Normally, it’s only the tumbleweeds that see any action over the Twelfth Fortnight in Belfast.
This year, however, during the year’s cold-storage ‘holiday’, a derelict house on the Cavehill Road was playing host to nothing short of a creative frenzy.
The production team behind Nailed, a heist-gone-wrong-cum-creepy-psychological-horror-pic, had holed up in the crumbling property for an intense bout of guerrilla filming – rivalling the more traditional July pastimes ‘enjoyed’ in the North for tumultuous energy and noise.
Of course, film sets are not places normally suited to serenity and peaceful tranquillity. Even taking this into account, there was a particularly manic atmosphere around the shoot.
The mania was best explained by the liberating, shot-gun nature of the production.
“I finished the script on the 12th of July, the actors read it on the 13th and on the 14th they said yes,” laughs writer Stephen McAnena. “Three days later we were filming. Incredible.”
Indeed. The story of how Nailed was written, green-lighted, cast, crewed, and shot within a fortnight is more dramatic and fantastical than the film’s actual plot. As Stephen explains, it all came about due to a chance meeting in a pub.
“Adrian (O’Connell- the film’s director) and I were out on my birthday and met Ben Katz, the executive producer of Johnny Was, a big budget thriller that was shooting in Belfast at the time," says McAnena.
"We got chatting and he told us that he had three US actors who had a bit of downtime due and, rather than sit around twiddling their thumbs, they’d love to do some work."
Katz told them to go and write him a script. Drunkenly, they agreed.
“Then, once we’d sobered up, we realised that we had a hell of a lot of work on our hands," continues McAnena. "I wrote the screenplay in two days and within a week we were filming.”
Polishing up an embryonic script idea he had mothballed years previously, McAnena changed the setting from Belfast to Brooklyn, re-jigged the characterisation to suit the three actors involved (Wilson Heredia, Sam Sarpong and Charles Porter), and situated the action in a single, interior location. All within 48, sleep-deprived and caffeine-twitchy, hours
According to O’Connell, far from stymieing the film’s development, the restrictions they faced in regard to budget and time, proved creatively liberating.
“We were all aware of the parameters in which we had to work," he says. "But we were never intimidated by them. We got on with it and tried to turn them to our advantage,” he says.
“No-one really got paid. We called in favours from all over the place. But once people heard what we were trying to do, they bent over backwards to get involved.”
Hungry for experience, volunteers happily gave their time for free.
"There are a lot of talented people in Northern Ireland who just don’t get the opportunities," says O'Connell. "They all jumped at the chance to work on a project like this. The atmosphere on set was really focused, really energetic.”
It’s this fresh vibrancy that O’Connell hopes to have captured on film.
“There are so many procedures that have to be followed when making films here,” he says.
Had the project taken longer to come together, the crew's enthusiasm might have flagged, he said.
“We would have spent so long thinking through every shot and polishing every line of dialogue that it would be a very different film from the one I think we’ve caught on camera.”
Irrespective of how the movie itself turns out (and, as O’Connell admits, the editing and post-production will take much longer than the actual filming), the can-do, cheekily pragmatic nature of its production has already identified Nailed as a landmark production in regard to Northern Ireland film.
A fact not lost on its producer, Colin McKeown.
“A lot of the time over the past lot of years you have sat around thinking, when are things going to change here?” he says. ”Either that or you just spend a lot of time moaning or listening to other people moan about the difficulties in making films in the North. But that’s all changed now. It’s happened. From here on it’s different.
In future, the North’s film industry should strive for a independent regional identity, he says.
“We should be making films that are predominately interior – we very obviously don’t have the southern California light – and we should also be trying to produce films from here that are of this moment, are outward looking, and are not wallowing in our own neurosis about this place,” he says.
“I think this is an important film because for the first time we’ve made something that’s a genuinely commercial prospect. I can’t wait until people see it.”
Pic: Amberlea Trainor