The Cured is a curious beast, it's a zombie film that takes place after the infection has been cured. It's also a sociopolitical thriller with important messages for how we treat people who are different and how societies can alienate and isolate outsiders to their own detriment.
With all of that at play CinÉireann sat down with Rachael O'Kane and Rory Dungan, the producers of the film, who have been shepherding it, alongside writer/director David Freyne, from the very beginning.
Foremost in our minds were what were the challenges in making a genre film like this in Ireland on a low budget and with large set-pieces, how do you handle that logistiaclly, and just how do you cast Ellen Page, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, and Sam Keeley?
Cin É: The film has been almost 7 years in the making, but the first we saw of it was the 2014 short film, essentially a proof-of-concept The First Wave. Why did you go down this route?
Rachael O'Kane and Rory Dungan: We decided early on, in order to showcase David's talents, plus the world of the movie, that we would make a short, based in the world of the feature (which was already scripted by then). This became The First Wave. It was a tough decision to make the short, in that we knew that we had to do it on a shoestring budget from our Irish Film Board development funding, and we were wary of it being an anti-sell if it looked inadequate and didn't actually look polished. But thankfully we managed to execute it well! We used the short in tandem with the great script as a calling card and began getting calls from America and went over and sat down with about twenty five to thirty financiers, US producers and sales companies. We ended up teaming up with one of them and developing the
project with them for about eighteen months before their creative team changed and we realised that our aspirations for the project no longer aligned. They wanted to make a more generic and less thoughtful film than we wanted to. So we parted ways and financed it through co-production with Northern Ireland and France. The Irish Film Board were the majority financier and were brilliant throughout development and production. It was a long journey that actually started in 2011 when we first submitted to the IFB for development finance, and they stayed the course throughout. A lot of the script came from when David was in Amsterdam at the Binger FilmLab in 2012. That was a fantastic resource, but unfortunately it's no longer there.
And you've been with David every step of the way. What has the creative process with him been like?
The creative process with David was great. He really knows his own mind and his voice is so assured, but he's always very keen to work in ideas and script notes that will improve the script. So we worked through a great many drafts discussing the world and the character and plot development together, David and
myself and Rachael. But ultimately he was always the one who had to go back into the room and write it. It was initially a much bigger world with all sorts of different elements such as ongoing capture missions and different bureaucratic levels that had to be sacrificed in order to foreground the primary characters and build them and the emotional aspect up further. David was very early to realise that everything had to emanate from the characters. Plus, ultimately, we had to trim down or cut out certain sequences due to budget constraints. Or find creative solutions around certain things.
The film is a co-production with France and with Northern Ireland. Did that come with any constraints?
Thankfully the financing from France was a 'financial' co-production which meant that we were able to spend that money in Ireland and beef up the S481 tax rebate. The Northern Irish financing required a 5:1 spend, as in we had to spend five times more up there than we received from NI Screen, which was tight, but we managed it through basing the entire post-production process up north. So we shot the movie in Ireland and posted up North.
CinÉireann / April 2018 47