The Brit pack of UK cinema

Kate Dickie

Actor; born in East Kilbride in 1972. She played Lex in the BBC series Tinsel Town, and won the Bafta Scotland and the BIFA award for her performance in Red Road

Shane Meadows: I met Kate at the Festival du Film Britannique de Dinard, where Red Road (Andrew Arnold, 2006) was the closing film. It was as if I'd known her for 20 years and we instantly became really good friends - and then I saw her performance. Brave doesn't come close to describing it. She proved that if you want an absolutely gut- wrenching, believable, honest and emotionally driven performance, there is a new generation of actress out there who can do it, and we don't have to rely on the same few established stars. Because if you look to Hollywood, it's either Sienna Miller or Keira Knightley, and that's about it. I've got nothing against those actresses, but you see them play the odd tough cop or something, and you just think, "I don't buy that for one second". Whereas Kate in Red Road is obviously a real person who's had a real life, she knows the world thatshe's depicting, and it's much easier to believe a performance when someone is bringing something of herself to it.

To have pulled it off like that in her first film is a real achievement. Her next challenge is to find another role like that. In Hollywood everyone is remaking everything else and there just aren't enough people writing good scripts.

Mark Herbert: What she had in that film was an ability to do stillness, but she also had a ferociousness in her eyes. There were moments in it that just tore me apart. It would have been so easy to play some of those scenes in a cheesy or clichéd way, but the complexity of what she did was remarkable. She didn't look like she was trying, but she was actually doing some amazing work in that.

Vicky McClure

Actor; born in Nottingham in 1983. She played Ladine in A Room for Romeo Brass and Lol in This is England

SM: I've known about Vicky's talent for a really long time, but I think her performance in This is England will really get her noticed. I cast her in Romeo Brass when she was 15. Her character was meant to have been about 20 and she was the youngest person at the auditions, but just so ballsy that she seemed like the oldest. But I'd always thought, she's an actress that won't come into her own until she's in her 20s. She's got a real edge, but at 15 all people can use that edge for is the rubbish role of some tough kid in Casualty. She was going to loads of auditions and being put up for things like Footballer's Wives, but I had to tell her that it just wouldn't be right for her, that she'd be underselling herself. So she'd given up acting and gone to work. Then, when I needed an actress who could play the leader of a skinhead gang, and be as strong as the men in the film, I went straight back and asked her to come out of early retirement. It's not that she's masculine or anything, she's a beautiful actress, but she's got an incredible, very striking look and a demeanour that I think will really start working to her benefit. Now that she's growing into her skin a bit, she'll hopefully start to command leading roles and be working into her 30s, 40s and 50s. Me or someone else needs to give her a role like Kate Dickie's in Red Road, because she's got a performance in her that will really set her apart from a lot of other actresses in this country.

MH: The camera just loves her. Her features are so strong and striking, but not in a Hollywood way. She's got something of that Sixties French new wave look about her. And obviously she can really act, and she;s great at improvising. She's got so much potential and I hope she gets more and more work.

Johnny Harris

Actor; born in South London in 1974. He appeared in the films Gangster No.1 and It Was an Accident, before he was cast as Derek in London to Brighton

SM: Johnny plays a pimp - a really awful, repulsive character - and it's an incredibly bold performance. It's a part that's been played a million times, but in a very two-dimensional way, whereas Johnny's performance has so many layers. He's very sinister, but the film also reveals that there's something quite pathetic about his character, and Johnny plays that vulnerability very deftly. In the olden days, Gary Oldman used to get those kind of roles, and he was able to bring a real charisma to them. Since then, there's been Paddy Considine, who is seen as someone who can do the same thing, but for a long while he seemed to be in a group of his own. Now there's Johnny. It's a massively powerful performance, the best I've seen on celluloid for a long time.

MH: He's incredibly nasty in that film, but seems like a very nice guy in real life. It's a very assured performance that showed you don't have to be the biggest man on screen, or raise your voice the loudest, to be the most intimidating. You've just got to have a real physical presence.

Jack O'Connell

Actor; born in Derby in 1990 and has appeared in The Bill and Doctors. His first film role is as Pukey in This is England

SM: He may not be very experienced yet, but Jack O'Connell is definitely one to watch out for. He's got something a bit special. I saw him at Nottingham's Carlton drama workshop and straight away thought that I was in the company of a new Tim Roth or a new Gary Oldman. He's just got so much about him. He auditioned for the lead in This is England and came very close, but he was just a bit too old, so I wrote in a new character for him. It started out as a tiny part, but once we'd got him on set, in every scene that he was in you were just drawn to him and he did something special, so his part ended up being quite an important one in the story.

Paul Andrew Williams

Director; born in Portsmouth in 1973. He directed pop promos and short films, before he made the feature London to Brighton

SM: When you make films yourself you can appreciate the enormity of what Paul Andrew Williams achieved in making that film for £100,000. But audiences don't care what a film cost as long as it's still a great film, and I think London to Brighton is. Also, I'm an actor's director, and when I see a film that's really being pulled along by the drive of its performances, I know that that must have come from the man at the top. I don't think we've seen this kind of bold, character-driven film-making in Britain for a long time. There's been a real gap since Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, but I think with Paul, Andrea Arnold (Red Road), Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar) and myself, there's a new generation of British film-makers emerging. And I'm not one of these directors that wants to be top of the pile, I really want other people to be making films. I want it to be like American cinema in the Seventies, when you had Scorsese and Coppola and Spielberg and you could talk about a generation of film-makers.

Carrie Comerford

Producer; born in 1967. Her credits include Manderlay (Lars von Trier, 2005) and Red Road

MH: I know that Red Road was a very bold and very brave film to make. Carrie's role as producer of that film would have been to support the director and allow her to achieve her vision. But that can be very hard sometimes, when the film is not structured in a conventional way, and you've got the execs and the financiers on your back. I think the results of her work are very clearly there to be seen on the screen, in a film which doesn't act or look like any other. I think if I was looking for a producer for a project, she'd be exactly the kind I'd like to work with.

Mary Burke

Producer; born in New York in 1978. She is development producer for Warp Films

MH: Mary started off as a runner when we made Chris Morris's short film My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117 (2002), and then her role grew from there. As well as having lots of contacts, she's got a very different sensibility to the rest of us, so she's really taken on the responsibility of developing new talent for us. Dealing with financiers is an important part of a producer's job, but so is the ability to generate projects that are then attractive to financiers. She has her finger on the pulse - it's not just looking to see who's just won a Bafta for their short film.

Paul Fraser

Writer; born in 1973 and grew up in Nottingham next door to Shane Meadows, with whom he wrote their first four films

MH: Paul has got such a lot of heart and humanity that he put into his scripts, and there's also a great poetry about his writing even when it seems very natural. You can see all of that in the films that he's written with Shane. But he's also got an incredible imagination and some very original ideas. We're working on some features he's written that are more fantastical, and it's a different strand to his work. I think he's got something really special and different, he's still relatively young, and we've not seen everything that he's got to offer yet.

Richard Ayoade

Writer, actor, director; born in 1977. He starred in The IT Crowd and Nathan Barley and, with Matt Holness, wrote and starred in the spoof Garth Marenghi's Dark Place

MH: Richard is a writer, actor and director who I think has definitely got something different about him. We got him to write and direct the next Arctic Monkey's video, "Fluorescent Adolescent", and what he's done really is phenomenal. I loved Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, I thought it was one of the undiscovered gems of British TV comedy - I can't believe it was put on at some midnight slot because it deserved better. It was like Les Dawson playing the piano - it's very hard to do something badly so well. You have to direct brilliantly to make something look that bad, but I think a lot of it also came from the original writing.

'This is England' is out on Friday

Interviews by Laurence Phelan; additional reporting by Hugh Montgomery