Following some doubt over its certification, teen zombie romantic comedy Boy Eats Girl will be in cinemas by the start of the new school term. Director Stephen Bradley discusses this unusual film with Eamonn Donohoe.

As far as zombies are concerned, art imitates life; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that art imitates the undead. You see, not only are zombies apparently relentless forces, movies about them never seem to go away. The glorious heyday of zombie flicks came in the 70s when Dawn of the Dead et al were on the big screen, but wilted somewhat after that. Recent years have seen a rebirth in the genre, and now zombies are cool again. Irish director Stephen Bradley has taken the whole concept, recycled it, given it a definite Irish spin, and repackaged it in the guise of Boy Eats Girl, a zom-rom-com with a wicked sense of humour.

It is fair to say this is a new venture in Irish film. Zombie films made here in the past were like the ones featured on The Blizzard of Odd: low budget and better off forgotten. Now Bradley, the writer and director of Sweety Barrett, has taken a script by writer Derek Landy and made something new that pushes at many boundaries. Such a venture may have given many directors reasons for caution, but not Stephen Bradley.

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'In the beginning of 2003, Ed Guiney, one of the producers on the film, and Andrew Lowe gave me the earliest draft of the script and I got hooked on it' he says. Bradley admits that 'the only ambition we had for the film to be taken seriously as a theme was to have the idea that, with the Celtic Tiger and all of that nonsense which has come over the last ten years, we have all sucked up that huge amount of Americana, and this film shows how much we have.'

Indeed it is fair to say that this is quite a rich furrow running through the movie, and it is one that Bradley feels is very evident. The setting is Dublin, but you have no bother transplanting it into London, LA, or Sydney without losing any of the impact. The most obvious example of this can be seen in the fact that the characters all have neutral names like Nathan and Jessica, so there are no Seáns or Ann Maries.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 106.