Guest editors D.A.D.D.Y. (AKA Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman) introduce readers to this year's Culture Night celebrations...
In 2016 we had written what was to be our first feature film, Extra Ordinary, and now we needed to raise the money to actually make it. Keeper Pictures (FKA Blinder Films) our tireless producers, let us know that finance people quite liked it but weren't really sure what to do with it, or us. We could understand that. The script was kind of bonkers, we hadn’t made a feature film before, and we had written the lead role specifically for writer and comedian Maeve Higgins, who, in the eyes of investors, hadn’t 'acted’ before. In our eyes and hearts, the character of Rose, a driving instructor with supernatural powers, couldn’t be played by anyone else.
We kept hearing that it was ‘execution dependent’, which is infuriating, as everything in life is execution dependent, isn’t it? It turns out us saying, ‘OK, but we promise it will be good?’ wasn’t quite enough for Hollywood to start signing cheques. So instead we said: OK, why don’t we make a little bit of it?
We wrote a new short scene set in the world of the film and, with help from our producers, a lot of friends and Screen Ireland, set about creating something in between an excerpt and a trailer for a film that hadn’t been made yet. Here it is:
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It's a bit rough around the edges, but we made this over a weekend with a small cast and crew, then picked up lots of shots here and there by ourselves. We shot on everything from phones to MiniDV and even borrowed an old Betacam from RTÉ to try and make parts of it look like old-school Nationwide.
Enda’s parents’ shed and mildly haunted piano are in the film. The ghost cheese was shot in Mike’s apartment on a VHS camera, with our friends pulling the strings. You get the idea.
It’s known as a 'proof of concept’. We’re not sure exactly what it proves, but to some investors, the execution they were dependent on must have been on target, because we did get to make the feature film about two years later.
But making it helped us too. It allowed us to figure out the world, adjust the tone a bit and breathe an internal sigh of relief when we knew we were right that Maeve was the perfect Rose.
It was also the thing that actor Will Forte fell for and made him read the script. When we first spoke, he said, ‘You had me at "a gravel".’
Extra Ordinary is currently available to stream on and other platforms...
