Kevin Sampson Talks Awaydays

28 September 2009

0Comments | Comment on this Article

Despite penning Awaydays back in 1998 it has taken over ten years to finally get the book adapted for the big screen. But after a string of studios being interested in the novel writer Kevin Sampson decided to make the movie himself.

With filmmaker Pat Holden on board Sampson penned the script and Awaydays made it to the big screen earlier this year.

About to be released on DVD I caught up with Kevin to talk about the book to film process, his involvement and what lies ahead for the writer.

- Ok so your book Awaydays has been made into a movie can you tell me a bit about it?

Well Awaydays is the story, primarily the story, of Paul Carty who is a seventeen year old lad still coming to terms with the death of his mother. He is searching for identity really and identifies with her strong working class character and drifts into a friendship with the enigmatic Elvis and through him he becomes obsessed with a gang that he belongs to called The Pack.

So against this backdrop of gang life and his strange aspiration to want to be part of the Pack, Carty strongly identifies with them, we have Elvis' yearning to get out and go and see the world, he's a suppressed bohemian.

So the two of them are constantly struggling with each other to be what the other person wants them to be with an emotional ending to all of that. It's all set to the early days of what we now know as football casual, the idea of young lads going to the football but wanting to look good, and it's got a belting post punk soundtrack.

- So did the film come about?

Well ultimately it came about because me an my partner in the production company Dave Hughes went and raised the money ourselves, we have been trying to get it made through more traditional methods of approaching the Film Council and film financiers to little avail. So we set up and EIS, it's a government scheme to really stimulate the arts across the board, raised the money and set about casting it and made it ourselves.

This was just about a year ago so it's just about to come out on DVD as it has had its release in the cinemas earlier this year to a pretty good reception and good reviews so it's all systems go for the DVD.

- You worked on the film script so how faithful did you keep the adaptation and how comfortable were you with any changes that had to be made?

It's very very faithful to the novel, certainly to the sentiment and the heartbeat of the novel, inevitably you have to make changes in the novel it's in the first person, it's seen purely through Carty's eyes, so I saw the film version as a liberating thing really as it gave me the opportunity to tell the story through more than one person's eyes.

There were a few things that I was really really to have to let go; there's one scene that follows Elvis' gradual emotional decline and there's a scene were there is Morris dancers on the run up to Christmas and he causes havoc and attacks the Morris dancers, but we made the film on a very modest budget and a set piece like that would really have to punch it's weight to justify the cost so that had to go.

The Doctor who scene also had to go but apart from that I 'm extremely happy with the finished result and it's certainly very faithful to the novel. 

- How important was it for you to be part of the book to screen process?

Ultimately very important, the book came out about ten years ago, and during that period I has pretty much always been under option in that there has always been a film company interested in making it.

It was a learning curve for me and it was a close call a couple of times I had seen what some of the film company’s ideas of how the film might turn out and it was really scary because it was an arms length of how I had always envisioned it. When the opportunity came to get the rights back and make the film ourselves we grabbed it and did it as true to my own version as we could do.

- What was you relationship with director Pat Holden like? And how similar were both your visions for the film?

My relationship with Pat is brilliant, part of the process of finding a director is all about sharing a sensibility, and before Pat was offered the job, that came about several sessions, many many cups of coffee and long and intensive chats about what the real pulse of the novel was about and how he would interpret the film, I have always been very comfortable to leave Pat to the actual day to day directing side of it, and he has made a great job of it.

0Comments | Be the first to comment!