Britain's first kung-fu movie Left For Dead recently premiered in Brighton. Richard Badley talks to Modern Life? producer Phil Hobden about his first foray into filmmaking on the micro-budget project and plans for future DVD release. You've seen it all before haven't you; a trained killer on one last job gets the gun turned on him when the boss decides no-one leaves while a young boxer refuses to throw a fight and is subsequently banished from the city. Together they team up to get bloody revenge on the gang and so-called friends that betrayed them, relying on justice being meted out with flying kung-fu moves. Could be any trashy Asian or US martial arts movie? But don't break out the nunchucks just yet, how about all that but British? Filmed in Brighton with British actors and a British crew calling the shots? Bet you've never even contemplated such a thing let alone seen it? Left for Dead's greatest asset is the intriguing factor of a Street Fighter style smackdown on UK soil. At the film's UK premiere it's a particularly special moment for producer Phil Hobden and director Ross Boyask, marking the end of a mammoth journey to bring their initial idea to the big screen. Ten years ago the pair knew they wanted to do an all out action movie inspired by the kung-fu junk food they had been brought up on. The only problem was getting it made in a country seemingly unequipped for the task, where it was nigh impossible getting a movie made let alone one with such unashamed B-list roots. Instead it took two solid years of blind dedication to get Left for Dead on the screen. As Hobden catalogues it: "Three false starts and re-shoots where we ended up recasting most of the film. The idea grew and we did a real Hollywood thing by starting without a full script. I came onto the project after it started, hated the script, got it rewritten and rejigged and we started again. That's the ability you have as a no-budget film maker; you can re-shoot anything that didn't work...and we did".
With neither of the filmmakers coming from an ad or pop video background it was notoriously difficult to get the money men to sit up and take notice, despite several short film projects demonstrating the team's gleeful love of wanton onscreen carnage. " Hollywood people see shorts as a waste of time," says Hobden. "Pure Vengeance, the short Ross made in 2001 with a load of the cast and crew of L4D was our way of showing people what we could do... it got interest but alas no money." Not having Hugh Grant propping up the cast list also meant there was little hope of funding, and it was going to have to be down to sheer willpower and the luck of the dice as filming went ahead. Quickly the producer saw the benefit of creative control: "The sense of achievement was amazing. It's totally our film from start to end, with no one telling us 'Oh sorry you can only kill five people in the first ten minutes, then another three or four in the next ten'. That actually happened with John Woo for Hard Target !" Just as well when you see the film's opening set-piece that demos all the weaponry that peppers the film; Uzi's, AK-47s, samurai swords, baseball bats, plastic bags and more importantly the flying fists of fury that everyone comes to rely on. A dozen people die, painfully, and things are just warming up as the audience wonder if the miniscule budget has been prematurely blown. Luckily not, as Williams (Glenn Salvage), a soldier for the grizzled mob boss Kincaid (Adam Chapman), is forced to flee his psychotic fellow killers who a moment ago were on his side. Welcome to Hope City, a name steeped in irony for it is a place of anger, violence and a bleak future ensured by it's deranged inhabitants. It's tourist hot spots are limited to disused warehouses, karate dojos and a crooked boxing club where a young Kelso (Andy Prior) is set to be the next big thing. Only he chooses honour over the paycheck when he refuses to throw a fight and learns the hard way what it is to cross Kincaid. Exiled from the city, he joins Williams in vowing revenge on those that betrayed him and bloody battle is the only way to get it.
" L4D is the ultimate beer and curry movie," says Hobden, "a Saturday night in with the lads or the film you watch when you come in at three in the morning off your head, it was never intended for a cinema release and not many digitally shot films are." The movie certainly lives up to that promise, with the story remaining proudly simple it dedicates the rest of the effort to building an encompassing world of larger than life caricatures. Kelso the good-looking hero, the weasely nutter Taylor, and the looming king-pin shape of Kincaid himself, all lend themselves to a world that can only be found in comic books, a medium given the nod in Left For Dead's opening graphics. It's a world of captains, bad guy's bases and morbid doctors sewing people back together after a night on the town, basically not the sort of thing to take the girlfriend to see when you find Bridget Jones 2 booked up. As Hobden confirms: "It is very much an Asian inspired movie. There's more than a passing nod to John Woo and Jackie Chan to name but the most populist. But at the same time it's not a US martial arts movie, the best way to describe it is British but with an Asian sensibility and a touch of the hardcore genre of the seventies". Of course a film made for next to nothing is going to be a little rough round the edges, but the makers have enough enthusiasm and drive to push the film on with audacious, ass-kicking moves. With Taylor being enough of a lunatic to have even the likes of Begbie nipping out the gents window when he kicks up a brawl, then there's plenty of opportunity to push the genre when it comes to spraying the claret in gut-wrenching torture scenes. "It's the kinda movie you love or you hate," confesses Hobden. "In Cannes a woman from a Hong Kong company walked out in tears after ten minutes, but we in the UK are traditionally huge genre fans, action has always sold here really well so I think there is a market."
While it takes time for the two heroes of the piece to team up, Left For Dead kicks into overdrive when they do, the actors dropping plenty of Tarantino style quips on the bloody road to the film's showdown. With a score that builds and broods like the swirling godsend cacophony that accompanied the climax to 28 Days Later, Boyask saves the best to last with Kincaid proving to be even more of a formidable adversary than the cigar-chomping king-pin of Daredevil. And Hobden's key to getting all this onscreen? With no money it was down to reliable man power, not thinking of making it big, but dedication to the task at hand: "At the end of the day everyone we worked with knew the score, we only had a few small ego problems from people we brought in and those that did weren't used again or were recast. But with the core crew that have been through the ringer for the past ten years we had no problems. Yeah there's stress; hell 18-hour shoots, sleeping on floors, running two units and sorting out ten different sequences or bits, your gonna have a few disagreements, but everyone was singing from the same page and I think that shows onscreen." Hobden must have been a busy man, not only does he appear in the film as Kelso's good hearted boxing manager, but he organised the movie with the threat of closure constantly hanging over head: "There were moments near the beginning when everything was going wrong and we stopped filming. For a while it felt like everything was going to fall apart, but at the end of it all the love of the project, dogged determination and knowing that for the last ten years we were building towards this film, plus the fact that we are mad."
With the British youth more heavily influenced from international media, the blockbuster films of the eighties from the US, Manga and video games from Asia, the action genre is one ready to explode in this country. Typically more reserved, the UK have never had anything close to the Bruce Lee mania which gripped the States in the seventies and mostly stuck to the periphery of what can only be described as cinematic fast food. But of course the one thing fast food has going for it is that everyone laps it up. It may not be Merchant Ivory, but Left For Dead caters to a growing market in this country for home grown kung-fu movies. As Phil Hobden points out: "Hey we make films that we want to watch. I love action films. Ross lives and breathes action films. There have been others but none of the scale and balls out confidence of Left For Dead and hopefully more will follow". Of course places like the Film Council are still hesitant preferring to play it safe with yet more Jane Austin adaptations, but in the world of technology there is always hope. Like the eighties and horror movies, it's down to home entertainment to save the day by allowing the buying public to create cult hits and that's exactly the type of market Hobden is vying for: "The aim was always to produce a huge library of DVD materials and to that effect if the right buyer picks up the film up we could have one of the best DVD's ever; 20 hours plus of behind the scenes footage, outtakes, commentaries, enough deleted scenes to make another movie, games...you name it!"
However, if you thought producing a first-time film was hard enough you should try selling it. Hobden decided if no one wanted it here then it was time to look internationally and in particular, the States. And the closest place to mix with Uncle Sam's wheelers and dealers? The Cannes film festival. "We had a no star, DV film, shot for little money but we have played the Cannes thing for three years, making contacts, speaking to people, preparing them for the main event. We used those contacts, we knew what they wanted and how to sell it to them. People loved the idea but we were very balls-out in our publicity and goaded people by using lines like 'Will knock the socks off anything the US can produce'. But at the end of the day the film speaks for itself. Some sales agents were great, then you get arseholes who sit there for 20 minutes trashing the film. But we got an agent, the film is coming along well and by the end of the year it will be on DVD in the States and hopefully in the UK, it was hard but that is what it's all about." To make life easier Hobden made sure they were prepared: "We went with 2,500 A5 two-sided flyers, A3 and A2 posters, 100 promo CD-ROMS, promotions with SFX, Impact and Total Film articles, sample music CDs from No Hype records, the web site...the list goes on and this was for one low-budget produced film." With all the pressure on at Cannes it meant all work and no play for the producer even in such a glamorous location. "That's the festival," says Hobden, "the market is a very different place, it's like going to Harrods then having to spend your entire day in the cellar. The market which we attended is like the title suggests...a market. Don't get me wrong you do get some serious star talent there (one of our colleagues ran into Quentin in the toilet), and we spent several hours chatting to the irrepressible Damien Chappa and Don 'The Dragon' Wilson but we always knew what Cannes was and we had our knocks as well as our triumphs."
But one festival doesn't have to be the end of a marketing campaign; with the world shrunk down thanks to global communication it is now possible to get your movie out there to anyone with an internet connection. "The film couldn't have been made with out email and the web, simple as that. No ifs or buts," continues Hobden. "The website (www.left4dead.co.uk) gave us the opportunity to show people what, how and when we were doing it. It's not a typical film website and we have making-of documentaries, casting calls, job postings, the works. The idea was to make a living, breathing tome to the making of Left For Dead. The technology we have now enables us to be a global community, to talk real time to people all over the UK and the world. Sites like many.com and shootingpeople.org were gold dust for us. Not to mention screenfighters."
With one film completed the pressure is now on Hobden and Boyask to maintain the momentum with the plan being to capture the glory days of grindhouse Asian cinema very much in vogue now thanks to the popularity of Kill Bill. Hobden, having gone from wannabe to fully fledged producer, has plenty of mistakes to learn from as well as his own philosophy on the business: "The best form of film school is to not go, spend the money on a camera and editing software, get someone to write you a good script, get a crew and just do it. That's my film school...hell I studied TV and film at uni and came out so demotivated having watched so many talentless people doss for three years that it took me four years before I started making films again. Get work on productions, work for cheap or free, learn the business, then make films. Fuck study, who cares about the meaning of the dwarf in Twin Peaks ...bollocks...make a film...that's my advice, get out of the class room and behind a camera".
There's no question that Hobden and his team are enthusiasm incarnate. For some making movies has always been a distant, impossible dream but he has been able to mould together a group willing to live it. "Don't arse about, if you want to make films don't let anything stop you. Family, girlfriends, friends, fuck 'em. If you have a passion then get on and do it. If you let things get in the way then it's not a passion it's a hobby and you'll never succeed." And here he is now, showing his labour of love to a packed auditorium on Brighton seafront, a location for the next project perhaps? " Brighton is the spiritual home of our production company Modern Life?" agrees Hobden. "We love Brighton, it has every kind of location in the district you could ever want (except desert) and has had a great history in film and low-budget films; Project: Assassin, Mainline Run, Distant Shadow, Quadrophenia. So people are generally very receptive. We have learnt from experience that as long as you get police permission generally the locals are fine. You get the occasional asshole (people where I lived vetoed one sequence we were planning), but generally everyone was cool and the gang."
Left For Dead is still in the process of making it's way onto DVD but Hobden is already planning a follow-up. Even if there's still no money he's got a team that works, and in keeping with the grindhouse roots there's always motivation to do it bigger and better next time round. "We're going to make another one for no money to keep our hand in. People will work for us again because they know that a) we make them look good and show what they can do and b) when we do get money they will be there and will be paid well for their contribution". Hobden still recognises that perhaps the general British audience aren't yet ready for local kung-fu movies on the big-screen but he's determined to corner the market as far as home entertainment goes and be right up there when the wave finally does break, "Saying that though, our preview screening went really well, a packed out cinema with 450 people cheering and laughing at the jokes, but yeah DVD is the market for us..." Richard Badley |
