Eat Local

by King, Danny

  But who could I put in this deserted farmhouse and what could they be doing?

  Serial killers don’t really do it for me (too unpleasant), Zombies had been done to death and werewolves had recently run amok in Dog Soldiers but what about vampires? I liked vampires. They were my fiends of choice but a bunch of humans taking shelter inside an old deserted farmhouse while vampires stalked the woods outside was hardly an original concept. Incidentally, if you want to read a brilliant book along these lines, the best of its kind is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. There have been three official film adaptations of it so far starring Vincent Price, Charlton Heston and Will Smith (the Vincent Price version is the closest to the book) but none of them are a patch on Matheson’s original novel.

  Also, as with my books, I generally find ‘baddies’ a lot more fun to write about than ‘goodies’ so it occurred to me to flip the premise and have the vampires taking shelter in the farmhouse while being besieged by humans outside.

  From this starting point the story came together pretty quickly.

  DEVELOPMENT

  The first draft of the screenplay is fairly different from the film. For a start there were ten vampires not eight, there was no Colonel Bingham, just Larousse, and Sebastian was (believe it or not) the first to die, having already been turned into a vampire by Vanessa against strict Coven rules.

  The script was more serious too, less comical, but it laid the basic foundations of what would become Eat Local about 30 drafts later (I stopped counting around the twelfth draft).

  The biggest turning point in the development of Eat Local came when I met Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher back in 2006. Jason and Dexter had optioned the rights to The Bank Robber Diaries a year earlier but I’d not actually met them. I asked my [then] agent to set up a meeting or pass on a message to the boys but unfortunately setting up meetings and passing on messages, indeed like getting me book deals or replying to my emails, were talents far beyond my agent’s limited skill sets.

  Fortunately, luck intervened and Jason just happened to wander past the pub I was sitting in one lunchtime in Brewer Street, Soho, so I jumped up and ran down the road chasing him and his wife Elly through the streets of Soho. When I eventually caught up with them, it took me about another five minutes to get my breath back long enough to tell them who I was, as the 60 yard dash is not my strongest discipline, but Jason was very understanding and came back to the Duke of Argyll for a pint. We chatted and met up with Dexter a week later and kept in touch while they were trying to get the film version of The Bank Robber Diaries off the ground but unfortunately it wasn’t to be. Most production companies felt it was too close to Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels to explore and eventually they had to give up the project as a dead duck.

  It was then that I mentioned I had another screenplay, a low budget vampire screenplay, and so Dexter sent it to a few producers he knew. In his own words, “All the doors that had stayed shut to us while we were hawking Bank Robber around suddenly flew open”. Why? Probably because ROB was obviously so much more doable on a limited budget than a sprawling bank robbery adventure that took the audience all over London. I hadn’t started with a story, I’d started with a production concept and cut my cloth accordingly.

  MARV (Matthew Vaughn’s company) were initially interested but the script needed work. Jason, Dexter and I met up and tossed ideasaround, then I went away and worked on the screenplay. Colonel Bingham was born, Sebastian was allowed to live and Mr & Mrs Thatcher became serial killers. It became more or less the story that became Eat Local except that there were still ten vampires and not eight and would be for most of the next decade.

  After a couple more drafts we had a fun and exciting screenplay on our hands that could be shot for around £1million.

  MARV passed.

  FALSE START

  Dexter and Jason continued to try to get the film made over the next few years and several producers were attached, a couple of whom I never got to meet. One of these producers took ROB to the Berlin Film Festival where an offer of €250,000 was made to buy the rights. Unfortunately the screenplay wasn’t his to sell, he was simply there trying to raise the finances to take it into production so the offer was never relayed to me. I only heard about this four years later (from someone who wasn’t there either but who’d heard about secondhand) but it was too late to do anything about it. I don’t know if it’s actually true or not. People have been known to tell porkies in the film industry from time to time. Either way, it left me feeling like I’d washed and tumble dried a winning lottery ticket in my jeans pocket but what can you do? As we used to say on the building sites, you can’t miss what you never had.

  During this period Dexter and I got talking about an idea Dexter had been carrying around for 20+ years himself. It involved a dad coming out of prison to find his son fending for himself on a tough council estate and we worked the idea into the story that would eventually become Wild Bill.

  Next to ROB, Wild Bill practically happened overnight. I finished the first draft in February 2010 and the cameras were rolling on it by the end of November. Incredible. The film turned out to be great as well and surpassed all our expectations, launching Dexter as a director and saving me when my book career hit the rocks.

  It also led to a renewed interest in ROB, this time by Wild Bill’s producer, Sam Tromans, with Jason Flemyng directing. She had budgeted the film at £2million+ had investors lined up but on the first day of pre-production the money never arrived. The investors changed their minds and the project collapsed. This was through no fault of Sam and she tried again but was dashed a second time in quick succession. It looked like ROB was destined never to be made.

  EVOLUTION FILMS

  In November 2014 Rod Smith of Evolution Films dropped me a line. He asked if anyone held the rights to ROB and at that time no one did. He optioned it on the spot and said he was going to make it. I’d heard it all before but I signed the film over to him anyway as he bought me posh fish & chips to seal the deal.

  Rod had previously worked as the Director of Acquisitions at Anchor Bay Entertainment. He’d been in the bidding for Wild Bill two years earlier and had been a fan of my writing so when he left to set up his own production company he made ROB his first target, with Jason directing. He didn’t have £2million+ to produce the film (then again neither did anyone else) but he did have a healthy working budget regardless. In real money! Not promised money or projected money or bullshit money. Proper serious “I’m not joking” actual money. I know everyone thinks the film industry is awash with millions because actors like Daniel Craig and Kate Beckinsale can command seven-figure salaries but there’s actually a lot less cash up for grabs than you’d think – probably because Dan and Kate have it all.

  Nevertheless, we had enough to make the film and this time Jason and I were determined to do whatever we could to get it made.

  The first thing we had to do was give the script a haircut. We had decent budget but in order to give Rod the biggest bang for his bucks we had to make several painful cuts, the first of which was reducing the number of vampires from ten to eight. It might not seem like much of a cut but there are a lot of people behind the scenes who need to be there in order to put those actors on screen, with make-up, costumes, prosthetics, cinematography, sound, transport, accommodation and food etc so that a simple cut and fold helped us get the best out of our eight remaining vampires. Believe me, if Sidney Lumet had been working with our limited resources he would’ve made 9 Angry Men not 12.

  Another snip involved losing a couple of big set pieces, a spectacular motorbike crash and a scene in a greenhousein which 18 is stalked through a hydroponics lab and only saved when he throws a switch and roasts his vampire attacker beneath a bank of UV lamps. Maybe we’ll save it for the sequel.

  Rod brought in GFM Films and Hereford Films to co-produce and in January 2016, a little over ten years since I’d first written it, ROB finally went into production under the title Eat Local.
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  CASTING

  I had nothing to do with casting. Jason offered to involve me but I didn’t want to do it again. I’d done it before with the BBC on my sitcom Thieves Like Us and it’s not something I’d like to do again. Why? For starters, every struggling actor you’ve ever met contacts you out of the blue to ask you for a part. Of course they do, and who can blame them? But that doesn’t mean they’re any good or right for the role and if you fill up your film with drinking buddies just because you don’t want to upset anyone you end up with something so bad that no one wants to go and see it except the people who are in it.

  Also, I like to think of myself as a nice guy (it’s a minority view) so when a desperate actor or actress is sat opposite me trying in vain to breathe life into my lines just so they can put the lights on back home, I genuinely want to help them. I don’t get the power trip that some people get when interviewing applicants and ultimately you have to disappoint 99% of the people you see. It weighs on you, it really does.

  That said, it was a sheer unadulterated joy to deny some of the nimrods who auditioned for Thieves Like Us gainful employment, one of whom was a stand-up comedian who didn’t read from my script because he’d prepared his own material, telling me that he not only wanted to star in the show but write it too. Interesting tactic? Telling the person who’s auditioning you that you’re not only after the job on offer but theirs as well. He got neither. But such narcissists were few and far between. On the whole most of the actors and actresses who auditioned for Thieves were decent people who were simply trying to catch a break in an industry that boasts more jobbing bar staff than Wetherspoon’s.

  But still, back to Eat Local.

  Lucinda Syson was in charge of casting but many of the parts were offered to friends of Jason. I know what I said earlier about not casting your mates but Jason has been around for many years and appeared in over 100 movies so his mates are of a better calibre than mine.

  Charlie Cox (Henry), Tony Curran (Boniface), Robert Portal (Bingham), Johnny Palmiero (18), Jordan Long (Thomas) and, of course, Dexter Fletcher (Mr Thatcher) had all been earmarked their respective roles long before the film went into production, all of them glad to help out Jason as he directed his first feature film. This might not seem like much of a hardship to a layman, starring in a vampire action movie for a mate along with a load of other well-known faces off the telly. Indeed, as someone with one foot firmly planted outside the film industry and one toe tentatively in, I can appreciate that. But when someone like Charlie Cox flies in from New York fresh from filming the second series of Daredevil, or Tony Curran flies in from LA straight off the back of Defiance, to stand around in the cold dark woods at 3am for what amounts to little more than their expenses and a bacon butty, then it is a big deal, particularly when their profiles help lift the film’s.

  Freema Agyeman (Angel) was another who flew in from the States, having just filmed Sense8 and North v South and there was no one more enthusiastic on the whole of the film set. She almost gave Jason a run for his money in terms of eagerness and there was nothing she wouldn’t do to help out. In fact if we hadn’t bundled her in her car when her scenes were done and sent her packing we would’ve no doubt found her scraping the ice off everyone’s windscreens at the end of every night. Come to think of it, I think I did see her at the lights down the road with a bucket of water and squeegee but fortunately the lights were green and I was able to put my foot down.

  The part of Vanessa originally went to Mini Driver, who Jason had appeared with in I Give It A Year. Unfortunately, at the eleventh hour, she was unable to do it but we had a blinding bit of good fortune catching Eva Myles between jobs and she was perfect. In fact if you could’ve plucked the character of Vanessa out of my head and put her on screen, Eve Myles is exactly what you would’ve seen. What a trouper too, working an extra day on Sunday in a force nine gale and sleet storm just to get her scenes done and even I couldn’t be arsed to do that. I was at home next to a radiator.

  Mackenzie Crook (Larousse) was a complete surprise to me. I hadn’t expected that bit of casting but he was just great and a perfect barometer for just how cold it was. In fact if you watch the first scenes in which he’s talking to Bingham his jaw no longer works because it was 2am and -8°C and we’d all been in the woods for five hours already. Well, when I say we… it is a writer’s prerogative to go home when it gets too cold. It’s in the Writers’ Guild handbook. Top fella though and very nice. Incidentally, Larousse got his name courtesy of my Larousse Pocket Factfinder. If in doubt your bookshelf is a great place to find your characters’ names. If it’s good enough for Ian Fleming,it’s good enough for me.

  I was particularly excited about the casting of Annette Crosbie as Alice. I was such a fan of One Foot In The Grave but obviously I couldn’t tell her this when we met because I was playing it cool so I just stood quietly in the corner mouthing over and over again under my breath “Ooooohhhhhh Victor!” I like to think that Annette chose to do our film because in a career spanning more than 55 years she couldn’t have been asked to fire too many M60 machine guns straight into the camera.

  Ruth Jones (Mrs Thatcher) was another coup. Elly Fairman had been able to get a script to her via a mutual friend and she agreed to do it after liking what she’d read. That’s a great compliment when someone of Ruth’s stature signs on because she likes what I’ve written, not least of all because I had genuinely written it especially for her. Jason phoned me a week earlier to tell me he had a crack at Ruth and asked if I could write some Ruth Jones type lines. I did and she bit. So in a way the part of Mrs Thatcher was tailored for Ruth, as indeed was the part of Mr Thatcher. Dexter joined us for a couple of days just as he was getting ready for the premiere of Eddie The Eagle. He’s a big-shot director these days so again we were lucky to have him, but he was great and stole every scene he was in, along with some tea bags and pencils from Labrokes earlier in the day.

  Vincent Regan (The Duke) was another eleventh hour signing. We needed someone with genuine gravitas and authority to play The Duke but Charles Dance had already played three vampires in December and Christopher Biggins was in still tied up doing Jack and The Beanstalk in Nottingham. Fortunately Vince came onto our radar and he liked the character. It’s funny, he’s not in the film for very long but he has such a presence that you feel him long after he’s departed. He looks like my cousin as well, but more he’s a lot more fun to be around. Vince that is.

  Lukaz Leong (Chen) is a stuntman and martial artist who appeared in Star Wars and 24, as well as zombie thriller, The Girl With All The Gifts. Jason was very keen on him playing the part of Chen and what he could bring to it, not least of all his death scene, which was much enlarged after Lukaz signed on. In fact, Jason’s Lock Stock co-star, Jason Statham, came on board especially to choreograph and direct Chen’s fight scene with the second unit, more about which later.

  Finally the key role of Sebastian needed to be filled. Jason and Lucinda saw a great many up-and-coming young actors and while lots were good, none were quite right, not until they auditioned Billy Cook. Billy had a way about him that felt right. Sebastian might’ve had a posh name but he is anything but posh. There’s a lad like Sebastian in every boozer and betting shop from Camber Sands to Carlisle: an ordinary lad of ordinary stock who likes a drink and a flutter and who would’ve found himself in a trench up to his knees in mud and still playing cards had he been born 100 years earlier. As the son of a famous pop star (David Essex), Billy might not have been born on a rough and tough council estate but the mindset was clearly etched into his DNA. In fact, Sebastian was even given a Romani backstory after Billy Cook was cast because of his own gypsy ancestry, his grandmother having been a traveller and descended from Romanies. It was a piece of precision casting and I was happy for Billy too, as he was a lovely lad and very popular with all the cast and crew

  Finally, there were a few notable cameos designed to help us pad out Eat Local’s IMdB trivia page, the first of which was Nick M
oran (Private Rose). He is only in one scene. Indeed he was only on set for about an hour but his involvement marks the first time he, Jason Flemyng, Jason Statham and Dexter Fletcher have worked together since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Indeed a fifth Lock Stock star, Nicholas Rowe, also made a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo as Private Gary, who we see being dragged through the undergrowth and killed by Boniface in the final act. Again, it was done simply a favour from a friend and he came along to Putney Common one evening and got into uniform just so that we could drag him through some brambles four or five times before he went out for the evening. If he plays his cards right it could prove a big break from him.

  Lastly, and most definitely leastly, I have an even briefer cameo as Private Woodcock, whose key role it is in Colonel Bingham’s army to sit in a camp chair next to a field radio and try not to shiver. You can see me in a short scene over Mackenzie Crook’s shoulder twiddling knobs and squinting up at the camera because I don’t have my glasses on. In a longer version of the scene I even exchange a look with Mackenzie Crook but whether or not I pulled it off I couldn’t tell you because I couldn’t actually see him. It’s quite frightening how blind I am. Still, that is another ambition fulfilled, to actually appear in a vampire film, to be part of that’s story’s made-up world, albeit fleetingly, so I’m quietly chuffed. Thank you Jason.

  PRODUCTION

  The film was shot over four weeks in early 2016, starting on January 18th and finishing on February 12th. Some extra scenes were shot on the evening of March 22nd and the Jeunesby Infinity advert two month later. There was even one final scene in which 18 was killed by Dexter shot later still, in October (you’ll notice it differs from the book in which 18 gets away). These additional scenes helped shape the edit and improved the final film, although I still feel a tad sorry for 18.