Screen writer hits target with own tale of a boy’s rise from a Batley back street

It’s a family drama, but one which happens to focus on Mia, a transgender assassin, who when not dispatching various targets, is struggling to come to terms with news a long forgotten ex is dying with cancer and the revelations that she fathered a son and has been made legal guardian of four other children.

Implausible, perhaps, but coming from the Bafta award-winning Paul Abbott, it’s not hard to see why Sky Atlantic was prepared to take the risk. He is after all, the creative mind behind Shameless, Clocking Off and State of Play, a screenwriter and producer who can turn even the most unlikely scenarios into TV gold.

Given the green light, Abbott had one problem. He already had several projects on the go and over the years has learnt the hard way that less is more. Abbott needed a writer and he already had someone in mind. Sean Conway.

The pair had met three years earlier when Abbott had seen a short film Conway had made as part of a competition run by Film 4 and the UK Film Council. Impressed, he asked the young writer and director whether he would like to spend some time working in his Manchester writing studio. It was, says Conway, the easiest question he’s ever been posed.

“Paul’s amazing. Obviously I’d seen a lot of his work and always thought, ‘I bet I’d really get on with that guy’. A lot of people who become successful tend to close the door behind them. Not Paul. He’s jammed it open and seems to determined to pull as many other people he can through it.”

Which was lucky for Conway, since in an industry fuelled by nepotism and family ties, he had neither. Growing up on a council estate in Batley, he was academically bright, but also he admits now, lazy. He coasted through exams, achieving decent if not outstanding grades, but with plans to play professional rugby league, qualifications he reckoned were largely unimportant.

“I’ve always loved writing,” he says. “I remember a school report when I was about six or seven which said, ‘Sean’s brain works too fast for his pen’. I wrote a lot, but it was just something I did. Everyone I knew had proper jobs and writing film scripts wasn’t something I thought you could even make a living from. My dad had been a pro-rugby league player and that’s what I always thought I would do.”

At 18, Conway was captain of the Great British student side and widely thought to have a promising future on the pitch. However, when he returned from a tour in America, he realised he had fallen out of love with the game.

“I’ve not picked up a ball since,” says Conway, who headed instead for Manchester where he was thrown out of two universities for failing to turn up or submit any work. “Between 18 and 20, I guess I just had too much fun. I started an English Literature degree and when that all went wrong I got a place studying the history of visual media. That went pretty much the same way and I wasn’t sure what I was going to to do. My girlfriend at the time was in Newcastle so I thought I might as well go live up there.”

The move turned out to be life-changing. While looking for work, Conway came across details of the film school at Northumbria University and secured a place on a scriptwriting course.

“Right from the first day, it felt like I had found something I really wanted to do,” he says. “Basically I got my head down.”

The hard work paid off and he sold his first ever screenplay to the photographer Rankin. Love, told in three overlapping strands, never made it to the screen, but the deal was enough to secure him an agent. In the years which followed, Conway perfected his craft, writing and directing short films, which all had a touch of eccentricity about them. There was one about a paranoid schizophrenic who saw messages in Alphabetti Spaghetti and another which showed a black gang leader, sporting a blond wig and riding a horse across his South London manor. A third was about a teenage nymphomanic. Given Hit and Miss’s leftfield take on the usual mainstream drama, Abbott knew Conway was the right man for the job.

“When I told friends and family, Paul had asked me to write a series about a transgender contract killer they either laughed or looked completely confused, so eventually I just stopped even trying to explain it,” he says. “I know it sounds like an odd premise, but I never had any doubts. I just thought let’s go with it, to be honest I was more excited than anything.

“It might sound ridiculous, but right from the start we knew it had to be believable. At its heart it’s a family drama. I wanted the fact that the central character is transgender and a contract killer, to remain just that, facts. The real drama comes from the idea that you have a man who is trying to become a woman, but who at the same time also finds out she is a dad to a son who is in need of a mother.”

Conway, who has now moved back to Yorkshire, was aware that Hit and Miss could prove to be his big break. Sky Atlantic only launched last year, but with half of its programmes from Entourage to The Pacific coming from the critically acclaimed HBO stable, it has already attracted a loyal following. However, when he sat down to write the six-episode series, he says there was only one person whose opinion he valued.

“Paul gave me complete free reign, which was probably very brave of him and I was really just trying to impress him. You hear some pretty awful stories about how much broadcasters interfere in new pojects, but Sky and the production company Red, which developed the pilot episode, were really hands off.

“You don’t get that very often these days so the whole thing was completely refreshing. They said they wanted it to be my voice and I’m really grateful to have earned that kind of trust.

“When you move from films to TV it is a steep learning curve. When I showed Paul the first episode, he said, ‘Sean. it’s great, but you’ve basically told the whole story in the first episode’. It sounds may be a bit naïve, but I suddenly realised that writing a six-part series you can’t shove everything in the first hour, it’s a much bigger canvas.”

While Conway was working on the script, the search was on to find an actress to play Mia. Various names were suggested, but when American actress Chloe Sevigny signed up to the show it was something of a coup.

Best-known for the 1995 film Kids about a group of promiscuous teenagers set against the backdrop of New York City and the arrival of HIV, and Boys Don’t Cry, based on the true story of Brandon Teena, a young transexual who transexual, who chose to live as a boy, Sevigny has always chosen films which side step the mainstream.

“When Paul first spoke to me about Hit and Miss, the main character was called Lori which is the same as my baby sister,” says Conway. “The first thing I did was change it to Chloe. I like to think that at some level of consciousness I was thinking of Chloe Sevigny. I was copied into the various emails going back and forth about possible cast and I kept cutting and pasting her name to the top of the list, so I like to think I played my part.”

While set in an unamed town in West Yorkshire, which Conway describes as “the right side of the Pennines”, much of the filming took place in Manchester. It was made on a comparatively low budget and even for Sevigny, now a veteran of independent films, the experience wasn’t entirely a happy one. In one early interview she described Manchester as “one of the grimmest places” she’d ever been to her in her life.

“I don’t think Chloe did herself many favours by shutting herself off from everyone else during filming, but honestly she’s a lovely girl,” says Conway. “I took her out and showed her the Leeds night life and introduced her to Mik Artistik (the regular around Leeds pubs who does portraits on brown paper bags). She must have enjoyed it as we are still in touch and she’s said she’s like to work with me again.”

The first episode of Hit and Miss went out last night. An early review had already praised the show’s writing, describing it as “unexpectedly moving” and Conway was counting a warm reception at a screening at his sister’s pub in Batley.

Everyone involved is hoping for a second series, but until then Conway is working with Abbott on the 10th series of Shameless. He is also working on a TV series about rugby league and a horror version of Romeo and Juliet, but neither have yet secured funding.

“It’s just insane, no one wants to take a risk,” he says. “We just seem to be churning out London gangester films or European art house films, which isn’t what British film should be about. TV is just regurgiatating the same old stuff, which is why I think Sky Atlantic have been really brave to stick the flag in the ground with Hit and Miss.”

However, Conway may not have to battle with British pursestrings for much longer. He’s recently returned from Los Angeles where he found himself introduced to “th e industry insiders who can open big doors.”

“My first meeting was at George Clooney’s company. I walked in and he was sat there at his desk.

“For a lad from Batley, that’s pretty surreal.”

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