What would be the effect of lowering the voting age?
Max, the central character of the film, is 17. We discussed at one point whether he should be 18 or older but keeping him at 17 seemed to be right because he couldn’t vote. I can’t imagine what argument there is against lowering the voting age. You can have sex, join the army – but not vote. In the days before women could vote, there was this obsession that if you let women vote there would be a Conservative government forever. There are always these kinds of arguments and the reality is different. There is a specific problem to do with the unattractiveness of mainstream politics. It’s not just that young people feel ‘there’s no difference between the parties so why vote for them?’ It is also that so much of what politics is about remains outside their control. If people felt it could make a real difference, if people felt that they could have direct control over their lives, that would be a different thing. But the film’s main idea is that if people don’t vote, they allow dangerous an
