Paddy was going off to shoot My Summer Of Love in June, and it was like the first of March and realistically, I would need the money agreed in 3 days so that we would have time to get it through the banks and everything. So I said to Mark,
“You’ve seen what me and Paddy can make for 200 quid, whatever money you can make in three days, we’ll make the film for that”….. and he raised three quarters of a million pounds!
It was one of those things, because it was such an insane idea, the first couple of people we’d been to see like the Film Council, were quite disrespectful in some ways.. The guy at the Film Council wasn’t interested, he was looking at his watch and he had a plane to catch.. By the end of the meeting he was actually saying,
“Well look I need to know more about it”, and I said,
“Well you’ve not listened to a word I’ve said, because the whole principal of this meeting was about 'could you agree to make something now?'”, so I said,
“I don’t want you involved” and that really blew him out the water.
Since I’ve made Dead Man’s Shoes, people from the Film Council have been coming up to me at festivals and saying, that guy’s not gonna be working here much longer. I think they’d dropped a bollock you know.
*SPOILER* (Dead Man's Shoes - skip to following blue section to avoid it)
Me and Paddy started writing one film and two weeks into it, Paddy didn’t like it. We started off making a comedy and I think we both said to each other, we can make something so much more challenging here.. Because no-one even knew what we were doing, we thought we really can go one darker.. This one’s like 11 on the dark scale!
We knew we could make a comedy, but we wanted to take on the biggest possible challenge.. I mean, I’ve never had a murder in one of my films, I’ve never had any special effects and I’ve certainly never had a ghost, you know and it was all of this in the lowest budget picture, so that was really exciting.
We started off with this idea of this guy that goes around at night like a ninja, more of a comedy story.. But he’s really wank at fighting and has got really shit weapons and trampolines… and the production company loved that, but I went back after a few weeks and said it’s become much darker.. I showed them the script and said we had got to a point, that we didn’t know where it was going, but we’d decide when we got there and they just gave into it.. It’s so rare to find people that are prepared to take that kind of risk.
http://www.shanemeadows.co.uk/briefscript.htm
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