Just under 10 years ago, I was doing daily papers at a film-industry trade show in Nice. Nestling in among the big service providers, right next to French stunt master Rémy Julienne’s flash stand, was the Isle of Man Film Commission. Having grown up on Merseyside, where the Isle of Man was the place you went to on your hols when you’d outgrown Rhyl but weren’t quite ready for the Costa Brava, I was intrigued. I went and talked to the nice people running the stand, who pointed out the many advantages of the island - a 30-mile long, 10-mile wide piece of rock in the Irish Sea more or less equidistant between Liverpool and Dublin. The IOM has its own language (Manx), its own parliament and, more importantly, its own tax system which currently attracts a wide range of service companies.
From a film-maker’s point of view it also has, like New Zealand, the ability to look like almost anywhere else if you dress it right and shoot it carefully enough. Thus, said the man from the IOMFC, it surely made sense to try and promote it as a place for people to make films.
I wasn’t entirely convinced but duly wrote up the piece. The following day, I spoke to US producer Edward R Pressman, who said he’d read the story and was going to check out the island, known to its inhabitants as ‘The Rock’. I wrote that up, too, and the man from the IOMFC was delighted. Then I forgot about the Isle of Man for a while.
| Where is the Isle of Man and why should anyone want to make a film there? The answer to the first question: ‘in the middle of the Irish Sea’, says Nick Roddick in the first of this issue’s ‘Island stories’. And the answer to the second seems to be ‘why not?’
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A few years later, however, I began to notice it turning up in Preview’s ‘Production Calendar’ as a popular location. Since then, some 37 movies and TV series have shot there, starting with The Brylcreem Boys in August 1995. I doubt there is an area of equivalent size anywhere in the world that has seen the same production levels.
The most famous of the early bunch of films to shoot there was the comedy Waking Ned, an international sleeper which, like a number of the early, Manx-based movies, was set in Ireland. “Kirk [Jones, the director] had looked all over southern Ireland,” says producer Glynis Murray, “and not managed to find a village with the right geography, where you can see the whole village, completely contained and not spread out over a wide area.”
