“You went home thinking there was a crisis, and you got up in the morning and found out that’s not the crisis anymore – the crisis has got bigger,” grins producer Trevor Birney, as he reflects on the shoot of the politically-charged comedy Kneecap in 2023.
Getting the film off the ground — which is the most nominated film at this year’s British Independent Film Awards with 14 nods, also has two European Film Award nominations and is Ireland’s entry in the international feature race at the Oscars — required a truckload of tenacity from its creators from the word go. Kneecap takes a darkly comic look at a generation who grew up in the post-Good Friday Agreement north of Ireland, through the perspective of a rampageous, anti-British west Belfast hip-hop band, who rap in the Irish language, with a script brimming with scenes of drug taking and provocative lines such as “I’m going to blow you like a Brighton hotel.”
Kneecap is the feature debut of former tabloid journalist and director of documentary One Rogue Reporter Rich Peppiatt, and the first narrative feature of documentary producer Birney of Belfast-based Fine Point Films, whose credits include feature docs Cyndi Lauper: Let The Canary Sing and Bobby Sands: 66 Days. The real-life hip-hop trio, made up of Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí, had no acting experience, and their first acting lessons in preparation for the shoot revealed some room for improvement.
Although Peppiatt is English, he lives in Belfast with his Northern Irish wife. His love of hip-hop music led him to attend one of the band’s gigs, where he witnessed a frenzied underground support for the Irish language in the north that piqued his interest.
The next challenge was meeting the band. Months of emails to them went unanswered. But a serendipitous moment when having a meeting in Birney’s office changed all that – a colleague of Birney’s revealed she used to go out with one of the band, and agreed to pass on his number. Peppiatt wrangled a pint with the group. Which led to more pints. And then more.
Getting the band, whose politics are staunchly anti the British occupation in the north of Ireland, to agree to trust an Englishman with their story also took some navigating.
“What helped in the initial courting was my wife is from Andytown in west Belfast, she comes from quite a well-known family,” says Peppiatt. “I married into a family that really have the scars of some of the worst instances of The Troubles.”
The day after meeting the band, Peppiatt signed up for Irish-language classes.
With Kneecap on board, Birney reached out to Patrick O’Neill at Irish distribution company Wildcard to sense check whether this was, as Peppiatt puts it, “the worst idea in the world, or if there was something in it”.
O’Neill thought the latter, and Kneecap is the distributor’s first co-producer credit. In 2020, the project applied for a development scheme, the Mother Tongues award, backed by UK distributor Curzon and French sales agent Charades, focused on projects from UK-based scriptwriters in which the dialogue is not in English.
“There were 112 different applications. Kneecap really shone through,” says Jack Tarling, who was running the development initiative with two fellow producers, and then boarded the project as the UK producer through his outfit Shudder Films.
“Maybe we’ll do a Kneecap 2 where they all end up in rehab”
Northern Ireland Screen was the first public funder to back the project, with Screen Ireland and the BFI also providing production support, for a total budget of €4.5m. The level of recreational drug use in the film was cause for concern among some of the funding executives.
“At script stage, there was disquiet about the drugs,” recalls Peppiatt. “One funder in particular said it’s very problematic to have a film that depicts that level of drug use, without the consequences of it in a negative way. I understood that argument, but my counter to that was most people who recreationally take drugs do not end up in rehab. It’s a cliché that every film that does drugs has to somehow become about drugs.
“Maybe we’ll do a Kneecap 2 one day where they all end up in rehab and hooked up to IVs. But that wasn’t this film.”
The line, “I’m going to blow you like a Brighton hotel” (said to Mo Chara by his Protestant secret lover) also inspired some nerves from the institutions. “I don’t think there was a single funder who wanted the line in there,” recalls Peppiatt.
“Exactly this time last year we were driving back from Galway and me and Rich had a four-hour conversation about that line,” reflects Birney. “The funders ultimately learnt to live with it, much to their credit.”
Another issue was a lack of prominent female characters. “There was also a note early to do with gender balance,” adds O’Neill. “But if you look at the film now, there are four really strong female roles.”
“It was Screen Ireland who came in quite early on that – [asking] ‘Is there a way of making sure that the female representation in there is strong, and you don’t fall into the trap of it just being female characters who are there to facilitate the boys?’ I’m happy with how it came out and the reaction has been that we’ve managed that,” says Peppiatt.
The film was fully financed before Michael Fassbender came on board in a supporting role. Fassbender’s performance as Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s Hunger had put him top of the wish-list, and BFI executive Louise Ortega luckily was friends with Fassbender’s agent and was able to get the script to the hot-ticket star.
The shoot took place in Belfast and Dundalk in spring 2023, with some thorny moments to contend with across the seven weeks of filming.
“Shooting in Belfast, with the [communities] divided as they still unfortunately are, when you’re an Irish-language production, instantly, you’ve nailed your colours to the mast,” says Peppiatt. “We had planned the opening sequence in the woods meticulously. It was supposed to be filmed on cables, in this one-shot sequence. A couple of days before we were about to shoot it, the local councillors, who happened to be unionists, got wind we were an Irish-language production and pulled the permission. We had to abandon something that was very technical and planned, and just turn up and do it in some woods.”
The film is billed as a biopic, but Peppiatt remains tight-lipped about how much of it is true. “70% of what’s in the film is true,” he claims. “I don’t answer that question – it ruins the fun of it.”
During its festival run, the film has gone down a storm, winning audience awards both in the US at Sundance and closer to home at the Galway Film Fleadh, where it also won the best Irish film and best Irish-language film prizes. In August, Curzon and Wildcard released it in the UK and Ireland at 500 sites, where it crossed $2.8m (£2.2m). Sony Pictures Classics bought the film from Charades at Sundance, and it has taken more than $1m at the US box office.
Across their promotional tour, the band have persistently vocalised their support for Palestine in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Did any of the distributors get skittish about their stance?
“At every premiere I’ve been at, they’ve been very clear about their message – free Gaza,” says Birney. “No one has, as far as I know, anywhere tried to prevent them saying that. They are who they are. When they got to Sundance, no one could be in any way disillusioned of their politics. Anyone who looked at their Instagram or their social medias understands their politics. If they are getting involved in a Kneecap film, they’re getting involved with three main characters who voice their support for Palestine. All of us has the same politics.”
“Part of the charm of the band, and the reason people really connect with them, is the fact that they really don’t care about the consequences. In a world where people are careerist, it’s refreshing to have talent who just go – ’it doesn’t matter’.
”Their protest in SXSW has had real world effects,” says Peppiatt, on Kneecap pulling out of performing at the US festival over its sponsorship deal with the US army, who has been supporting Israel in the war in Gaza. The festival subsequently dropped the sponsor.
Bringing big budgets to Belfast
Peppiatt and Birney plan to continue working together on narrative features, and have recently launched Coup d’Etat Films. “Through the experience of Kneecap we became aware of the need to support indigenous filmmaking in Belfast. There is a moment for Ireland [happening] out there, and there is a moment for the north still to come,” says Birney.
“I have a couple of projects with Trevor that have gained traction in the background – it’s made us think we can be moving to the next level of things, of attracting serious money,” says Peppiatt. “The next project will scale up significantly from Kneecap. Beyond that – if we can get this project away at that price point, in the next 5-10 years, can we bring in the £50-100m+ projects into Belfast, into Ireland generally?”
Peppiatt and Birney have been taking meetings in Los Angeles. “I can see a middle ground where I can still work with the talent, the money, the executives in America, but I can do it closer to home,” says Peppiatt. “I’ve had some offers [in the US] that have been very hard to say no to. It’s a gamble. But I’m very excited about the next year or two.”
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