Tuesday 13 October 2015

European Première of Lenny Abrahamson's Room in London

I had the unexpected pleasure of attending the European Première of Irish director Lenny Abrahamson's Room at the Vue cinema in Leicester Square, London on Sunday evening.

I won a Twitter competition run by the nice folks at the Irish Film Festival London. It was nice to meet Lenny briefly after the packed out double screening - I'd met him once before when he was a speaker at an Irish Film Board scheme I was selected for in Dublin 2013.

I thought the film was fabulous. Lenny has done really well to bring Emma Donoghue's difficult story to screen. He was helped greatly by terrific performances by Brie Larsen and child actor Jacob Tremblay who was outstanding.
Brendan O'Neill and Lenny Abrahamson
Room has picked up several awards so far - winning the People's Choice award at Toronto and Audience Award at Aspen. It has also been nominated as Best Film in official competition at the BFI London Film Festival.

There is talk of Oscar nominations which in my opinion would be well deserved. I think it may be a watershed film for Lenny allowing him to tell some great stories by working with bigger budgets and other big names in future.

Here's some photos from the Just Jared Celeb site of the Red Carpet action before the show.
Room star Brie Larsen with director Lenny Abrahamson
 Here's a great 5 star review by Scott Davis on the Flickering Myth site
"Even the most hardened cinemagoer will fall under the spell of Room at least once, and so far it seems every audience have fallen suit. Almost out of nowhere, Room has enchanted, enthralled and uplifted itself into the Oscar race with an emotionally complex but supremely rewarding, heartbreaking and transformative tale of the love between mother and child, supported by two astounding central performances that will stay with you for days afterwards."
Thats all for folks now. You can follow Room news on Twitter here. You can follow my Stickleback Productions tweets here.




Friday 9 October 2015

Colchester Film Festival 60 Hour Film Challenge

I did the Colchester Film Festival 60 Hour Film Challenge at the weekend. Only decided to do it about 2 weeks before so it was somewhat thrown together but managed to get a good crew and the Mockingbird Theatre Bar as a main location.

I also had a second unit filming in Minneapolis, USA directed my filmmaker friend Phil Harder. They were filming a segment featuring Barkhad Abdirahman who starred in Captain Philips with Tom Hanks.

I'm hoping a festival cut of the film will be available in a couple of weeks.

We'll here on 10th October whether we've been shortlisted.



Here's some pics and an early draft of the credit roll.









Thats all for now!