Olly Blackburn (Donkey Punch) Interview
Starring Jaime Winstone, Nichola Burley and Sian Breckin, Donkey Punch is a no-holds-barred horror/thriller that pushes the genre to its limits and dares to ask the question: Do you know what a Donkey Punch is? Olly Blackburn is the film's director and co-writer.
Olly Blackburn is an award-winning commercials director, music video director and screenwriter living in London. He has directed music videos for, among others, Gomez, Tin Star, Embrace and Six By Seven and was nominated for the CADs Best Newcomer award. In commercials he has worked with some of the biggest agencies in the UK. Spots include Anonymous Learners for BBC Education, which won a CFP Young Directors Award at Cannes; Rabbit for The Media Trust, which won a British Television Advertising Craft Award, 1999 and Carlsberg idents for the European Cup.
His award winning shorts include Swallowed (NYU’s Martin Scorsese award, best film at the Karlovy Vary and a Silver Bear at the 24th Ebensee Festival) and Wonderful World (Sony Award for Best British Film). In 2005 he directed his first TV drama, shooting the Flying Blind episode of the ITV docu-drama series Survivors, which was overseen and script-supervised by Paul Abbott.
As a screenwriter Olly's work includes adapting Chris Fowler’s Roofworld for director Vaughan Vaughan Arnell (Samuelson Productions/New Line), co-writing The Last Born for director Nils Arden Oplev (Zentropa/New Line/Metronome), The Long Tomorrow for Erik Eger and Vinyan for Fabrice de Welz. Olly is also a journalist and writer - dig around and you can find some of his scribblings at ollyblackburn.com.
“Making Donkey Punch was all about energy, speed and lots of intense work.
Everything started right after New Year 2006. I was a bit depressed after a few tough work years and was trying to figure out how to tell a good, tight story for very little money. David Bloom had come back from a holiday in the south of France and he’d noticed how all the luxury yachts there were tended very young crew members whilst the owners were absent. He called me up to tell me there was a great story there, we met and – the dead light bulb suddenly came to life.
We got excited and came up with a story where lots of things that really interested us came together around a genre film with six characters trapped on a boat out of sight and out of mind. We managed to get a script done in a few weeks and that became the story of the rest of the project: writing very fast and full of excitement while the producers at Warp X pushed us to keep going - and everyone else to get it made.
There was a lot of instinctive stuff in the writing. These were characters who we knew, and others we were less familiar with but made it our business to get to grips with. The idea was to try and be as realistic as possible, tell a story as if it had already happened. That was really important, we wanted people to identify themselves with these characters. If you’re young, one of these characters could be you or one of your friends or someone you see out on a Saturday night. So we were meticulous about things being believable and realistic. We tried to soak up dialogue and fashion, the music people listen to and stories they tell each other and we did a ton of research: the boat shows, sailing academies, trauma specialists, boat crew, we punched several donkeys and personally synthesised many controlled substances in my bathtub until finally creating Russian Ice. Not all of these statements are true.
Because we weren’t writing a straight-down-the-line genre film, but something more focussed on characters, and also involving some really extreme scenes, everyone knew from the start that casting was everything. Whatever we wrote, it had to be acted with honesty and fearlessness or the whole thing would be a disaster. I made a decision early on that working with the actors was going to be the most important part of this film. Nothing mattered as much as getting strong, emotive, believable performances. I also felt really terrified that I might let down the same producers who had made Dead Man’s Shoes and This Is England - which have absolutely amazing performances - with work that wasn’t up to snuff; and that terror drove me through a lot of the production.
Des Hamilton cast the film. We had seven months to cast during the writing and run up to pre-production and in a low budget project done with so much speed, this was the one area where we took our time. We saw lots and lots of young actors, not just trying to get the characters right but the group dynamics too because this was an ensemble piece. Toward the end of casting we did actors workshops with David Bloom present and that fed back into the script. That was fantastic, finding out for real what was ‘act-able’ and what wasn’t. It helped us nail the characters down and cut out stuff we’d once thought was genius and therefore thankfully never inflicted on the public. Then when we were in pre-production Dave came out to Cape Town while we rehearsed the script. We picked up on things that could be made better, scene by scene and he did a final pass right before the cameras rolled. That one was, literally, for the cast. I think it made a big difference to be able to be that attentive in the writing so late in the day. We began shooting Donkey Punch in March 2007, less than a year after we had written the first word.
Shooting was intense, very fast, and quite incredible. We had so much ground to cover every day it stopped being ridiculous after a while. We had 24 days to shoot people getting burned alive, hanged, firing flares, using knives, getting thrown off the boat into the freezing sea, at night. Sometimes we were doing more than two stunts a night. Shooting on a boat alone is hardcore, let alone at night with everything kicking off and (as the bond company liked to remind us) the boat alone cost four times the budget of the entire film. Then there was a completely off-the-scale sex scene that had to be portrayed realistically and believably, without any of the cast getting cold feet. And throughout all of that, shooting in sequence meant every day threw up even more emotionally intense scenes that our young actors had to perform with complete conviction.
So we did everything we could to make the set a safe place for the actors to work. They lived together, the guys went to do sailing training together. Before we shot, the girls went out on the town in Cape Town in character together (we shot it – that’s a lot of the opening credits stuff). Nichola and Sian are both from Leeds and they helped Jaime out on the nuances of the accent. Everyone worked intense hours, tons of material every day, most of it demanding and as the shoot went on and the dynamics between the characters got more and more fucked-up, the actors were really channelling it – and it’s right there in their performances. Robert, Sian, Nichola, Julian, Tom, Jay and Jaime are all young – Sian had never even acted in front of a camera before and Jay was straight out of drama school – and they managed to do very demanding work that would scare off many actors with years more experience. The way they committed to their characters, gave such heartfelt performances and looked after each other all the time is really amazing. I can write this stuff, but I would never have the balls to act it. They did, with lots of intensity, and they brought many elements to the characters that were all their own.
This was always going to be the actors’ film, and together with Barry Wasserman the AD and Nanu Segal the DOP, I made sure we came up with a way to give them as much freedom as possible. We always rehearsed before shooting and most times we set up and lit our shots only after seeing the rehearsal. We never went into shooting a scene if the actors weren’t comfortable or prepared and when the cameras rolled it was like a long distance race that took a shot or two to get going, and then after everyone hit their stride, they just motored through the scene, building and building, finding their rhythm and having the confidence to try new things.
The last day of shooting was a twenty hour day. We had our wrap party at 5am, straight after the last shot was called, and those left standing kept partying through till the afternoon when the actors got on the plane back to London. That pretty much sums up how the film was done.
Six months later and we’ve completed it. For better and worse, I know that the script Dave and I wrote is up on the screen. Everything we discussed, the themes we wanted to explore, are all there.
Directing it I wanted to capture the adrenalin and excitement of a genre film and completely suck the audience into the momentum of the story. I wanted to make it a true journey where you feel very differently at the end to how you did at the start – it was so important to have that movement from sunshine and lightness and beauty to the darkness and claustrophobia and violence that comes. And I wanted to capture a human drama we can all relate to - the emotions of a group of people with real motives, fears and flaws who make real decisions and real mistakes.
It was very important that this was a genre film anchored in real people – there’s no monster or unstoppable psychopath or anything like that. Just people.”
Donkey Punch is released in UK cinemas on 18th July 2008.
