By Dov Kornits
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director and producer Morgan Matthews, who helmed A Brilliant Young Mind, Williams and The Railway Children Return.
For a filmmaker who works primarily in the considerably outside-the-mainstream fields of documentary and children’s cinema, there is pretty much no way out of being unsung and under-celebrated, and these terms can certainly be applied to British-born director and producer Morgan Matthews, the founder of the independent production company Minnow Films. A documentarian with a deeply humanist and socially conscious streak, and a sensitive director attuned to the strengths and vulnerabilities of children, Morgan Matthews has a distinctive style and his work carries a strong thematic throughline. “I want to be creatively challenged and try all the different forms of storytelling, whether it’s documentary or fiction,” Matthews told Cinema Perspective in 2015.
Matthews first started directing for television, with a variety of short subjects and documentaries, often with topical, confronting subject matter. With a keen and incisive eye, Matthews applied his cool but impassioned focus to issues such as mental health (2003’s Care House), female gang violence (2004’s Rude Girls) and addiction (2006’s Quitters), while offering slightly less bruising material with 2007’s Beautiful Young Minds, which looked at a group of mathematical prodigies.
After these initial works, with his skills honed and developed, Matthews then upped the ante with three essential works for British television. Clocking in at three hours, The Fallen (2008) chronicled every British serviceperson killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Scenes From A Teenage Killing (2009), meanwhile, documented every teenager who died as a result of violence in a single year in the UK, and the ambitious Britain In A Day represented a single day in the life of people in the UK. “We used user generated content shot by people all around the country with mobile phones,” Matthews has said of the project, which was produced by Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald. “We ended up with around 800 hours of footage!”
After stepping somewhat out of character for the goofy 2013 mockumentary feature film Shooting Bigfoot (about the bizarre world of bigfoot hunting), Matthews made his fictional feature debut in 2014 with A Brilliant Young Mind, also known as X+Y. The gripping drama X+Y focuses on Nathan (Asa Butterfield), whose social awkwardness and general disconnect to his emotions is only matched by his proficiency in mathematics. His single mum, Julie (the wonderful Sally Hawkins), is equally unable to connect with the boy, but has the foresight to bring him to Humphreys (Rafe Spall in a breakthrough performance), an ex-Mathematics Olympian, who becomes Nathan’s tutor in maths, and ultimately, life in general. The latter part of the film sees Nathan travel to Asia, chaperoned by Richard (Eddie Marsan), where he meets Zhang Mei (Jo Yang), and a gentle relationship ensues.
“There are many similarities, and there’s much that we took from the original documentary,” Morgan Matthews replied when asked by FilmInk how similar his 2007 doco, Beautiful Young Minds, is to his narrative feature film, which used it as inspiration. “The character of Nathan in X+Y was inspired by Daniel, who was sixteen-years-old and focused entirely on math, so he dropped all of his other subjects. He became obsessed with China and taught himself Mandarin in three months. He went to China and came back with a Chinese girl whom he married, and the wedding was in the documentary. But I don’t think people would believe that in a fictional film, so that doesn’t happen in X+Y. But I found a very rich and interesting world.”
With Nathan on the Autism Spectrum, how did Matthews go about directing the young Asa Butterfield? “He doesn’t say much, which is challenging for an actor, so it was important for Asa to know what was going on inside his head as Nathan, and part of the process in helping him with that was to introduce him to Daniel,” Matthews told FilmInk in 2014, referring again to one of the subjects of his documentary. “And though Daniel’s shy and quiet, if you spend time with him in a quiet environment, he’s able to articulate what’s going on his head and how he feels. He’s actually very good at communication, even though he thinks that he isn’t. He was able to articulate all of this to Asa, so Asa had a good understanding of who his character was, and what’s going on in his head. So even when he’s not saying much, what’s going on in his head is very important, because that translates to what’s on screen. He did a great job.”
For a doco filmmaker, the experience of working with actors rather than “real people” was something that Morgan Matthews was initially worried about, but ultimately truly appreciated. “The actors brought wonderful moments into the film that weren’t previously scripted,” he replied when asked whether the scripted nature of feature films was different to the spontaneity of documentary. “So there was that joy and excitement, but just capturing the performances and working with such great actors was a real privilege for me.”
After two more documentaries – 2017’s This Was My Dad: The Rise & Fall of Geoffrey Matthews (a deeply personal work) and 2017’s Williams (the story of the Williams Formula 1 team) – Matthews returned to feature filmmaking with 2022’s The Railway Children Return, a sequel to the much-loved 1970 children’s classic The Railway Children, directed by Unsung Auteur Lionel Jeffries. Scripted by Danny Brocklehurst, The Railway Children Return brings audiences back to the Yorkshire village where the original took place. The time is now 1944, amid the Second World War, and children are being evacuated, arriving at Oakworth, and the very same railway station where the Waterbury kids’ adventures took place all those years earlier. Jenny Agutter’s now aged Bobbie from the first film has a daughter and grandson of her own, and still lives there, welcoming in three young children into her home.
“I thought a lot about what it was about the original that connected with people so much, and what has made it such an enduring classic as well,” Matthews told Radio Times. “And whilst it was important for us to try and capture some of that essence, and some of the detail that people might recognise from the original and might recognise as an homage to the original, we also wanted to make a film that stood up on its own. We didn’t want to overly load it with nods; that would be either confusing or a bit oblique for people who hadn’t seen the original, particularly children. I didn’t want it to become self-conscious in that way or distracting.”
Morgan Matthews pulled off the difficult move of embracing the previous film while also looking keenly forward, and achieved something sweetly impressive with The Railway Children Return. Though he has been feted and awarded for his TV documentaries, Morgan Matthews could certainly do with a little more attention, especially for his two feature films…
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
