Projects matching: Steve Barron

Synopsis

Mike Bassett comes out of retirement to help England's new German manager, but soon finds himself in the hot seat again.

Synopsis

When the England manager has a heart attack, football's top brass turn to Mike Bassett (basically no one else wanted the job). Bassett is the sort of old fashioned manager who writes his team on the back of his cigarette packet. Even with troubled football genius Tonka Tonkinson back from retirement and off the booze, England lose Mike's first two games in charge. His team struggle to a goal-less draw in the final qualifying match but, thanks to a fluke result elsewhere, England qualify for the finals in Brazil. In South America things go from bad to worse. The results are pathetic, the team captain is arrested and Tonka has a fling with a beautiful woman… who turns out to be a man. However, inspired by the words of Rudyard Kipling, Mike makes an impassioned plea for the country to get behind him - fans, press, players - even his wife. The rousing words stir the team… but even though they play the game of their lives, the scores are still level with five minutes remaining. Bassett makes his final, brave, and some would say stupid decision - to bring on Tonka. Fired up, Tonka comes off the bench to try to restore pride to the nation.

Synopsis

When producer Alison Owen first read the script for Rat, written by 65-year-old Irish writer Wesley Burrowes, she was convinced "it had been written by some post-modernist kid out of film school". An easy mistake to make given that the script she describes as a "Kafka comedy" is about a Guinness-loving man who comes home from the pub only to turn into a rat. "For me, the joke was never that a man turns into a rat, it was more the humorous potential of a clash of perspectives," says Burrowes. "You have an ordinary family to whom this tragic thing happens and the real comedy is in the way they receive it. They're immensely pragmatic, ordinary, decent people and suddenly this calamity occurs and they proceed to treat it as if it's just one of those domestic events that are upsetting... like woodworm in the furniture." Director Steve Barron signed on immediately, as did Stewart Till of Universal Pictures International. Production took place in Ireland in November 1999 with Imelda Staunton and Pete Postlethwaite in the key roles of wife and husband rat. Barron and Owen took the unusual decision to use real rather than animatronic rats. "Our film is sort of opposite to films like Stuart Little or Babe," Owen explains. "Whereas those films are all about the audience imbuing the animal with human characteristics, in Rat the characters are imbuing the rats with human personalities and the audience sees this as completely ridiculous." Rat premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in July to great audience acclaim.