The story of the making of the 2005 British film Breakin’ the Cycle is surely more compelling than the film itself. Nobody can say for sure, because a rough cut was confiscated by the Met police and the raw footage was considered lost. But the film’s origins and subsequent unravelling is extraordinary. Two of Hackney’s most notorious drug dealers try to go straight and become movie producers. It’s a strange combination of comedic chaos, an accidental stabbing, drug money and shootouts, big dreams of making a different life through art, and, ultimately, tragedy. The film-makers had to navigate real-life gang warfare, and an elitist, perhaps racist, film industry.
The cast included the rapper Lethal Bizzle, and Bradley McIntosh from the pop group S Club 7. If McIntosh was desperately trying to escape his clean tween pop image, he wasn’t the only one trying to escape something, though the stakes were far higher for others. Colin Browne, the leader of the Hackney gang Love of Money, wrote the film while serving a prison sentence for cocaine smuggling, and directed it; he had plans to take it to the Cannes film festival. Browne would be killed shortly after filming had finished.
