The North unites against a bigger threat
IT'S A scene that evokes some of the darkest chapters in Northern Ireland's history: a disputed Orange Order parade descends rapidly into violence as bloody-faced rioters engage in a pitched battle with their enemy. Battle of the Bone (right) may bear the hallmarks of a documentary on Drumcree, but the theme of this low-budget, locally-made film is more munching season than marching season. Debut director George Clarke's picture is the first ever zombie/kung fu movie to be made in Northern Ireland. It tells the story of a zombie invasion that strikes Belfast on the Twelfth of July. Catholic and Protestant rioters are forced to cut short their own pitched battle before joining forces to see off the greater menace.
"This is an attempt to put our old disputes into perspective," says Clarke. "It shows both sides of the community uniting against a bigger threat. In real life, you could substitute zombies for crime or global warming. It's about Northern Ireland leaving its negative history behind and moving on."
Battle of the Bone is currently in post-production, with a release planned for this year's Twelfth Week. Negotiations are under way for the film to be the first feature screened at the soon-to-be-opened Odeon cinema in Belfast's new Victoria Square complex.
With more than 500 extras, Battle of the Bone is one of the biggest low-budget features to have been made in the city, but the budget for the shoot, which was spread out over four months, was a meagre £10,000. Casting was carried out mostly online using social networking sites, with roles also being offered to passers-by.
"The response from the public was really positive during the shoot," says Clarke. "But I don't think I could have made this film 10 years ago. I might have offended people with the Twelfth theme. Today, there's less risk of that happening. I think tensions have eased." The entirety of the film's budget was put forward by a single investor after a chance meeting with Clarke.
Improvisation kept the costs of the shoot down; a wheelchair was used to make a dolly-cam and the crew borrowed a cherry-picker from a local window-cleaning firm to capture the aerial shots of the climactic zombie chase.
Frustrated by what he terms "old-fashioned" attitudes in local funding bodies, Clarke co-founded his own production company while filming Battle of the Bone. Yellow Fever Productions is part-enterprise, part-film school, offering mini-budgets to local first-time directors to fund feature-length projects. But the company has one golden rule: Troubles films are banned. "You could call Battle of the Bone the mother of all Troubles films as it shows the conflict on an apocalyptic scale," says Clarke. "But we made it in the hope that no other Troubles film would have to be made again. Belfast and Northern Ireland are changing and we should be documenting this, instead of going over our past."
To encourage local film-making, Yellow Fever Productions has commissioned a project entitled Ten for Ten; a slate of 10 independent films made by debut directors to be shot over a short time frame of 10 weeks. Each film will receive the even slimmer budget of £100. Twenty-year-old student Graeme Livingstone is finishing off the script for his Belfast-based road movie and plans to shoot in Harland and Wolff estate in forthcoming weeks. "As someone who has been acting for over 10 years, it's frustrating to see foreign films coming to Northern Ireland that don't use local actors. It makes it even harder to get that big break," says Livingstone.
Forthcoming Yellow Fever productions include a sci-fi movie set in Belfast's Botanic Gardens and a Battle of the Bone sequel entitled The Slash My Father Wore. "If a zombie film can be made in the centre of Belfast, then anything's possible," says Clarke. "This venture is all about telling local film-makers to think big, no matter what others in the industry might say."