Motion Picture by Tarantino: words that, confusingly perhaps, accompany more British rap videos from the last five years than can be listed here. These are lavish visuals boasting wild concepts (a chase sequence in Plasticine stop-motion), brazen winks to camera (a rapper dealing in industrial shipments of cans of Coke) and star-studded casts (artists such as Potter Payper, SL and Dappy – yes, that Dappy). But the director responsible is not the Pulp Fiction auteur; it’s Teeeezy C, a twentysomething Londoner whose Tarantino nickname is a play on his ‘government’ name. In keeping with today’s UK rap scene, however, he won’t say what his name actually is. He’d rather not reveal exactly where he’s from, either. “There’s too much ‘He’s from there, he’s from there’,” he says over the phone. “I’m actually out here – you’ll see me on the main road – and people have evil eye. There’s guys that probably right now are praying on my downfall … I’m just a Londoner at heart, innit.” What we do know is that Teeeezy is in his early 20s and was born to Indian parents. He began directing at 18, for friends hoping to make it as rappers. Months after starting university he joined British rap platform Mixtape Madness, shooting their freestyle series Mad About Bars. “I had a long conversation with the owner, Kwabz,” Teeeezy remembers, “and basically convinced him: ‘Give me a small budget, let me get a white room, a couple lights, a microphone, and let’s start something.’” Now in its fifth season, new episodes attract millions on YouTube. Since 2015, Teeeezy has made music videos with five-figure budgets (Nafe Smallz and M Huncho’s Part of the Plan), broken the UK Top 20 (Digga D’s No Diet) and filmed in Tokyo (V9’s Japan 2.0), Nairobi (WSTRN’s Sharna) and Chernobyl (Chris Cash’s Offside). “I’m not interested in generic rap videos,” he says. He mentions Jurassic Park as his favourite film but also Belly, a 1998 gangster flick directed by Hype Williams, the gold standard of hip-hop video directors. YouTube hasn’t always been a comfortable place for British rap music. Drill artists, whose lyrics tell of drug deals and territorial rivalries, have been criminalised by the Metropolitan Police, who since 2018 have ordered the removal of more than a hundred videos from the site on the grounds they encourage violence – including some by Teeeezy. His collaborator Digga D was recently recalled to jail, having only been released months before, while his single Woi sits in the charts. “He’s done five million views, he’s come out of jail to do something positive and … they’re not having it.” Yet Teeeezy is optimistic. “[At the moment] I’m putting together three minutes’ worth of content,” he says. “Soon I wanna be making feature films. And I wanna show the next kid like me that he can too.”