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A FILM ABOUT a serial killer, set in a small snowy town in the American midwest, might not seem like your ‘typical’ Irish movie. But Irish directors and producers are proving that as we move into 2017, there doesn’t need to be anything typical or stereotypical about the work they produce.
Take I Am Not A Serial Killer, the aforementioned film – out this weekend – directed by Corkman Billy O’Brien and starring veteran actor Christopher Lloyd alongside Max Records, the fantastically named teenager whose breakthrough role was in the big screen adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.
Filmed in Minnesota as the winter set in, and with a budget of just $1.45 million, it’s based on the young adult novel of the same name by Dan Wells.
Records stars as John Wayne Cleaver, the son of a mortician who helps his mother prepare cadavers. Diagnosed as a sociopath and seeing a quite ineffectual therapist (played by Karl Geary, brother of the musician Mark), the movie follows as he tries to track down a local serial killer.
So far, so not Irish, a fact that’s not lost on the team behind it.
“I’ve met people in different countries like Sweden and so on, where this film would never have gotten off the ground if we had been [for example] Swedish,” says O’Brien when TheJournal.ie sits down to chat with him and Records in a Dublin city-centre hotel.
“Because they’d have said no, it has to be a Swedish story – so you know that’s why we’re really grateful that they were supporting it the whole way.”
The ‘they’ are the Irish Film Board, who part-financed the film along with the Fyzz Facility and Quickfire Films.
The film took years to get made – Records did his first test shoot back when he was 13 (he’s 18 now). The 16mm film required for filming sat “glaring” at O’Brien for a long time from fridges at his house, having been bought by producer Robbie Ryan (who also works with lauded British filmmaker Andrea Arnold, of American Honey) as it was due to go out of stock.
“The [Irish Film Board] were probably going ‘are they ever going to get this made’, but they supported us from the word go,” says O’Brien. “You know, they were just fantastic and also very outward looking. We didn’t know about [Oscar-winning] Room going on or Brooklyn or that, but if you look at their range of films they’re all Irish to one extent or another, but they are also international, which fits Irish people being all over the world.”
O’Brien wrote the screenplay with Christopher Hyde, and says the IFB appreciated the adaptation “from our first conversation”. Getting a big name like Lloyd on board (who has talked about how he loved that the film “is taking me into another genre”), was another boost.
“With Robbie Ryan and Nick Ryan and myself they are supporting Irish filmmakers as well which is a really great thing and a very important thing to do, in that it’s tough out there,” adds O’Brien of the board.
You meet American directors who are so envious – because it’s fine if you’re going to make a Star Wars or Superman but if you’re an American independent filmmaker you get no support, so it’s a great thing to have.
“You never know how the audience will react”
The release of the film is described by O’Brien as a “relief” and Records as a “an exhale”, and the positive reaction to it is, of course, welcome. Records shines as a troubled teen, managing to make the audience feel more empathy towards him than fear. Lloyd, meanwhile, does a great turn as a seemingly doddery old man who in fact harbours a chilling secret, while the 16mm film gives the whole production a nostalgic look.
“You never know with films, they’re their own beast and you never know how the audience will react,” says O’Brien. “It’s just it’s really good in this one because people get it and particularly in Ireland we seem to be getting the black humour really well, which I love, so that’s great.”
Filming took place about 100 miles from the Canadian border in a mining town, and the isolation afforded the team a lot of creative freedom.
“We could do what we wanted, and that’s very rare,” says O’Brien, which Records describes as a huge attraction for him in choosing to work on the film.
“[It] was great because we were away from anything and the locals loved having us there,” says O’Brien. Some of the locals even ended playing parts in the film. “You just kind of get on with it in the cold. One thing compared to Ireland, Ireland’s very grey and grim, like today. They get a lot of sunshine over there.”
Interjects Records: “It’s a different kind of grim.”
Making it
The book was set in a midwestern town, so O’Brien and his fellow producers knew they’d have to get there to make the film they wanted. It was a “thrill”, says the director, but they always questioned if they would actually be able to do it.
“[I] remember me, Robbie and Nick just sort of talking about this and then we decided… we’re not big time producers but we are filmmakers, so we just hopped on a plane and went over there and that’s where we got Max up and did the tests.”
It was a revelatory moment for them.
“We realised something, that actually it’s not that difficult and the town – in terms of the look the town has it all, so we don’t need a massive art direction budget, we don’t need a big crew, there actually is a way,” recalls O’Brien.
Because in one sense it sounds mad, Irish people going on location to America to film rather than a big American film coming to Ireland, but actually we got over there and there’s a real can-do, do it yourself spirit in the midwest because they have to – so yeah, it just fitted and it was good that way, it worked.
I Am Not A Serial Killer goes on general release this weekend in Irish cinemas.
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Good to know. Well done humans.
Let’s celebrate with a giant bonfire!
I’ll bring the CFC canisters!
Pfft ‘Ozone Layer’ – its about as real as that global warming nonsense that people were harping on about. In the 80′s the rainforests were the big thing.. now there is no problem.
When I was I school during the 80s and 90s the ozone layer was all they’d bang on about. Must be 20 years since I last heard it mentioned.
Lets burn down the observatory so this never happens again
Thank you again science!
Good to know the earth can repair itself, all we need to do now is stop using fossil fuels, nitrogen & stop poisoning the rivers and by extensions ourselves. There are more important issues than Brexit and the world needs to focus.
Sure it needs to focus , in this case how a bunch of academics managed to convince everyone that humans have control of the planet’s temperature . Maybe they should opt for something more manageable like controlling the jetstream and moving it North of Ireland so we can have a decent summer.
The science is so far over my head I’d need the Hubble telescope to see it, however a recommended read is James Hansens ‘Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity’, also an interesting link which we can identify with when we look upwards http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/artificial-weather-revealed-post-9-11-flight-groundings
I wouldn’t recommend anything other than people make up their own minds and if these type of fear driven agendas make sense. It is a bit like the political mess called ‘brexit’ where huge fears are generated and once people act on those fears nobody has a clue how to behave and all reason goes out the window. The fearmongering was always a part of the aggressive strain of empiricism that began in Royal Society England and only a few people, among them Von Humboldt, nailed down that it prevents people from enjoying their surroundings both terrestrial and asronomical.
“This assemblage of imperfect dogmas bequeathed by one age to another— this physical philosophy, which is composed of popular prejudices,—is not only injurious because it perpetuates error with the obstinacy engendered by the evidence of ill observed facts, but also because it hinders the mind from attaining to higher views of nature. Instead of seeking to discover the mean or medium point, around which oscillate, in apparent independence of forces, all the phenomena of the external world, this system delights in multiplying exceptions to the law, and seeks, amid phenomena and in organic forms, for something beyond the marvel of a regular succession, and an internal and progressive development. Ever inclined to believe that the order of nature is disturbed, it refuses to recognise in the present any analogy with the past, and guided by its own varying hypotheses, seeks at hazard, either in the interior of the globe or in the regions of space, for the cause of these pretended perturbations. It is the special object of the present work to combat those errors which derive their source from a vicious empiricism and from imperfect inductions.” Von Humboldt ,Cosmos
Hope it makes sense to somebody.
The great thing about science is that it is true regardless of public opinion.
And with that, a mighty cheer went up from the heroes of Earth. They had banished the awful Ozone Layer hole forever…because it was haunted. Now let’s all celebrate with a cool glass of turnip juice
That’s great to know.maybe our government could lay off the carbon tax now
Dick the carbon tax collected by our government goes no where near any solution to the ozone problem more likely the hole in the minsterial pension fund
Carbon tax has to do with global warming, nothing to do with the ozone layer.
Let the carbon pay the carbon tax!
Carbon taxes are to offset and discourage use of greenhouse gasses. Greenhouse gasses cause global warming and climate change.
Ozone layer is depleted by CFC gasses and similar. Ozone layer shields us from UV radiation.
Two separate global issues. One is getting better, the other is FUBAR
I’d be surprised if carbon taxes were being used for any environmental causes
Expanding foam to the rescue https://youtu.be/I6uGEo75vbg
How do we know that the hole wasn’t always there?
Because scientists had data before the hole to say that there was no hole then they diagnosed both the hole and the cause for the hole. The world then acted and now the hole is closing.
Me hole :-)
Pfft, science is wrong most of the time. Every idiot on the street knows that.
Kirks logic is sound…..
The hole was first discovered in 1950 some 37 years after the discovery of the ozone layer itself.
Its discovery was via a process of deduction rather than actually finding it.
Only in latter times have we developed the technology to enable proper monitoring and analysis of atmospheric ozone.
We have no idea how long the hole was there before we found it.
Good news
Maybe a sock in the hole would work.
Phew!
Looks like there might not be an
Ozone layer tax beside my USC on my payslip any time soon!
I wonder did the 2000 + nuclear weapons tests which took place from 1945 – 2006 have any effect on the ozone layer or the earths climate?
I am sure that people can see what is going to happen next, at least those who can read passed the headlines . I doubt they will announce their success about acid rain anytime soon since they latched on to carbon dioxide and went for broke with ‘global warming/ climate change’ and how humanity can tax themselves into sorting it out.
Do you work in the oil industry?
I never doubt the intelligence of people however common sense is not always present and especially among academics. At the bottom of it all is a single statement representing an awful ideology which drives empiricism and these silly notions which equates the planet to a common greenhouse and fills in the gap between the two with a lot of bluffing, voodoo and wrapped up in contrived fear.
“Rule III. The qualities of bodies, which admit neither [intensification] nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.” Newton
It simply isn’t that difficult, begin with the fall of an apple and scale it up to planetary motions and fill it in with every half baked notion that mesmerizes his followers who hadn’t a clue what he did beyond that he seemed to give them a passport to wreck astronomy. A number of his followers did admit they had no idea how he arrived at his conclusions but I sure do -
“The demonstrations throughout the book [Principia] are geometrical,
but to readers of ordinary ability are rendered unnecessarily
difficult by the absence of illustrations and explanations, and by the
fact that no clue is given to the method by which Newton arrived at
his results.” Rouse Ball 1908
Again, there is nothing difficult about any of this .
Yes or no would suffice
Do you really have to go back to the mysteries of Newton to support your theories?
Newton was the Boris Johnson of astronomy, full of bluster but with depth or substance to his agenda. The difference between me and his followers is that I actually know what he tried to do.
Oops, that should read ‘little depth or substance’ .
Obviously because of all the carbon tax we paid, well done money!
Best not to mention that the Montreal Protocol was Margaret Thatcher’s initiative. This story and Brexit within a week would make any self respecting Guardian reader’s head explode.
Articles like this let you see how thick people really are.
Ozone hole has nothing to do with climate change.
Mary Robinson can stop the climate change for justice mullarkey now..
Why?
What has ozone hole got to do with climate change?
When Danny Healy Rae stood up in the Dail and suggested that God ultimately decided these things the whole country laughed at him.
They’re not laughing now though are they?
Lol seriously .. Lol
Least of our worries.
its getting smaller due to the fact of insurance company’s robbing us so we stop driving or find it impossible to start
Someone dug another hole and used the spoil to fill in that hole. They did in their hole.
have your say