How These Co-Directors Told an Action-Packed True Story

If you love movies as much as we do here at No Film School, you'll often marvel at the simple miracle of cinema coming together. In the case of the new film Dead Shot, I had one such moment watching Colin Morgan's character walking down an empty street set in 1970s Ireland, the lane filled with several period cars. I thought of how difficult it would be to lock off that location and get so many cars for that single shot, all because of a few lines on a page.

Dead Shot was inspired by the book The Road to Balcombe Street by Steven P. Moysey, and of course by Northern Ireland's infamous Troubles, in which loyalists and nationalists clashed over British rule, often violently.

In this classic revenge tale, Irish paramilitary member Michael (Morgan) is bent on revenge after his wife is killed in an ambush. He departs for London to hunt down the soldier responsible, Tempest (Aml Ameen).

We spoke to the film's co-directors, Charles Guard and Thomas Guard, to learn more about the making of the movie. Enjoy!

Dead Shot | Official Trailer | Sky Cinemawww.youtube.com

Editor's note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

No Film School: I'm going to start with you directing together. What does that collaborative process look like?

Thomas Guard: It's very fluid and open. We don't divide any of the roles that we do. We write together, we talk to the cast together, we talk to the cameraman together, we talk to the editor together. It is just a spirit of collaboration really, that sees us through from the beginning to the end.

Charles Guard: It is pretty organic. We love stories and we love people, we love characters. So, yeah, we love exploring. If there's any kind of—I wouldn't say contentious—we just sort of believe in water finds a way, and this philosophy that the best way of doing something, or of realizing something, will reveal itself to you.

And filmmaking is very much that process for us. We believe in the magic of filmmaking in the sense that things come together when and if they're meant to. And if they don't, then you can't fight against that. You have to sort of adapt and work around it and perhaps look in a different direction.

Thomas Guard and Charles Guard behind the scenes of the action/thriller/drama film, DEAD SHOT a Quiver Distribution release. Photo Courtesy of Mark Mainz

NFS: I did see in your press notes that you mentioned something like that specifically about making compromises, making tough decisions. Do you have any examples of that on this film?

Thomas Guard: There are a lot of tough decisions, I guess like any film.

Charles Guard: Where do you begin?

Thomas Guard: Well, I mean, it could be as simple as a location falling through or having to rewrite an entire sequence because there isn't the time and the money for it anymore. And we were faced with things like that often.

But as Charlie said, I think we do believe you just have to have the faith that whatever the movie gods throw at you, when you're in the middle of making something, it's just about how you deal with it. ... You just have to be water and just flow around it and find a way through it and a way of making it work.

And more often than not, the solution, your compromise solution is actually you end up six months later in the editing rooms thinking, "Actually, this is actually better than we could have imagined," or, "This may actually be stronger than our initial idea." Just probably because it has more life, it has more organic reality to it.

Felicity Jones as Catherine in the action/thriller/drama film, DEAD SHOT a Quiver Distribution release. Photo Courtesy of Mark Mainz

NFS: I also really did love the look of the film. I'd love to know a little bit more about your process on the visuals and even what tools you use in terms of cameras and lenses.

Charles Guard: Well, we worked with an amazing DP, Mattias Rudh, who's a Swedish cinematographer. When we were kind of discussing the movie, we sort of said, "Look, we really want to shoot this in a sort of run-and-gun style with a lot of handheld cameras." We want to be light on our feet. We don't want to be bogged down with lots of camera rigs and we didn't want to be shooting stuff too much on a dolly.

And the paraphernalia of filmmaking, it can sometimes get in the way of the energy of the set and the energy of the kind of moment. And that for us, that does affect ... it affects everything. It affects everyone's performance ultimately, and it affects the actors. And we were really keen on telling a story in a very immediate and kind of an energized way that felt like the audience was right with the actors, right with the kind of protagonists and making decisions and changing their mind as quickly as they were. So the energy of the film became very much the experience of the film.

Thomas Guard: Well, in terms of the lenses and the camera, we used a Sony VENICE, which was brilliant. We'd never used a VENICE before. We'd always used an ARRI Alexa. But the great advantage with the VENICE is that you can break it down into a thing called the Rialto, which is essentially just a tiny little hard drive in a lens.

We deliberately chose very cramped shooting locations to create a sense of claustrophobia and tension. And sometimes it would've actually been very difficult to get a conventional-size camera in those spaces. I mean, some of them were so small, but the Rialto was fantastic for getting into little nooks and crannies and the backs of cars and things like that.

Thomas Guard and Charles Guard behind the scenes of the action/thriller/drama film, DEAD SHOT a Quiver Distribution release. Photo Courtesy of Mark Mainz

NFS: I would love to know your process behind the synth score.

Thomas Guard: Well, it is funny because we'd never heard of Max de Wardener. Obviously, we work also with our brother Ted [Guard], who was the editor on this. And we were all talking a lot. We'd had a lot of conversations about what score, what composer we were going to use, and what type of score it should be.

And synth, we loved the synth scores from the '70s and early '80s, and we kept talking about things like that. And also contemporary composers like Cliff Martinez who works for Soderbergh and worked a lot with Soderbergh and his evolution of it. But after one of these conversations, we'd all been having, we switched on the radio and there was a track playing.

Literally, it was this fluke-y. There was a track playing, and we all heard it and it was like, "What's this?' And we waited until the end of the track and the disc jockey said, "That's Max de Warner's 'Kolmar (Reprise).'" And we couldn't believe it.

We looked up his stuff and this album in particular, and he had actually talked about in the liner notes, how he was trying to do for this album, a '70s inspired album with original synthesizers from the '70s and strange instruments like the ones Martenot, which is an instrument that Radiohead use a lot, which creates this kind of ghostly sound. And it was just one of those incredibly lucky accidents that you sometimes get making the film.

Charles Guard: Yeah, the magic of filmmaking right there.

Thomas Guard: And almost like two weeks later, he was actually on set and we'd got in touch with him through his website and he was on set and we were talking to him. So it was a really lovely relationship and we got on really well with him and had an amazing time building the score with him.

Aml Ameen as Tempest, Jack McMullen as Cole, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Keenan, and Mark Strong as Holland in the action/thriller/drama film, DEAD SHOT a Quiver Distribution release. Photo Courtesy of Anne Binckebanck

NFS: What was the most challenging sequence on this film and why?

Charles Guard: There were a lot of challenging sequences on the film. I mean, when you're making a film like this, that's a period thriller set really in live location, real locations, largely actually on the street, it's incredibly difficult. Because if you have a limited budget, which we had a very limited budget, you have to be very careful where you point the camera because everywhere reveals the fact that you are out of the world. So everything was difficult. The chase sequence after Paddington was very difficult.

The sequence probably that jumps out as possibly the most ambitious sequence that we attempted was the end and the idea of these two characters finally meeting and coming together in the middle of the night in total darkness in this kind of industrial wasteland that the scene is set in and taking them from that world through into dawn and onto this beach where they have this very emotional kind of moment where they finally come face to face. That was a very difficult scene to do because really, we didn't have very much time to shoot it at all. And the transition from night into day largely happened with one dusk. So that was tough.

We actually shot that sequence backwards. It was the only way that we could actually do it. So we began with the sequence with the two men on the beach and then kind of pieced together everything else sort of in reverse. But that was a very tough sequence.

Thomas Guard: At some points, we were almost cutting in camera. It was like those Super 8 competitions where you have to shoot a film on one roll of Super 8 film and get it processed and have it all ... And at moments, there were definite moments where we felt we were doing that.

Charles Guard: We were. We absolutely were.

Thomas Guard: We would just get one take and then we'd have to change and then get the next bit beforehand, get one take, and then go back and yeah, all in reverse. So yeah, it was bonkers.

Felicity Jones as Catherine and Colin Morgan as Michael O’Hara in the action/thriller/drama film, DEAD SHOT a Quiver Distribution release. Photo Courtesy of Mark Mainz

NFS: What advice would you have for aspiring directors?

Charles Guard: Keep going to the cinema and just do it. Just do it. That's the best possible advice we could probably think of. There's so many opportunities now to just do stuff, and if you don't have the money to do it or to get a camera, then shoot it on your phone and just piece stuff together and explore stuff because there's a real beauty in the art of cinema, and it's still, despite everything, an incredibly impactful and meaningful medium to work in.

Thomas Guard: I mean, it's always difficult giving advice, isn't it? But I mean, something that we love doing together is not just watching films, but watching films we love and then reading the published scripts, the shooting scripts with them, and actually just comparing the shooting scripts with the film because you learn a huge amount from old classics from back in the '80s.

I mean, it's always easy to find on the internet now, the shooting scripts, and they're very revealing and it's always interesting. It's never really direct lessons, but it's just interesting to see how things have changed from the scriptwriting to the film or to the edit and how things evolve. It's quite a liberating process.

Dead Shot is in theaters, on digital, and on demand August 18, 2023.