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| boy eats girl
“I THINK SAMANTHA IS GOING TO
SURPRISE A LOT OF PEOPLE
WITH HER PERFORMANCE IN THIS,
BECAUSE SHE’S A NATURAL
- SHE JUST HAS IT”
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“The amazing thing about the relationship between these two guys is that, in some crazy way, Max is inspired by Vincent,” says Foxx, who gives his finest movie performance here, both drawing on and totally distinct from his career as a stand-up comic. “It’s as if Max has been just bursting at the seams for something different in his life, and when it happens he eventually embraces it.”
“What I thought was brilliant about the script when I first read it,” comments Mann, “was the simple dialectic of these two very different lives coming together and colliding on this one night in LA.”
Getting the project going at all was helped enormously by the commitment of Mumba to the lead female role (one of the few characters not to get zombified before the night is through). The 21-year-old Dublin-born singer is by now something of a veteran of film acting, having made her debut a couple of years back in Time Machine, following it up in 2003 with Irish comedy Spin the Bottle. Here, though, she has to carry the movie, along with British newcomer Leon, who will soon be seen playing the title character’s pageboy in Oliver Stone’s Alexander.
“I actually sent Samantha the script in September of last year,” says Bradley. “Obviously having her on board helped finance the film, but also she really stuck with it. I saw her in Time Machine and you can really see her potential there. She’s been going to and from LA on other projects, but she’s really been very supportive. She just mucks in with everybody else: there’s no hierarchy. She’s been fantastic: I think she’s going to surprise a lot of people with her performance in this, because she’s a natural - she just has it.” There is also talk of at least one song for the soundtrack, but that, insists Bradley, is down to her management and the record label.
Production on Boy Eats Girl has been mainly centred in Howth, a hilly peninsula at the northern end of Dublin Bay, with the scenes at Jessica’s house - which is definitely a cut above those of her schoolmates - set on the Isle of Man. Jessica’s dad is one of the main obstacles between Nathan and his daughter, but her posher upbringing comes in handy at the end where her horse provides a crucial means of escape.
Jessica’s house is one of the key settings of the film, and the Isle of Man - in addition to providing access to that tax haven’s various financial advantages - also turned out to have just what they needed for the movie’s climactic scenes. “It’s not that big a house,” says Bradley, “but it has all the elements: a long driveway up to it with slightly creepy trees and a kind of grass circle in front that you can drive right round. Off to one side are the stables and there’s a paddock in front for a horse. So if you were trying to build a set for the demands of the script, you couldn’t find a better location.”
The other all-important thing was the special-effects work, which has been done by UK company Image Effects. “The supervisor there is a guy called Bob Keen,” says Bradley, “and he is very experienced at all this kind of stuff: his horror credits are all the Hellraiser films, Candyman - all of Clive Barker’s stuff. But he’s also worked in LA and he actually did Yoda in the first Star Wars. More recently, they’ve worked on stuff like Gladiator and they did Dog Soldiers.
“They get very passionate about scripts like this because they don’t come along, from their point of view, that often!” Having once been given a guided tour of Bob Keen’s workshop, where the reference library is made up of medical books full of photographs of - well, things that didn’t quite work out right - I have no doubt that scenes like the one in which the guy who works in the video shop gets eaten will be given the respect they deserve.
And that a tradition of Irish genre movies will be well and truly launched.
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BOY EATS GIRL
Odyssey Entertainment presents, in association with Bord Scannan na hÉireann/ The Irish Film Board, Isle of Man Film Limited and Lunar Films, an Element Films Production
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Prod: Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe; Exec prod: Steve Christian, Louise Goodsill, Ralph Kamp, Mark Woods; Co-prod: Matthew Justice, Eoin Holmes; Dir: Stephen Bradley; Scr: Derek Landy; Ph: Balazs Bolygo; Prod des: Anna Rackard; Cost des: Susan Scott; Ed: Dermot Diskin, Ben Yeates; Casting: Carrie Hilton, Amy Rowan; Mus: Stephen Rennicks.
With Samantha Mumba (Jessica), David Leon (Nathan), Deirdre O’Kane (Grace), Laurence Kinlan (Henry), Tadhg Murphy (Diggs), Mark Huberman (Samson), Sara James (Cheryl), Denis Conway (Craig), Bryan Murray (Mr. Frears), Paul Reid (Shane), Conor Ryan (Kenneth), Sarah Burke (Charlotte), Jane Valentine (Glenda).
International distribution:
Odyssey Entertainment
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