Situations Vacant is set in the world of Dave Bracken. Dave wants to get the right job, meet the right girl; he just needs to figure out the right lies….
When young Dave Bracken is unleashed on Dublin’s employment market with his effervescent imagination, his father’s memory and his mother’s high hopes, he soon discovers that living the corporate high life by day and loving some gorgeous girl in a penthouse by night is in reality a faraway fantasy.
Then Dave and his best pal, Vinny Burke also jobless and loveless, receive some unorthodox advice from Whack, the barstool sage, and from their friend Tom Farrell, who seems to have it all, except they haven’t noticed that having it all is making Tom miserable.
Whack’s advice is simple. It’s his fail –safe two-point-plan. Before an interview have 2 pints and then start lying.
What have they got to lose? Only the job they didn’t have in the first place.Tom proffers the perfect answer to clinch any interview and armed with their new found wisdom, Vinny and Dave down the pints and swiftly move onto telling lies..... big lies, lies that somehow pay off….
Suddenly Dave and Vinny are "living the dream". Right up until the first lie starts to unravel, then the next….then the next...
Situations Vacant is a contemporary comedy where three guys have to realise that their happiness depends on living life by their terms and no-one else’s.
The behind-the-camera talent includes director of photography Nuria Roldos (Peacefire, Pride and Joy) Art Director Anna Kirwin (Nollaig Shona), editor Paul Mullen(Once), hair and make-up designer Isable Perez (“Our Wonderful Home), costume designer Clodagh Deegan (What did you do that for Helen, casting director Louise Kiely (32a, Frankie), sound recordist Paddy Hanlon (8.5 hours, Strange Days )The film also features music composed by Tim O’ Donovan performed by Neosupervital.
‘A furiously, frantic shoot over only 18 days was all worth it as Situations Vacant is a vibrant, enjoyable audience pleaser, a very original take on one man’s quest to find a job’ says producer AnneMarie Naughton.
The film is produced by AnneMarie Naughton, (The Wednesdays, Tara Road) with Michael Garland, Paul Donovan and Richard Mulcahy as executive producers.
Situations Vacant is a Grand Pictures Productions in association with Park Films.
Directing a film with very little money presents many challenges. But in many ways, having very little money can also be very liberating. You need to be open minded and supremely creative with the funds you have as does everyone else who decides to make that film with you.
first read Steven Murray’s script for ‘Situations Vacant’ in December 2006. At that time the film was called ‘Next!”. I instantly liked it – it was funny, very funny in places and the main characters were endearing and engaging - a virtue that was surprisingly absent from many other scripts I had read. Dave Bracken, the main character, reminded me of myself when I was nineteen thinking I could do anything, be anything, but totally unaware of how naive I really was about life and all the curve balls it was about to throw at me.
So, I immediately engaged with the script on a personal level, which is vital for a director who is about to devote a considerable portion of the next three years of their life bringing their vision of a story to the screen.
By December 2007, the script had been in development for a year with Steven Murray, the writer, a script editor, myself, Exec Producer Michael Garland and Co-producer Ailish McElmeel at Grand Pictures (Spin the Bottle, Paths to freedom, Wide Open Spaces, The Race) and although it still needed work, we felt that it was close to being ready to go into production. Now, where were we going to find the money to do that? It’s horrendously difficult raising finance to make a film and even more so when you’re film has no stars and is going to be directed by a first time feature director (that’s me) and is written by a first time writer. But I felt that we had something that was really worth making, that would entertain an audience, make them laugh and in the end send them home smiling – no mean feat when it comes to giving the public something for their money. The script was consistently funny yet there was also a very sweet and charming story there of a few ordinary blokes trying to find love and work and facing all the challenges that go with those two things that we all aspire to having.
By January 2008 Grand Pictures had two hundred thousand to invest in a project. In film financing terms this amount of money is peanuts and I spent many days and weeks pondering whether as a director I could pull it off. Having worked as a First Assistant Director on many films in the past (The Run of the Country; This is my Father; Family; Young Indiana Jones etc.) I know exactly how long it can take to shoot a film – how long it takes to set up the equipment, to move from one location to another; all the practical details that are involved in actually getting the script down on film. We did a shooting schedule. We could shoot for a maximum of three weeks – eighteen days in total. That meant that if the final film was to be ninety minutes long (the average length of a feature film) we would be shooting roughly five minutes of screen time a day. Not bad, I felt.
However, there were many other obstacles to be considered. The script had 40 speaking parts and about 42 locations, which is a lot of both of those things when you have very little money. There was also a big finale set piece in a conference centre with hundreds of extras, which would take at least two days to shoot. The crew and cast would all have to be paid (naturally) but they couldn’t be paid their normal rates. Whoever ended up on board as the producer would have a lot of hard battles but again, when you have very little money, you can be creative and offer other incentives i.e. cast actors who are keen but have little experience (lack of experience doesn’t mean lack of talent) and crew who can be upgraded to more senior positions to gain valuable experience– something all of them would desire.
I also had to consider my own position. Could I afford to immerse myself in something that was going to take up so much of my time for no money? Only if I could secure a paying job further down the line (like us all, much as I would do anything for my ‘art’, I still have to eat.)
I waited things out for another couple of weeks. When a TV drama offer came in for later in the year I accepted and once I knew that some income would be coming my way from that project I decided that for my part as director, I could now make “Situations Vacant” for the amount of money we had and that we should do it and we should do it now.
I spoke to Grand and told them that, provided we got the right people on board who had the same enthusiasm for the script, we could make this film for the amount of money and time we had. They agreed that we should go for it. This was mid February and we decided that we would start shooting on April 19th. We had about nine weeks to prep the film, to find a producer, cast, crew, locations and the other million things that would be required to get the film made.
It was madness really.
Once the decision was made to go for it, we needed, as a matter of urgency, to find a producer. Michael Garland, from Grand Pictures contacted AnneMarie Naughton (The Fading Light, The Wednesdays, The Martyr’s Crown), persuaded her to read the script and then somehow persuaded her to take on the job. Naturally she had big reservations – this was a hugely ambitious undertaking; if it all went belly up we had our reputations to think of not to mention the potential mess we could end up in. We developed a quick understanding – if I could fulfil my part of the bargain whilst being flexible with what she could provide for the money we had, then she could fulfil her part of the bargain. A director makes many demands, but I would have to be hugely flexible in relation to every aspect of the film. If we couldn’t afford something I simply couldn’t have it. A deal was made.
The ball was rolling and it was already gathering speed.
The next thing I needed to do was start casting. Once a project gets to this stage it really comes alive for me. Up until this point I’ve just been dealing with words, notions, fleeting images, colours and shots in my head. I don’t know what the characters are going to look like or how they will sound before I start to cast and I try not to get too many fixed ideas before I meet any actors. The six main leads were all between nineteen and twenty-six so I was hoping there will be lots of new talent for me to see especially for the nineteen year olds. Louise Kiely (32A, Frankie, The Race) was the casting director and brought an infectious enthusiasm to her role and to the project as a whole, as I discovered, did most people who ended up working on the film. I wanted to see as many actors as I could and although we had little money to offer, Louise ended up organising about four hundred actors who auditioned for the many roles. Working with actors is one of the most thrilling and challenging parts of my job so as soon as auditions began and I was working with real people, I had started directing and I was in my element.
We auditioned for a total of six days, improvising, creating scenes, dumping scenes and by the end of it we pretty much had our ensemble. Some were indeed very inexperienced but for others working on screen was familiar territory. Many of the characters appear in only one scene in the film but for me each of these day players was as crucial to the success of the film as the lead actors.
By the time we were four weeks away from shooting, prep for the producer and her production team was in full swing. Every day deals with crew or equipment providers would be struck and every day deals would fall through but as each day passed some things would stick and although we seemed at times to take ten steps backwards there was always two or three forwards so we bent our heads and ploughed on through praying that things would be alright in the end.
To add to all the mania we were still working on the script.
I met the location manager Brendan O’Sullivan four weeks before the shoot began. His was going to be a hideous job – forty locations with a paltry sum of money to secure them and pay for all the additional costs that arise when you shoot on other people’s property. He had just found out his budget before we met and as he actually appeared for our meeting I took that as a vote of confidence and a sign that he was taking the job. He would have no helpers to scout or wipe his furrowed brow. Just him. He and I and Nuria Roldos, the director of Photography (Peacefire) would have to be very inventive with where we would shoot. We had essentially no lighting kit so would have to be very mindful of natural daylight or using existing interior lights at locations and as moving from one location to another can really eat into your tiny amount of shooting time we would have to find multiple sets at as many locations as possible and each would have to look different from the last.
I still don’t quite know how Brendan pulled it off but I suspect it was by the use of sheer brass neck, friends and family connections (including my own house) and bargaining location owners down to a miniscule fee, we got what we wanted and in many locations, far more than we could possibly have hoped for.
For the last two weeks of prep, I spent my days in a cavernous scout hall in Harold’s Cross. Each morning I rehearsed with the actors. The space was freezing but perfect in a kind of ‘you’re-in-the-scouts-now-so-make-do’ sort of way. The afternoons were spent on recces, doing costume fittings, looking over props, shot listing, making script changes or occasionally marvelling over how we had managed to get this far.
I’m sure if I had spent any time in our production office I would have discovered the reality of how difficult it was from production’s point of view to pull the whole thing together. AnneMarie, the producer, and I spoke several times a day mostly to exchange good news if we had it or bad news if she had it but if there were real difficulties going on behind the scenes (which I’m sure there were,) she generally didn’t tell me.
Two days before we started shooting we delivered the final script.
We began shooting on a Saturday, as the location we were using on was only available that day. I walked to work – no cab fares on this job. It was a beautiful morning as I teetered between horrible nausea and extreme happiness.
The old boxing adage “train hard, fight easy” springs to mind. All the hard work of the last nine weeks started to pay off. I’d never say it was easy…two days off in three weeks, never ever having enough time and resources….but somehow, thanks to a fantastic cast, crew, production team and warm sausage sandwiches cooked up every morning by our enterprising driver Alec, we got through the schedule. By the last two days of the shoot we had come to our final sequence of the film. Our Conference centre turned out to be the ballroom in the Burlington Hotel and our hundreds of extras turned into fifty sharp-suited would-be job seekers of all nationalities who pretty much turned up out of curiosity but they, like everyone else who touched this project, did Trojan work. It’s amazing how, through clever shooting, fifty people can suddenly fill a capacious ballroom.
Each day during the shoot, Paul Mullen, our editor, (Once, Zonad, Satellites and Meteorites) was assembling the rushes. We would talk at lunchtime every day or more like I would talk to Paul as if there were no problems to report Paul said little. It was all coming together nicely and so, after a couple of days of gentle pleasantries between us, I stopped calling and waited for him to come to me. Lunchtimes were precious given the long shooting day and pressurised situations.
We edited for four weeks and like the shoot, this process passed in a surreally calm and problem-free fashion. Of course there were tricky parts and scenes that ended up on the floor but by the end of the four weeks the film, although by no means finished, was in a pretty good state.
I then went off to my television drama to earn some bucks.
In September we held a test screening for an audience most of whom represented the age group the film is aimed at – 15 to 35 years olds. They were all strangers to us, plucked from cafes and passers by from the street. We screened the film and gave them each a detailed questionnaire to fill out. Given the film’s unfinished state, the response was overwhelmingly good and the feedback was invaluable. We edited for another two weeks during which time we placed all the music that composer Tim O’Donovan (Neosupervital) had been working on during the three month break in the edit.
We then did our sound mix and our online edit to complete the film. It was only at this final stage on the last hour on the last day that we finally decided on the name. For two years we had argued back and forth about the original title ‘Next!” I could understand how it had meant so much to the writer but to an audience who knew nothing about the story the title said nothing so after many suggestions from many quarters ‘Situations Vacant’ was proffered and it stuck.
It was mid November 2008 and we finally had our film hot out of the oven and ready for consumption.
In January 2009 we screened it for cast, crew, some friends and a few others who might be interested in its’ potential. They loved it and after eleven months it’s finally out there.
Three years in the making – mere milliseconds in the world of film.