Interesting film

Morton, now 31, was 16 when she started storyboarding the film. She was living in a hostel for the homeless when she read an article about a young prostitute in Nottingham and realised this was somebody she had known in care. Years later, she read about two other girls she'd known who had also become prostitutes and had been murdered. The reports had a huge impact on her. She wanted to tell their stories, and her own story, and create something fictional, all at the same time. She started to write scripts, but rejected them as rubbish. "I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that." She clicks her fingers.

Eventually, she asked Tony Grisoni, who adapted David Peace's Red Riding trilogy for television, to write the screenplay, and he created a film that is not about murdered prostitutes, and not literally her life story, but is close enough to make her family shudder with recognition.

"There are a lot of similarities between me and Lucy, but my mum and my dad and my eight brothers and sisters can all watch the film and go, 'We know that's not our story, but we get why she's done it.' At the same time I do love them and I do respect them, and I'm not about to exploit them."

Morton was first taken into care as a baby. She never learned why as a child, and remains unsure to this day. Everybody concerned - mother, father, social services - has a different version of the truth. Family life was certainly not helped when her father got the 15-year-old babysitter pregnant (he went on to marry her) and her mother moved in with an alcoholic. There were times when Morton returned to live with her father until she was eight. Then she was made a ward of court, which meant she could never return home - again, something she didn't know at the time. She describes her father as a "brilliant man", a huge influence on her life, so desperate to be a good dad. She has not always felt like this about him.

Did he hit her? "Yes. Yep." Badly? "Yep." The most horrific thing about the violence in The Unloved is its inevitability. However senseless, and however much Lucy's father tries to stop himself, we know just what's coming next. He even provides a tortured running commentary as his willpower fails him. I ask Morton if her father hit her in a similar way. "I think anybody who has been abused as a kid - and I was abused as a kid, by various people - will say it's irrational because violence is irrational. It is a criminal offence for you to hit me or me to hit you, but it is not a criminal offence for a parent to hit a child. What gives one person the right to be violent with another person, especially a person who cannot understand? Baby P... My mind boggles at the amount of violence inflicted upon children in today's society."