A Black caper-comedy stoner flick
He was hospitalised, robbed and teargassed, but Shimmy Marcus was making his film if it killed him. Colin Murphy talks to the director of the newest Irish feature film, Headrush
Shimmy Marcus wrote a script for a crime and drugs caper set in Dublin in three weeks in 1995. He was 28, doing a bit of work with bands, trying to get work acting. "That kind of lifestyle lends itself to lots of hours of speculative thinking with a joint hanging out of your mouth, talking about how you would do 'the big one' – you know – the big smuggling job."
He wrote the script longhand, typed it up, sent it to a few producers. To his shock, one replied.
"The producers signed an option. I had no idea what an option was, but I thought, this time next year I'll be at the Oscars, walking up the red carpet."
1995. Ten years ago. That script, Headrush, finally hits the Irish screens at the end of this month. It has spent the last two years touring film festivals, garnering awards and rave reviews, but unable to secure a distribution deal until now.
It hasn't been an easy ten years for Shimmy Marcus, and his producer, Edwina Forkin.
"We live very frugally. You don't eat in a restaurant twice a week, you eat in a restaurant twice a year. I don't want to be the bleeding heart, but you make huge sacrifices. We hear our friends talking about, 'we just got on the property ladder', and we're still renting our bedsits and hovels. You do it because you cling to the belief that, eventually, it'll all come good. Like it does in the movies.
"The thing I don't think people understand is that filmmaking is a drug, it's an illness, it's a curse. It's not something you decide is a sensible thing to do. You have to be irrational and crazy to want to make a career in the film industry because it's such a difficult, it's – what the word? – it's tough, it's really tough."
Headrush is a tale of a couple of kids, young lads at a loss amidst the tigerish success all around them, one who can't get a girl, and one who's fast losing his because he can't hold down a job. They spend most of their time getting stoned (in a variety of ever more creative ways lovingly depicted in the film). When Charlie (Wuzza Conlon; these people all have great names) finally blows it with his girlfriend, he comes up with a scheme to win her back – a sure-fire winner: go to Amsterdam, bring back a load of drugs for the Uncle (a glowering Stephen Berkoff), make a load of cash, get himself sorted. Sound familiar? Them's the dangers of taking a decade to make your film.
"This predates Trainspotting, Twin Town, Shallow Grave, Lock Stock", says Marcus. "I'd watch all these movies and think, shit, somebody's got a copy of my script!"
But that doesn't worry him any more. "Any time we come up against any of the other Irish movies (at festival screenings), the big hitters, Man About Dog, Intermission, we beat them."
And the film has changed as the project developed, and a genre of new stoner-action flicks emerged.
"You know the first thing you do, before you even write it, you learn your pitch, your one line. It was 'a black caper-comedy stoner flick', it was 'Trainspotting meets The Lavender Hill Mob' or whatever. Now that we're selling the movie, it's changed again, because we don't want to warn off people who are afraid of the stoner, the drugs thing. So now it's 'a tongue-in-cheek, love-story caper comedy'." He laughs. I don't know whether he's being tongue-in-cheek, or just cheesy.
He hunches forward, suddenly. "You know what it is? It's about a guy who gets dumped by his girlfriend and does this smuggling scam to try and get her back. It's about the amazing lengths people will go to to get their girl back."
By early 2001, Headrush was almost ready to start filming. The producer, Edwina Forkin, had raised €4.2 million of a €4.4 million budget. Then two planes flew into the Twin Towers. The budget collapsed.
"People just weren't putting money into anything. Nobody wanted to spend money on anything until they worked out what the 'new world' was going to look like. The funding for these feature films is like a stack of cards. If one person pulls out everything collapses.
"After spending six years writing and rewriting, three years funding and refunding, it really looked like it wasn't going to happen.
"And that was pretty bleak."
They thought, "we either walk away from it, or we make it on a hand-held video camera with a bunch of mates. We decided we just had to make it – didn't matter what it looked like – we just believed in the story."
But then the Irish Film Board announced their low budget initiative scheme – "tailor made for us, the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow", he says.
The board gave them €500,00, Edwina raised another €300,000. They had a budget.
"Because we ended up going low budget we got a lot more support and favours from people." U2 contributed music, as did Fun Lovin' Criminals, friends from Shimmy's days in the music business. Huey from the Criminals even took a cameo.
After ten years trying to get the money together, the film was filmed in six weeks. (Total production and pre-production took just under nine months.)
What was it like to finally get behind the camera?
"Amazing."
"That's what I live for. People were like, 'are you not scared?', 'are you not anxious, worried?'. You don't have time for any of those emotions. It's not until you're finished that you realise what's happened. You're just so focused on doing the best job you can. People often describe the making of a film like going to war. The logistcs are phenomenal. There's a million creative threads as well as production threads you have to keep in your mind to make the whole thing come together. I've been chomping at the bit for so long to make this, there was no such thing as nerves or anything like that."
Marcus was raised on film. His father is documentary maker Louis Marcus, twice nominated for Oscars and a former chair of the film board.
"Most kids for their birthday would get a magician or a puppet show – we got Laurel and Hardy black and white film shows, which were amazing.
"But because he was documentary we didn't really realise what he was doing... I had this stigma that I didn't want to be just seen as following in my old man's footsteps. Plus, they're pretty big shoes to fill."
Though he knew, somewhere, he wanted to make films, he distracted himself with a business degree, then got into music and tried to get into acting.
"I always thought visually, I had a secretive... I always wanted to make films but never had the courage to tell anyone." The script came out of a whimsical idea, after sitting around one Christmas watching movies, but when it was optioned by the producer, that changed things. "When I realised this was going to happen, that kind of sobered me up."
With the help of the production company, he set about learning the technical aspects of screenwriting. "It was a very rough diamond, it had a great energy to it, characters that talked and talked, but it was suffering in structure. I knew nothing about the technical aspect of writing, which is very scientific."
"The other problem was, I'd never made a film. The producer was, like, 'you'd really better go out and make something first, before anybody gives you the chance to make a feature film'."
So he made a short film, which went on and won some awards. "That was my film school."
"I'll be honest, I don't want to sounds arrogant... It's not rocket science. I think you intuitively learn a lot from watching films. Also, I realised that I don't have to know how to operate a camera, I can hire a good cameraman to do that... What I realised I had to learn how to do was to be able to communicate to all these departments how I saw the film visually."
Sitting opposite him, it's clear his character might have had something to do with it all. "I'm a stubborn bastard, as well. Once I get on to something, I really want to see it through."
The second film comes easier, he says – he hopes. The next one is already lined up, starts shooting at the end of the year – "set in the north of England in 1974, kind of Saturday Night Fever meets Billy Elliot, the first big kind of northern soul movie".
He enjoys remembering some more of the bleaker moments during Headrush.
At a film festival in Amsterdam, Marcus and Forkin had "something like €1.50 between the two of us". "We shared a slice of pizza with mushrooms that were dogdy and got food posionsing, and had to be carried onto the plane the next day. Customs thought we were out of our minds from the trip to Amersterdam."
"I've had kidney stones from this thing. I got teargassed two months ago at a film festival in Michigan (when he got caught up in riot after a sports game). And that shit stings. So I've been like – I've been robbed, I've been hospitalised, I've been teargassed, I'm going to get this film out if it kills me."
And now it's out?
"It's just like the old man says, you've made it, move on."
?More Headrush nationwide on 24 June