Spy thriller’s are often action-packed, quick moving, and have action stars with big budgets attached to them. Then comes Dead Shot. While filled with actors I know and love can carry a film, they are not the action stars I’ve come to associate with the genre with the exception of some of Mark Strong’s previous work and it has led to a fascinating film about a border feud gone wrong.
The film is described as follows: “When a border ambush goes wrong, a retired Irish paramilitary witnesses the fatal shooting of his pregnant wife by an SAS officer. After outwitting the SAS, now presumed dead, he escapes, taking his revenge to the dark streets of 1970’s London.” When I spoke with directors Thomas and Charles Guard for the release of Dead Shot, it’s clear they really love the genre and knew how to make it work for them.
When I asked about playing within the spy thriller genre with the film, Charles Guard talked about how it played into their own limitations within the project. “Well, the limitations for us specifically with this film really came down to kind of time and money as so many films do,” he said. “But we just really were tight on both. We had to sort of kind of reshape things and be very light on our feet in terms of what we could achieve and what we couldn’t achieve. We sort of ring fence key scenes that we felt we needed to capture the feeling of the story we wanted to tell, which was very much a kind of 70s style thriller that’s sort of a kind of ride that keeps quite a sort of spontaneous and immediate energy that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats. Then the stuff that was extraneous to those ring fence kind of scenes, we sort of had to reevaluate whether or not we could do things quicker or more economically. So it fed into a sort of leaner project, really much leaner project.”
You can see our full chat here:
Dead Shot is available on digital now.
(featured image: Quiver Distribution)
Published: Sep 19, 2023 03:27 pm