Fear and Loathing on Location
And independent feature film is shooting somewhere in the Leixlip area. Eamonn Gray takes his life into his hands to report on the production.

Panic
We were somewhere around Leixlip on the edge of the Pale when the nausea began to take hold. The taxi driver was shifty, like he could sense my growing malaise as I tried to put my smudged list of directions in order. How long can a man hold it together on two hours of sleep and an empty stomach… in a place like this? Where Dublin, Kildare and Meath converge, compasses are useless. The landscape is coma-inducingly uniform. Panic and déjà vu lurk around every bend on this never-ending dirt track. Certainly this is no place for man, especially some jumped-up scribe from the Big Smoke who insults the locals by his very presence. My phone call with the production manager of some independent film whose name I had long since forgotten rang in my ears: ‘It’s not signposted. Just follow the directions I sent you and you’ll be fine’. I wasn’t convinced. Neither was the increasingly irritable wheel jockey who eyed me accusingly while muttering some colloquial gibberish down a two-way radio. I prayed for a head on collision, a natural disaster, anything to release me from this wretched nightmare.

We turned down an inconceivably narrow road. The overgrown hedges on either side had blocked out most of the sky and were attempting to infiltrate our vehicle. This was it, the end of the road, the last line of the cryptic clues I now crumpled in my hands. If we didn’t find it here, then it was on to the Atlantic coast, and oblivion. The production manager’s siren call still beckoned me. The bug-eyed driver clung to the wheel like a deluded lion tamer to a kitchen chair. He knew it too. Victory or death, we were in this together.

A huge archway up ahead. Beyond, a gently meandering avenue lined with arboreal wonders rolled sumptuously up to an expansive dwelling that could have been the crib of Zeus himself. Could it be that these two mere mortals, now bound hand in sweaty hand, had somehow surmounted the treacherous slopes of Mount Olympus to take their place amongst the gods? It was clear that a certain fear still gripped the driver for he had no desire to hang about for answers. On receipt of his two pieces of silver, my companion hastily departed without so much as a glance in his rear-view.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 118.