The Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) will host an exclusive screening of Ecosse Films’ ‘Pelican Blood’ on Thursday, October 21st. Academy Members are the first audience in Ireland to view the film, which is the latest from Dublin-born director Karl Golden (The Honeymoners, Belonging to Laura). The director will attend the screening and, alongside ‘Pelican Blood’ producer John McDonnell (Zonad), will participate in an informative Q&A session with the Academy.
In the run up to the event IFTN spoke with Karl Golden about the film and his newest project ‘Weekender’ which he recently wrapped.
Premiering at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June, ‘Pelican Blood’ is based on Cris Feddi’s novel of the same name. It is the story of Nikko, who is charming and funny whilst also obsessively compulsive, dangerous and self-destructive - a pretty unique combination for a bird-spotter! Nikko ticks off rare birds as he sees them and he plans to kill himself once he’s reached number 500. As we meet him Nikko has just ticked number 497. The reappearance of Nikko’s beautiful but highly volatile ex-girlfriend Stevie, played by Emma Booth, throws his plans into turmoil and turns his life upside down. Can she save him from himself or push him further towards the edge?
Certainly the film’s plot grabs one’s attention instantly, and Karl tells us he was immediately taken with ‘Mad Dogs’ scribe, Cris Cole’s script: “It was different and for whatever reason I really liked it,” he starts. “I suppose the relationships on-screen were just really interesting and I like seeing how people deal with the emotional complexities. This was a very extreme love story. It’s very much a story of what it feels like to fall in love the first time round - where you’re so overwhelmed by the intensity and the dramatic currents of love that they sweep you away. I think that when you’re young you don’t necessarily understand the force of love and for me, when I read it, I totally remembered what it was like to be 19/20 and to have that sensation and I hadn’t seen anything like that for a while. It was set in an unusual world as well.”
Produced by Ecosse Films ‘Pelican Blood’ features breakthrough performances from young leads Harry Treadaway (Fish Tank) and Emma Booth (The Boys are Back) and will be released across cinemas later this year by Icon Entertainment. Karl tells us how he found his cast: “We cast with Gail Stevens who is Danny Boyle’s casting agent and she kept talking about this little film called ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ that she thought no-one would go and see. (I actually auditioned Dev Patel from that film and he wasn’t right for us - but he was very sweet - and then of course literally his whole world changed within a few months.) Gail’s thing is to find really the best young talent. So she found Harry whose work I knew I’d seen and I really liked him.
“I had seen Emma in a film called ‘Clubland’, years ago. It was her first film, an Australian film and I thought she was terrific. We couldn’t find a UK actress at all, for whatever reason. Stevie is a hard character to play because, in a way, she’s a femme fatale and if you play it badly she’s just a ‘bad girl’ character and I didn’t have any interest in that. So you needed to see from the wounds behind that her eyes - you needed to feel their pain a little bit and you needed them to be sort of playful as well and it’s just very hard to pull off all that stuff as well as being a doomed lover.”
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| Karl Golden on set |
Emma sent in an audition tape and was offered the part. The film’s two leads then didn’t meet until production commenced - something that could have gone terribly wrong, as Karl is acutely aware: “We put them together and that’s always a risk because they were cast separately in London and Australia,” he explains. “But when they got together they were just perfect. It was as if they had been in love for two or three years - it was great!” Karl also has his own approach when it comes to rehearsals: “We didn’t rehearse a lot to be honest,” he tells us. “I don’t ever tend to rehearse a lot. We spent a lot of time listening to music and stuff and drawing pictures of childhood and teenage years and going on a few bird watching adventures instead. Often you just want to give actors the confidence and the space to find it themselves. And Harry and Emma bonded really quickly doing it all.”
A very big issue that the film raises is that of suicide. However, whilst Nikko’s impending death is an important part of the film’s story Karl did not want his cast and crew getting bogged down in it. “I think the most important thing was that I never wanted it to be an ‘issue’ film,” he explains. “I never saw it as a film that was about people who wanted to kill themselves. In fact I banned the word ‘Suicide’ on set because, to me, it was literally about two kids who were so lost that they took extreme emotional measures - but they weren’t in control of their lives. So the suicide was secondary to the sensation of love and being out of control and feeling isolated which happens.”
Karl recently wrapped production on the set of ‘Weekender’. The feature shot for five weeks in several locations including Manchester, London, Amsterdam and Spain and tells the story of two friends, played by Jack O'Connell (This is England) and Henry Lloyd-Hughes (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), who get drawn into the hedonistic world of warehouse parties during the UK's acid house explosion in 1990. I imagine Karl came away from the madcap globe-trotting shoot with similar feelings to that of a hardened raver? “Yes, it was mad,” he agrees “It was just a totally different world again to anything I’d done before and it was the world of rave music which is not something I know a huge amount about. It was a very quick turnaround - I got sent a script and then we went into finance and then I was shooting within a couple of weeks so it was great. So we ended up shooting a lot around, strangely, right around where I live in East London and then we were in Amsterdam for a bit and then we were down in the south of Spain for a bit.”
The film’s niche subject led to a lot of support from the music industry, DJ Terry Farley liked it so much he came on board as creative consultant. “He was really supportive and interested in the project,” Karl tells us. “So we ended up meeting him and he was really passionate about it. So he came on board and one of the guys who plays a DJ in the film got to have a Terry Farley masterclass on the decks.”
Karl begins editing ‘Weekender’ this week and this will continue until early March when it is to be delivered to distributors in UK, Canada and Spain and any others who have signed up by that point. Not one to rest on his laurels, Golden has several other projects in the pipeline. One of these is an action-adventure feature with the ‘Weekender’ producers but another would bring him closer to home: “There’s also a kind of darkly comic thriller called ‘All Fall Down’ in the pipeline for Dublin with Martina Niland and David Collins,” he tells us. “It’s a film I’ve been working on with them for the last year or so. It’s a brilliant script written by a guy called David Lynch, who’s done a lot of children’s drama here with the BBC and I’d just really love to come home to do something.”
- ‘Pelican Blood’ is produced by Ecosse Films’ Robert Bernstein and Douglas Rae and John McDonnell of Ireland’s Fantastic Films. The director of photography is Darren Tiernan (The Honeymooners) with music by Niall Byrne (Amongst Women) and editing carried out by Camille Brenda (Batman Begins).
- The exclusive IFTA screening of ‘Pelican Blood’ will take place on Thursday, November 21st in Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema. All IFTA members are welcome and should contact the IFTA office on (01) 662 4120 with ticket requests. For information on how to become an IFTA Member visit www.ifta.ie
