Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies | Tagged: aml ameen, Charles Guard, colin morgan, exclusive, felicity jones, interview, mark strong, quiver distribution, the guard brothers, Tom Guard
Charles and Tom Guard spoke to Bleeding Cool about their latest action & revenge thriller in Quiver Distribution’s Dead Shot, cast & more.
Charles and Tom Guard have been active for nearly 30 years. However, the creative duo has been collaborating on projects for 20, starting with a series of shorts before their first feature they directed together in 2009’s The Uninvited for Dreamworks and Paramount. They re-emerged in their throwback to the classic action and revenge thrillers in Quiver Distribution’s Dead Shot. Featuring an all-star cast of Aml Ameen, Colin Morgan, Mark Strong, and Felicity Jones (who’s also an executive producer), the story follows a retired Irish paramilitary, Michael (Morgan), who witnesses the fatal shooting of his pregnant wife by British Sergeant, Tempest (Ameen) during a border ambush gone wrong. Now wounded and presumed dead, he escapes, taking his revenge to the dark and paranoid streets of 1970s London. The Guards spoke to Bleeding Cool about their influences on the film, working with Ronan Bennett on the script and casting.
Bleeding Cool: What’s the inspiration behind ‘Dead Shot?’
Tom Guard: We’d always been into 1970s cinema, specifically action thrillers and revenge stories. When we were shown the original script of ‘Dead Shot’ or ‘Borderland,’ as it was called at the time, it jumped out at us the idea of cat-and-mouse between the two lead characters. We took it on and worked on it ourselves. We realized that something else was emerging in it, which left the specificity of The Troubles and went into a different arena, almost of revenge and a more mythic idea of revenge and retribution. We thought that we felt excited and liberated by that.
When you guys were working on the script with Ronan Bennett, did you have to do much with it to tweak or polish it?
Charles Guard: The essential idea of the cat-and-mouse was much in play in Ronan’s original draft, but as Tom said, the context was different in the sense that the film, we made exploring ideas of identity and masculinity. We’re looking at the two characters as good and bad, resisting any urge to see them as heroes and villains. We set out to inject that complexity and empathy into the story, along with understanding the context of their lives. Female characters like Ruth (Sophia Brown) and Catherine (Jones) are on the story’s fringes but can be seen as strong characters. That felt important to us because we wanted to tell a story that looks at two generations of men, the kind that Holland (Strong) and Keenan (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), older men who have their feet firmly set within the concrete. The younger men, like Michael and Tempestt, can still move around, and the concrete hasn’t set around their feet yet.
The idea of those characters having all those men having reason to live and having lives to live for in Tempest’s way with Ruth and Michael. With Michael, we resisted any desire to bring him and Catherine together because of Michael’s contacts. There was the idea of Michael being in the land of the living and at a crossroads, being able to choose life or death in the sense that all revenge stories take you or the protagonist to that place. Those were the things that we set about telling. We started at the beginning, ready, and went all the way through to the end. It wasn’t tweaking so much as that reflected the story.
Can you tell me what went into the casting and how everyone worked out?
Tom: We were thrilled to work with Colin Morgan and Aml Ameen. They both connected personally to the material and the parts. Colin is from South Armagh [Northern Ireland], where the story begins and connects to it deeply. Going on a journey with him and bringing Michael to life was exciting. Aml also had a deep connection to it in terms of his family and experience. We felt lucky to have found and worked with two actors with that connection. Mark Strong and Felicity Jones were phenomenal anchors to build on in their two supporting parts. They created such a structure and elevated the material into something else. We were immeasurably happy to be collaborating with them, too.
Was there a sequence difficult to shoot or an aspect of production that you struggled with?
Charles: Everything was difficult to shoot. It’s hard to shoot a period movie on the streets with the resources and financial realities we were working within. It wasn’t easy to work in that way because we wanted to create a run-and-gun atmosphere. It’s hard when you have the money to do that, specifically the end sequence. The climax on the beach was difficult. It was an ambitious thing we were trying to do to start the sequence, to start the scene in darkness with Tempest and Catherine’s arrival. As the scene built and Michael arrived, they became aware that the two men were about to meet for the first time; we wanted to move out of darkness into the light and dawn. That was challenging with the amount of time we had to shoot it because we only had one dawn to make that happen.
Dead Shot is available in theaters, digital, and on-demand.
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