Noboy dies – nobody gets hurt.
Academy Award winning director James Marsh being interviewed says .. ‘Oh, the troubles in Northern Ireland! Isn’t that an exhausting and slightly depressing area to be thinking about?’ But here there was this great universal premise, this impossible bargain that’s being forced on the main character in the first act of the film.
SHADOW DANCER originated as a novel, written by Tom Bradby during his time as a TV correspondent in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. Tom Bradby adapted his novel for the big screen and SHADOW DANCER is his first feature film.SHADOW DANCER is the new film from Academy Award winning director James Marsh (Man on Wire, Red Riding, Project Nim) starring Andrea Riseborough (W.E, Made in Dagenham), Academy Award® nominee and Golden Globe winner Clive Owen and Emmy, Golden Globe, and SAG award-winning actress, Gillian Anderson.
Single mother Collette McVeigh (Andrea Riseborough) is a Republican living in Belfast with her mother and hardliner IRA brothers. When she is arrested for her part in an aborted IRA bomb plot in London, an MI5 officer Mac (Clive Owen) offers her a choice: lose everything and go to prison for 25 years or return to Belfast to spy on her own family. With her son’s life in her hands, Collette chooses to place her trust in Mac and return home, but when her brothers’ secret operation is ambushed, suspicions of an informant are raised and Collette finds both herself and her family in grave danger.
SHADOW DANCER will be released by Paramount Pictures on August 25, 2012.
James Marsh’s IRA-era morality tale Shadow Dancer is garnering rave reviews for its balanced depiction of conflicted people.
British-born director James Marsh is a humanist with a strong political bent. A fan of the work of British director Alan Clarke, he moves effortlessly between fiction and documentary filmmaking. With his Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man On Wire, about Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Centre’s twin towers, and last year’s Sundance Grand prize-winner Project Nim, about a chimp raised to be human, he has created heartfelt dramatic stories out of incredible real events.
His non-documentary features have met with less success. Interestingly, though, 1999’sThe King, his deeply personal tale about religious fanaticism (starring William Hurt and Gael Garcia Bernal), did well here.
“In South Korea, Albania and Australia it found an audience—so go figure!” the 49-year-old notes wryly. “Otherwise The King for my career was a spectacular self-defeat and I was unemployable after that. I couldn’t get anything going at all so I then went back to documentaries.”
After living in New York for 14 years Marsh (pictured, left) moved to Copenhagen three and half years ago, just after the US release of Man On Wire. “My wife is Danish and we have children so it’s a nice place for them to grow up basically.” He now spends half his time working on the other side of the English Channel.
“When I went back to the UK on the back of Man on Wire I actually found myself in a very comfortable position of being able to work regularly,” he explains, “because there are still many different ways films can be financed there.” In quick succession he made Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980, Project Nim and Shadow Dancer, a Belfast-based drama that was shot in Dublin and London last year. “I’ve been making up for lost time,” Marsh quips.
Set in Northern Ireland during a tense transitional period in the country’s history, Shadow Dancer represents Marsh’s best fictional dramatic feature to date. Tom Bradby, a television correspondent during Northern Ireland’s turmoil, adapted the screenplay from his novel. It focuses on the dilemma of Collette McVeigh (Andrea Riseborough) who followed the family tradition of joining the IRA after watching her younger brother being shot dead in 1973. Most of the film takes place in the ’90s when as a single mother she must either become an informant for Clive Owen’s MI5 detective or lose her son and be sent to prison for 25 years.
Marsh: “I get sent lot screenplays and almost didn’t read this one. ‘Oh, the troubles in Northern Ireland! Isn’t that an exhausting and slightly depressing area to be thinking about?’ But here there was this great universal premise, this impossible bargain that’s being forced on the main character in the first act of the film. It just really spoke to me—the idea of betraying your family, your ideals, your views, your traditions and being forced to do that in order to be a mother. It’s the kind of conflict that allows people to become psychologically involved. It’s a very interesting starting point and I like the surprises in the story. I like watching movies where you don’t know where it’s going.”