and film-making would be a lot simpler if it was feudal."

His recipe is simple. "You have to be a conman to make really good films today," he says. "You have to work inside the system but against it. Take the money and run." He has huckstered the BBC into backing his pet projects for the past 10 years. "It's" got harder, but as long as I kept winning prizes they let me get away with it." With Dostoievsky's Travels, he spun a hilarious and fantastical documentary around the writer Fyodor's great grandson Dimitri, a St Petersburg tram driver, whom he found struggling to break free of the clutches of an overbearing vegetarian German baroness who had held him prisoner in her schloss in Schleswig-Holstein: "I rang [the novelist] Nigel Williams, who was editing Bookmark at the time and said, 'I got this great idea, Nigel, send me some money immediately, I'll explain later.' And he did."

It may sound too bizarre for belief, but Pawlikowski made his name in 1990 with a still more deliriously satirical Bookmark documentary about Benedict Yerofeyev, the leg-pulling laureate of Soviet drinking culture whose hallucinatory masterpiece From Moscow to Pietushki is a sort of aesthetic discourse on the rigours of alcoholism. Every wino in Russia can seemingly quote from its exhaustive menu of cocktails in which eau de Cologne, French polish, and deodorant are among the more favoured ingredients.

Pawlikowski's career hasn't been all Felixes, Emmys a'nd Prix Italias, however. For four years the BBC's obsession with voyeurism and fly-on-the-wall documentaries left him out in the cold. Then his one brush with the lilliputian world of British star power produced what Pawlikowski calls "my near nemesis", the low-budget BBC and Russian co-production, The Stringer, where Anna Friel took top billing ahead of some of Andrei Tarkovsky's greatest actors. If Twockers and Last Resort were his time in purgatory to pay for the �1.4m he blew on The Stringer, he has used it to hone one of the most distinctive styles of British film-making. "You have got to go against the grain to stand any chance of making anything that will pass the test of time. When we went to Bosnia to shoot Serbian Epics, we must have been the only crew there who didn't shoot a single frame of fighting. That was a perverse thing to do, but the film we made has not aged like so much else that tried to catch the rage of the moment."

Now that the world has completely lost interest in Bosnia, he has followed that logic to the letter by returning to Sarajevo. "It has turned into this weird protectorate. It's crazy. I have this great idea..." At the Thanet Times, Mike Pearce revels in a similar contrarianism. He wistfully regrets that the furore over Last Resort has run out of steam so quickly. "I had thought there might be more in it," he says, though he is proud of how Margate has stood aloof from the racist excesses of Dover, where the local paper described asylum-seekers as "human sewage".

Thanet Film Club are planning to show it in nearby Broadstairs, he tells me, but not until the autumn. "Films like Last Resort don't normally make it to Margate," says Mike, "I'm sure it is great, but it's not my thing. I'm more a tits and bums man myself."