by Paul Fischer

Billy Elliot is one of those British films a la The Full Monty that has taken much of the world by storm. The film's huge buzz has surprised all that worked on it, especially young Jamie Bell, who makes his film debut in the title role. "We're all surprised and so pleased at the response the film's been getting at the various festivals and obviously pleased that everybody seems to like it."

In Billy Elliot, Bell plays the titular character, a miner's son in Northern England, who is forever changed one day when he stumbles upon a ballet class on his way to boxing lessons. Joining the class, but keeping it a secret from his widowed father and overbearing brother, 11-year-old Billy finds himself in dance, demonstrating the kind of raw talent seldom seen by the class's exacting instructor, Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters). She encourages him to try out for the Royal Ballet. But when his father and brother find out and forbid him to continue, Billy is torn between his responsibility to his family and to the gift with which he has been blessed. His overwhelming desire to dance has become much more to him than simply a means of self-expression. It is his passion and it is his destiny. There seem some fairly distinct parallels between Billy and young Jamie, geography being one of them. "I only live about 20 minutes away from where the film was set" which was a site for one of the major mine closures during the actual miners' strike. "But I wasn't affected by the strike at all", Bell recalls. The other parallel is the dancing aspect of this teenage character. Here, in this very male environment, both Jamie and Billy are born to dance, and like his character, Bell recalls dancing for the first time in a hall full of girls. "Both Billy and I were not only scared shitless of being surrounded by girls, but like him, I remember being thrust in the back, with this massive group of girls towering in front of you and you can't see a thing. So if the girl in front of you is getting it wrong, then you're also getting it wrong because you're trying to copy her moves, so it's a hard process getting from the back of the row to the front."

Bell has been dancing since early childhood. "I was initially interested in ice hockey when I was three", Bell recalls, "So I always wanted to be an ice hockey player." That is, until he saw a game. "I was put off a bit by it, it seemed too rough for me." Dancing seemed a more natural route to follow. "It 's been in my family for ages, as both me mum, nanna and auntie danced." Jamie has trained in al facets of dance, refusing to merely specialise in one. "When I first started you would do tap foe 2 years then you'd move onto ballet, but you kept on doing tap as well, so you'd finish a tap class then go upstairs and do a ballet class, then you got better you'd do them both simultaneously."

Coming from the kind of community from which Jamie grew up, it wasn't easy going through one's childhood as a dancer. His peers at school were not the most supportive bunch of kids. "Two years into my training I got hassled quite a lot, calling me 'poof' and 'ballerina boy'. " Like his fictional alter ego, the more he was thwarted, the stronger he became. "Them doing that just made it more of a challenge to me, because I wanted to prove to them it wasn't just for girls but for boys as well, so my determination strengthened." The determination paid off: After all, Jamie is now the star of a hit new movie, and those kids who mocked him are dancing a different tune. "Yeah, they treat me differently now because they think I'm rich. They think that my first movie is like Die Hard or The Matrix; I keep on telling them it's about family and growing up with your family, but they don't get it."