Dublin director Garry Walsh on making the leap from documentary to comedy

Directors going from the world of documentaries to comedy may seem absurd, but there is precedent.

Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris shared some of the most depraved tales of the glam metal scene in the Decline of Western Civilisation series of films before turning her hand to comedy and in more recent times, Josh Greenbaum made the leap from documentary to absurd comedy with Strays.

Blanchardstown man Garry Walsh is in esteemed company with his debut film, Wickedly Evil.

Walsh has an impressive CV, with producer credits on the acclaimed documentary Older Than Ireland, the recent Richie Sadlier RTÉ series Let’s Talk About Sex, and is working with funnyman PJ Gallagher on a documentary series about mental health.

Producing documentaries may not seem like the traditional route to comedy direction, but Walsh said working in the world of documentary was the perfect proving ground.

“I wouldn’t say that I fell into documentary filmmaking,” he said, and noted that he and Older Than Ireland director Alex Fagen had pitched a scripted comedy series to RTÉ prior to the documentary.

While the series did not make it to air (“that’s always the way, most projects hit a wall at some stage,” he mused) the experience of being on a set and seeing the nuts and bolts of film production gave him the push needed to make a feature film.

“I figured a nice comedy horror would be a break from the hard documentary stuff I’ve been making,” he laughed.

The set-up for the film is simple; we see the aftermath of a job gone wrong, and the main characters hide out in the woods until the heat dies down.

Along the way, a comedy of errors results in the characters finding out they are not hardened Michael Mann-style crime geniuses, and more bumbling Coen Brothers dithering idiots.

Just when their luck couldn’t get any worse, a mysterious and evil presence starts lurking in the woods.

Writing the film was a family affair for Walsh, who wrote the film with his brother Bryan.

There is a loose, almost improvisational feel to proceedings, which Walsh said was a testament to the skills of the actors.

“We certainly didn’t have the time or money to go full David Fincher 100 takes to get them to say the dialogue the way I wanted them, but it really is a credit to the actors that the dialogue flows so naturally out of them,” he said.

In Wickedly Evil, there are numerous shots where the camera stays fixed in one position, or is nearly like an unseen character that is observing proceedings.

When asked if this was a stylistic choice or something borne out of budget, Walsh asserted it was the former.

While Walsh did cite the films of Sam Raimi and Edgar Wright as favourites of his, he made the deliberate choice to keep the viewer in the shot for as long as possible as opposed to the kinetic, frantic style of his favourites.

Walsh is well-versed in his love of horror, stating a preference for Wes Craven-style horror as opposed to the recent trend of A24 slow-burn psychological horror, and was eager to sink his teeth into something in the horror genre.“I’m not going to sit here and pretend what I made is even approaching anything like Tarantino or the films I watch, but it was great to have the experience – it was a tremendous learning curve.

The modesty of Walsh stems from his rather unusual route to directing, having grown up on a council estate in Blanchardstown, ran a chain of multiplex cinemas and like all good cinephiles, watches a film a day.

“I’m a proud Dublin man, I grew up here, I lived here, and the characters me and my brother write are based on the people we’ve encountered in our lives,” he said.

The horror genre is notable for being among the cheapest and relatively easiest to produce, but making the film was not without issue for Walsh.

“You could nearly make a documentary about the things that went wrong on this film, I might get around to making it someday.”

“Like Hearts Of Darkness?” we enquire.

“Yeah, not far off it,” he laughed.

“I can’t tell you the amount of things that went pear-shaped here, you probably wouldn’t even believe me if I told you!”

Shooting the film at the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic and shooting the film in a remote house in County Wicklow with poor electricity and no heating proved a challenge for Walsh and his crew, but he found the positive side of it.

“In the grand scheme of things, as hard as they are when you are in the middle of it, it is all worth it when you come out the other side.”

Securing the services of cinematographer Matthias Grunsky was a crucial part of the film according to Walsh, as Grunsky has experience shooting 15 feature films in the United States.

“Even getting Matthias to come over and do the movie for us was huge, and his experience was really vital. We were shooting in a remote cottage just outside of Gorey in Wexford in the dead of December, at night, with very little money and resources.”

Walsh and Grunsky spent a lot of time deliberating over the style and look of the film, and Walsh’s documentary background came into play when it came time to make financial decisions.

The film was privately funded (“we didn’t approach Screen Ireland or anything like that,” he noted) which resulted in Walsh having creative freedom that would not be afforded to him otherwise, but when the money was gone, it was gone.

“I’ve worked on bigger documentaries where to a certain extent, you can spend a bit of money to get yourself out of a hole and sometimes it’s good to have no resources and go ‘nobody is coming to save us, we have to figure this out on our own.’”

The film is due to receive a digital release, but Walsh is working on securing a small Irish cinema release.

“Once something is released digitally, it’s out there so it is harder to get cinemas on board. But at the end of the day, I’m a cinema man, I make my films for the cinema screen and there is no better feeling for a filmmaker than seeing your own work on a cinema screen.”

“I don’t care what kind of system or set-up you have at home, I don’t think it will ever replace the collective feeling of seeing something with a bunch of strangers.”

Wickedly Evil is available now on digital services via 101 Films.