You can tell by the quality of the buffet that hopes are high for Shallow Grave. Irish film distributors don’t dish out wine and vol-au-vents at a press screening unless they’re cocksure that they’ve got a real smash on their hands. The tack at the launch in UCI, Tallaght last week was top notch.

Made on a £1 million shoestring, this independent British production was creating an industry sizzle long before it had even secured a commercial release. Shallow Grave has won awards at several European film festivals and garnered a Niagara of praise at both Edinburgh and Cannes. In America where it has yet to open, it’s already being billed as one of the essential “must-sees” of 1995, and the comparison that is being made most often in the advance publicity is with Four Weddings And A Funeral.

Anyone expecting the cosy warmth of FWAAF, however, is in for a sharp shock. Shallow Grave may light up the box-office with similar aplomb but it’s a very different kettle of celluloid. A chilling tale of dismemberment, dementia and dosh, lots of dosh, it’s low on weddings, even lower on funerals but heavy on both bodies and burials.

The plot couldn’t be simpler. Three brash thirtysomethings, a journalist, a chartered accountant and a doctor, share a large, enticing flat in Edinburgh’s New Town. They hold auditions to find a tenant for the fourth bedroom but encounter nobody who reaches their particular standards of cool and charm. Until Hugo turns up, that is.

Hugo moves in and, within twenty four hours, proves to be a lot cooler than his new flatmates thought. They discover him lying stone cold dead on his bed, cause of death a massive drug overdose. Under his bed they make an even more startling discovery, a huge suitcase stuffed to the gills with money.

After only a brief bout of conscience-wrestling, the trio decide to keep the cash and to dispose of Hugo’s corpse as efficiently as possible. It’s then that the fun really starts. Greed has an insidious habit of rupturing even the tightest of friendships. There’s also the matter of from where all that legal tender came in the first place, and how far will those for whom it was originally intended go in order to regain their spoils?

In Shallow Grave, writer John Hodge, producer Andrew MacDonald and director Danny Boyle have created a refreshing and compelling movie that is intelligent, funny and ablaze with the kind of sensuous jolts and twists that guarantee maximum use of cinema-seat edges. “We wanted to make a film that was somewhere between art house and commercial cinema because that’s the kind of film we like to go to ourselves,” explains John Hodge.

OMINOUS MENACE

Glasgow-born Hodge, a doctor by profession, had never written a script before but had long harboured ambitions to tell stories on the big screen. He met fellow Scot, Andrew MacDonald, then working as location manager on Taggart, through his sister who had been sound editor on a short film MacDonald had made for the 1991 Edinburgh Film Festival. At that time, Hodge had nothing more than a hand-written, foolscap outline of the film he wanted to write but that, along with a shared love of movies by the Coen brothers, Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder among others, was enough to sow the seeds of a collaboration.

A little over a year later, thirty year old Hodge completed the screenplay which MacDonald forwarded, along with a request for development money, to the Scottish Film Production Fund. The SFPF liked it and stumped up the princely sum of £4,000. Buoyed up by such reassuring if meagre encouragement, Hodge and MacDonald attended a script-writing seminar in Inverness in November ‘92, with the sole intention of trying to get a copy of their script into the hands of one of the main speakers, David Aukin, Channel 4’s Head of Drama.

“There have been various stories about how we bribed someone to give David Aukin the script,” says MacDonald, “but what we did was buy his driver a drink. We just searched out the chauffeur we were told was taking Aukin back to the airport, and bought him a drink. And, the guy gave it to him. To our astonishment then, Aukin rang us up about a week and a half later and asked if he could meet us. He loved it, and on the 11th of January 1993, I’ll never forget the date, we were told that Channel 4 were giving us the green light. Of the £1 million which we knew was all we needed, £150,000 came from the Glasgow Film Fund and the rest from Channel 4.”

The next step was to find a director. “We knew the sort person we wanted was someone who was about to make their name,” MacDonald explains. “We didn’t want an established name or someone who had tried and failed. We wanted someone who was hot and, in some ways, our equivalent, but a more experienced film-maker.”

That bill was fitted perfectly by Danny Boyle, a thirty-eight year old Mancunian with an impressive pedigree of theatrical and television credits. Boyle loved the script (“it was very lean but you could actually see the film as you turned every page”) and he mentioned all the right cinematic touchstones (Blood Simple, sex, lies and videotape) during his interview with Hodge and MacDonald. They both knew immediately that Boyle was the man for the job.

Having assembled the small but perfectly pitched cast, with Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston and Ewan McGregor as the three central characters, the six-week shoot began in and around Glasgow in September 1993. The fourth central character, the vast, sumptuous flat in which much of the main action occurs, was a larger than life-size set constructed, at considerable expense, in a Glaswegian warehouse.

The final piece of inspired casting was the choice of the utterly obnoxious Keith Allen for the role of the mysterious, doomed Hugo. Audiences in Britain have been known to holler, cheer and clap when he’s killed off only seventeen minutes into the picture.

Shallow Grave is no splatter-fest but it is violent in a very real way. The bonecrushing is all the more wince-inducing for the fact that most of it is incurred with the aid of banal household utensils and tools like hammers, hacksaws, even a fridge door. A trip to the hardware shop provides the film with one of its most foreboding scenes. Not since Dead Ringers has a shot of mere implements been so loaded with ominous menace.

“We wanted to make a very British film,” says Boyle. “We didn’t have any guns in it because guns are wholly false to the British experience. You can live your whole life in Britain and never see a gun, unless you live in Northern Ireland and even that’s changing. Most of the violence in these islands is carried out with objects that are far more terrifying than guns.”

“It’s very easy to shoot someone actually,” adds Andrew MacDonald. “You just aim and pull the trigger. Anyone could do it. It’s like using a vacuum cleaner. But to actually pick up a crowbar and whack somebody is a very different thing. You have to be really strong and you have to be really intent on hurting that person. The same with a knife and all the other household objects that are used in this film. They hurt the viewer to watch because you can more readily conceive just how it feels.”

MISLEADING COMPARISON

It is not to give too much away to reveal that the dissection of cadavers is an important element in Shallow Grave. Ironically, given what happens to one or two of the living characters in the film, it’s the treatment meted out to the stiffs that has been raising the loudest gasps of terror from some audiences. Obviously, as a fully-qualified doctor himself, it is a subject about which John Hodge can claim more than a passing knowledge.

“In first year medical school, all medical students for hundreds of years have dissected bodies, it’s not really a big deal,” he asserts. “What it teaches you is how easy it is. Any one can do it. You take all these eighteen year olds from all over the country with different personalities, from not very varied backgrounds maybe, but a reasonably good spread, and you put them in a room to cut people up and they all just do it. They have no problem with it at all.

“I was influenced by that aspect of it rather than the horror of it, the ease with which people adapt to that situation. Of course, the character in Shallow Grave doesn’t adapt to it very easily but that has more to do with the circumstances than with the task itself.”

Inevitably, some of the lazier and less imaginative film journalists across the Irish sea have been hailing Danny Boyle, in particular, as “the British Quentin Tarantino.” It’s a misleading comparison that does Shallow Grave a disservice and could well become a millstone for Boyle.

“I admire Tarantino very much,” he avers. “He’s done an enormous amount to create a sense of energy in cinema and to mobilise a fairly young audience again. And, of course, to make some very sophisticated films. Pulp Fiction is a very sophisticated piece of work. He’s not just pandering. But I don’t think there’s any comparison with what we’ve done at all. We set out to make a film that was not an American film, that was a very conscious part of what we did.”

Given the phenomenal reaction to Shallow Grave, all three of its progenitors have been inundated with separate offers of further work. But they’re determined to pace themselves and to continue to operate as a team. Already, they’re planning their next project, an adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel, Trainspotting, set among a group of junkie friends in Edinburgh. Shooting is scheduled to begin in the Spring.

In the meantime, the obvious question is how would Hodge, MacDonald and Boyle themselves react if they found a suitcase of lolly under a dead flatmate’s bed?

“We’ll get back to you when we come to a definitive answer on that one,” says Danny Boyle. “A lot of money is a lot of trouble, I know that. We were very naive in the early days of this picture and, at one point, we thought about how we might get some publicity for the film. Why don’t we hire a million pounds for a day, we thought. Use real money for some of those scenes. So we rang up about it, but what it costs to hire a million pounds for a day is just unbelievable.

“You have to pay interest, hire security, all this stuff. It’s a headache, far too much trouble. Only the top notes are real. That’s all we could afford.”

• Liam Fay

Shallow Grave opens in Ireland on Friday, January 27th