Cousins Pictures' The Eliminator, an action-adventure tongue-in-cheek zombie feature set, and filmed, in Northern Ireland proved to be the hit of this year's Galway Film Fleadh. Paul Power takes up where he left off last year with the film's writer/director, Enda Hughes.

In March 1995 I travelled up to Keady in Armagh, driving past an eerily unmanned border crossing to meet Enda Hughes, writer, director, editor, photographer and co-producer of The Eliminator, described as 'Northern Ireland's first indigenous feature'. The surreality continued as I sat with Hughes in the 30-seat cinema he has constructed at the rear of his home where we watched a mute cut of his first feature film, The Eliminator.

'Dirtier than Harry, Madder than Max' ran the logline for the film which, thus far, had cost £3,000 to shoot. Being mute however, I was treated to an 83-minute feast of action and comedy on-screen while, sitting beside me in the cinema, Hughes utilised his vocal skills to recreate the film's dialogue and sound effects. Entertaining as it was, it couldn't have prepared me for what appeared on the screen on the 12th of July at the Galway Film Fleadh.

Before the screening, Hughes took to the stage to inform the audience that the entire film had cost just under £8,000. What? Such extravagance! So where did the extra £5,000 get spent exactly, "I saved up again about another £2,000 through nightclub deejaying", says Hughes " and I did a couple of stints as an AD working on a few programmes for the BBC and a comedy series for Select TV that was shot in Belfast. Denis [O'Hare, the third member of Cousins Pictures, besides Hughes and his brother Michael, who also is one of the film's co-stars], one of the other producers put up the other £2,000 himself that he'd just saved up from working, so we didn't get any official money from any official organisations or anything like that."

The shoot itself relied on a lot of favours from friends, family and locals who were only too willing to help out, plus an extremely co-operative RUC who turned a blind eye to exploding vehicles, bomb blasts and zombies roaming the nighttime graveyards of South Armagh. Was the production as reliant on favour during post-production also?

"Absolutely. We were really lucky and we landed a deal we couldn't refuse to track-lay and mix our soundtrack with Colour Film Services sound studios in London. We did the whole thing on an American digital system, a hard drive system where all the stuff was stored, called Time Line Studio Frame, which is very like cutting 16mm mag except it'' all digital and on an Apple Mac screen. You have the Beta or U-Matic copy as slave and the system is locked to it by timecode. We sourced all the sound and track-laid it all over there and ended up with 84 tracks of sound which were pre-mixed, right down to the final dub."

The 'unrefusable offer' was not a totally free one however, and was done during down-time at the studio by dubbing mixer Richard Armstrong who "had seen the film mute and was very into it" Hughes continues. "I think also because he saw it mute (although there was a dialogue guide track) he saw it as a very good challenge for him, and also a great training exercise on that piece of equipment for editing sound. Also, I don't think sound engineers very often have that amount of creative control over something because they're given a lot of location sound or sound that another editor has dumped in and they're just asked to mix it all and fix it up. But in this case he was sourcing a lot of the sound and was able to put together the mix that he really wanted to do. I think that's why it was so attractive to him because he was able to start with a clean canvas."

Being entirely post-synched for sound effects and dialogue (much of it done in Ireland as the last sound job to go through The Purple Room before its amalgamation/conversion to Ardmore Sound - "70 or 80% of the ADR and also a lot of the action sound effects like the gunshots, some explosion effects, car effects and things like that Paco Hayes had laid down in advance of us going to London"), Hughes confessed to having got a little overexposed to the film. "I think about halfway through the sound dub I kind of fell out with the film. When you've gone through it in that much detail trying to lay down tracks of sound and everything - I mean I've literally seen it up on a thousand times, if not more - it's very difficult for me now to sit and watch it and be objective about it. But our original intentions when we were planning it two years ago I think were very much what came onto the screen and the end result was very much what we had planned, so in that sense it's satisfying. But on the other hand I just suppose I'm sorry it took as long as two years to do. If it had taken a wee bit shorter maybe we wouldn't have been forced to have put so much into it of our own time and everything. But yeah, I am happy with it."

As well as a driving - literally, during the spectacular 13-minute car chase scene -soundtrack which ranges from speed-metal guitar numbers to a Bacharach-parody for the hilarious 'Nam flashback (my favourite scene in the film) composed by Stuart Neville, many members of the audience in Galway were gobsmacked to hear Stiff Little Fingers' 'Alternative Ulster' over the closing credits. Not that such a track couldn't have been more appropriate for a film which showed another side to Northern Ireland never before shown on screen but how did they manage to get the rights for that unofficial 80s anthem?

"We always wanted to use 'Alternative Ulster' form way, way back" Hughes recalls, "but we decided that it wouldn't be possible and we'd almost lost hope. We were so sure we wouldn't be able to use it and we didn't really bother enquiring.

"But right about a week before we did our dub I just decided 'What the hell - I'll ring EMI and see how much it would cost to use a track like 'Alternative Ulster'.' EMI put me in touch with Complete Music, the publishers, and they said we could go ahead and use it and EMI said there would be a small fee for licensing it." Hughes' girlfriend Brenda Garvey, who appears as a flesh-eating zombie at the film's end, is also related to SLF's lead singer Jake Burns and in the end they got permission for the use of the track through him. "But it was at the midnight hour, at the very last, that we discovered we could use it, so we stuck it on there. The rest of the music was recorded during the editing of the film and then it was tracklaid during the pre-mix in London. But 'Alternative Ulster' was the ultimate afterhit.

"To be honest, the reason we always wanted to use the track was because that was what The Eliminator was meant to be: a completely alternative view of Northern Ireland, just an alternative look at the whole thing. Because very often people kind of label Northern Ireland as one thing or another and they think it's a very black and white place. But in truth the culture is just as much of a patchwork quilt of influences as it is anywhere else - the chainsaw brigade and the kind of people who are into schlock movies and all that up North. So that was the idea with The Eliminator: to show something completely alternative coming out of Northern Ireland that you don't normally get al all." Although, summing up Stone's final self-destructive action at the end of the film, Hughes notes that "If one person doesn't go along with what the rest think, it can cause a lot of trouble for a lot of people."

The approach of Hughes and his team to the promotion of the film in Galway was, he says, a "guerrilla approach with lots of in-you-face publicity" where they drove around town during the afternoon of the screening with a loudhailer and the Eliminator himself poking out of the sunroof with his bazooka, while a crew fly-postered every available lamppost and stencil-sprayed zebra crossing with the film's name. It worked: on top of word of mouth the film had a full house and, allied to glowing reviews and interviews in The Irish Times, The Times, The Hot Press ('a legend in the making), Vox and NME, the film has been accepted as the closing film for the Second West Belfast Film Festival next month and then goes on a fairly hectic festival tour: Manchester's Kinofilm, the Festival of Fantastic Films (also in Manchester), the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Welsh International Film Festival and, of course, the Armagh Arts Festival. The film has also been submitted to other festivals, including several in the US. So what's next? "We'll eventually try to secure a deal with some kind of distributor, then hopefully on the strength of The Eliminator raise some money from another source to make another film." "Hughes feels that it may have 'art house' theatrical potential "but not a major theatrical release, although I think there's a huge market for it on home video."

The Eliminator is certainly a welcome new development in Irish feature filmmaking where all too often the po-faced earnestness with which drama is approached rules out other genres. For instance, how many Irish comedies have you seen in recent years? How many schlock horror Irish films? And, since The Mackintosh Man how many good car chases have been filmed on Irish roads? Well make sure to watch The Eliminator then.

Hughes' immediate plans include shooting a short and possibly a pop promo and a test commercial this summer. "I'm very into action and movement on the screen but I wouldn't like to continue making films at such a low budget. At the end of the day The Eliminator is like a schlock action film that's supposed to raise a smile and maybe raise an eyebrow. I'd like to use it to raise Cousins Pictures' profile and maybe people will think 'If they can do that with £8,000, what could they do with more money?'"

A remake of The Ten Commandments, Cousins-style for £10,000?...

Paul Power

This article was printed in Film Ireland 54 (Aug/Sep 1996).