Tom Harper was brought up as a Quaker in north London: his father Rod was clerk of North West London Area Meeting, he went to Quaker summer schools and Junior Yearly Meeting and still occasionally attends Meeting for Worship. He had anticipated my question about the extent to which Quaker values inform his film-making. ‘It’s about empathy’, he explains. ‘Mass entertainment media like films have the power to make us understand better, to empathise with other people who are not like us. So they have a responsibility not to be exploitative. This is important for the health of society in general. We define ourselves by the people around us. The more we understand them, the better informed our decisions are likely to be.’ Tom got into films by working, post-university, as an assistant editor in a post-production facility. When he started to practice on footage that he’d shot himself, he soon realised that he preferred getting the footage to sitting in a dark room editing it. He is grateful to his mother, film producer Sara Feilden, for help in getting him the job, but doesn’t think he was consciously influenced by her in his choice of career. He’s just as grateful to her for insisting that he go to university first. Here he developed a ‘love of learning’, a choice of words which at first seems surprising from an up-and-coming young director, but is clearly all of a piece with his purposeful approach to film-making. Tom doesn’t want to be didactic, but there’s a lot he wants to say.

Luckily, Tom seems to revel in contemporary themes. Cubs (2006), the short film that first got him noticed, is about a gang of urban fox-hunters; it conjures up a fearful world of the city at night and the peer pressures on young people. Cherries (2007), set in the near future, follows a class of teenage boys faced, during an unnamed but extended war, with the unexpected re-imposition of conscription. One theme of his new film, The Scouting Book for Boys, is the pressure put on young people by the hypersexuality of today’s society. In all these films, Tom is consciously trying to counter the way young people are treated in the popular press. ‘I’m sick of the way teenagers are demonised. We should be celebrating them, and their differences.’ His next, more commercial, film, Cheerleaders, will follow a group of hard-living young girls in Hackney and will, apparently, have a happy ending. I can’t wait.

One of the boys in Cherries refuses to be conscripted. In exploring this choice, Tom was mindful of the example of his grandfather, a conscientious objector who served in the Friends Ambulance Unit. And he sees David, the anti-hero of Scouting, as someone who makes a catastrophically wrong choice because he feels he has no other options. In too many films, he points out, we follow the actions of the hero, who does exactly what you wish you were doing. ‘But life’s not like that. We all make mistakes on a regular basis, at least I do.’ He hopes that, by seeing David and his contemporaries from the inside, as it were, we can look at him, and indeed ourselves, with greater understanding.

Sara Feilden’s three-part series ‘Who needs fathers?’ began this week on
BBC2 (Wednesdays, 9pm).