Page 22 - Fujifilm Exposure_8 Wildlife John Downer_ok

GREEK
GREEK
ODYSSEY
ODYSSEY
Martin Dunkerton turns a true life tale of teenage excess on sun-soaked Greek islands
into his first full-length feature film.
Four years ago Martin Dunkerton was just another alcohol soaked Brit, enjoy- ing the sun, sea and whatever else he could find on the idyllic Greek island of Paros. But he was a little older and cer- tainly much wiser than the callow teenager who embarked on his first “lads holiday” when, aged 35, he returned to the scene of his greatest triumphs and noisiest disas- ters last summer. The result is the ensemble film Brothers, focusing on the adventures of six Britons and a New Zealander.
“I think you get to a certain point in your life when you go on these lads holidays,” he muses thoughtfully, “where you can only go for so much shagging, drinking and having a laugh with your mates. Towards the end I was on more of a spiri- tual quest anyway. I was asking myself why the lads were acting the way they did.
“I’m one of them, yet I can see a bit more clearly than they can, and in recording those ideas you start getting a bit more insight into male behaviour which I knew instinctively would make a brilliant screenplay. Naturally it deals in the truths about men. We’re so complicated, we’re basically destroying the world and ourselves, yet we don’t ever seem to question who we are. If we go back to who we are, we understand something about men. We pull back some of the layers, and hopefully get to some kernel of truth.”
Writing his screenplay over a period of four years, Dunkerton and his producers Julian Dunkerton, Joanna Garvin and Nick Valentine have followed an unusual course in bringing their movie to the screen.
Raising a budget through private investors comprising fifty individuals and organisations, they arranged deals with top companies like Fuji, Panavision and Technicolor before embarking on a challenging location shoot over five weeks in the Greek islands.
“Getting such a great deal with the Fuji stock helped enormously,” adds producer Garvin. “If we
hadn’t had that we probably wouldn’t have shot it on 35mm. That had a knock on effect for us, with Panavision who gave us an amazing deal, and Technicolor too. And AFM were brilliant with the lighting as well.”
“Then,” Dunkerton continues, “we got crew who’d worked on movies like Cliffhanger, The Spice Girls movie, The Avengers, Aliens - a first class team. They all read the screenplay, and once they read that they wanted to come on board.”
“A lot of the crew brought other crew mem- bers on to this film,” Garvin says, “even though they normally would have got a lot more money, because they said things like ‘I turned down The Full Monty, and I don’t want to miss an opportuni- ty on the next big British film.’”
Setting off for Paros with a full cast and crew, there must have been an element of familiarity for Martin Dunkerton and those few among them who had similar experiences. But the closest he came to previous adventures was feeling bleary eyed in the mornings - this time through the pressure of long hours rather than alcohol.
“It started off like that,” he laughs, “really mad, getting no sleep and being constantly on set. At first I felt this there was a real sense of dejà vu
with the place too, but I suddenly realised I hardly knew any of the island at all because when I was with the lads we always stayed in the same place. Our location manager took us to parts of the island that looked like God had sculpted them with his own hands.
“It was quite beautiful, with a bright blue sea and white beaches in these coves - and the stock really does justice to the beauty of it all! I thought ‘my God!’ I never even knew these places existed when I went there as a tourist. We’d always go to one beach, one bar and one club when we were on holiday, because there were different girls there every night. We were kings of our bar.”
Photos: above left: Martin Dunkerton with Joanna Garvin; facing page bottom: with Editor John Grover of Brothers
EXPOSURE • 22 & 23