Pulling no punches

Published on Wednesday 16 July 2008 20:35

DONKEY PUNCH is the most controversial British film since Trainspotting, with a view of humanity almost as low as its £1 million budget. A slick, chillingly brutal horror-thriller, it concerns four posh boys and three up-for-it northern girls who get together on a luxury yacht off Majorca to take drugs and film themselves having group sex.

Female commentators and tabloid newspapers have already expressed outrage at the film, which had its premiere in London on Tuesday. The only recognisable star in the young and attractive cast, Jaime Winstone, has been compelled in interviews to defend the film's "out there" orgy scene and its depiction of raunchy ladettes who are punished for their sexual licence.

So it might be something of a surprise to find that Oliver (Olly) Blackburn, who directed and co-wrote this nastily effective slice of celluloid, is a nice, polite, Westminster and Oxford-educated middle-class boy. More surprising still, he is unapologetic about the film's themes and its visceral scenes of sex and death.

"It is meant to be a provocative film, to deal with things you wouldn't talk about at a dinner party," says Blackburn, 36. "I'd never heard of a 'donkey punch' until my co-writer David Bloom told me about it but when we looked into it we realised it was this big urban myth, referenced in rap songs and a certain type of porn film.

"We also have the phenomenon now of the sex tape on the internet, the newspaper stories of footballers filming each other having sex. Everything in the film is rooted in reality – those boys could have been crewing that boat and they could easily have met those girls in Majorca. We just took the stuff that's out there and made it into a story." More than that, he set out to make a film that would be cheap, controversial and commercial, all in one.

In the mid-1990s, Olly, the son of property lawyer David Blackburn and his art curator wife, Jan, won a Fulbright scholarship to study film-making at New York University, then began a promising career directing music videos and commercials back in Britain, before moving into scriptwriting. Becoming depressed after years of "writing and rewriting stuff and none of it being made", he started looking for a a story that would be visually and narratively arresting but cost less than 1 million to film, with which he could make his feature-directing debut. "It's very hard to make a first film," says Blackburn, "but one of the ways to do it is to come up with a very smart concept for a 'genre' film that can be contained in one location and doesn't need too many characters."

Then, in January 2007, his old friend, David Bloom, a former ad-man and comedian turned screenwriter, returned from an off-season holiday in the South of France. He told tales of gangs of young British men hired as crew then left to run riot on luxury yachts – and also of a stag do he'd attended where competitive tales of sexual excess culminated in one man bragging about 'donkey-punching' a girl – a sadistic act supposedly performed by a man to heighten his own pleasures. "This tied into a lot of shared thoughts David and I had about the way aspects of our culture have accelerated," says Blackburn. "The stories about footballers, and people putting sex videos on YouTube."

Since he and Bloom "came of age in the rave era, which was pretty full-on", they also knew how casual attitudes among the young are about drug-taking. Within a month they had roughed out a script. This is where digital film studio Warp X comes in. The Sheffield-based outfit grew out of a successful independent record label and made its name in cinema circles by producing Shane Meadows's Dead Men's Shoes and This Is England. Last year, Warp X was given 4.5 million by funding bodies including the Film Council and FilmFour to produce a slate of low-budget British movies. Donkey Punch was commissioned as the second film of six to be produced over a year: the first was A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, a confessional documentary about director Chris Waitt's sad love life, which was a recent critical hit.

"I think the Warp X model is great," says Blackburn. "You shoot on high definition video not film, which keeps the costs down. If you can come up with a story that will sell itself, there is no pressure to cast 'marquee' names, so we got exactly the cast we wanted. They pay you a fee, which is not huge, but you end up owning a certain portion of the film, which is uncommon."

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Blackburn is not exaggerating about the hardships he and the crew underwent. "It seemed such a simple idea: they're stuck on this boat," he says. "Of course, the first rule of film-making is, do not shoot on water. It complicates matters in ways you cannot imagine." He ticks them off. There are tides, the weather, safety issues, cramped conditions. On the first day out, the boat's motors packed up, causing half-a-day's delay in the very tight, 24-day shooting schedule. When filming a swimming scene, half the crew had to be on the boat, and half in the water, and they had to shout to communicate. And all this was taking place in freezing temperatures, as South Africa was standing in, for cost reasons, for Majorca.

"The swimming scene looks so simple and beautiful but we had to pull the actors out in the end because they were entering hypothermic states," says Blackburn. "Also, the boat itself cost four times the film's budget, and we were often shooting until 5am, setting people on fire, hanging people, with Jaime Winstone doing her own stunts. The insurance company was freaking out." Then there was the emotional cost to the actors, too. Five of them, including Winstone and screen newcomer Sian Breckin, take part in a sex scene shocking not so much for its explicitness as for its sense of things spiralling out of control.

The eponymous sex act is followed by a series of increasingly violent acts that seem to enforce the horror cliche that sexually active women will be bloodily punished. Blackburn is unapologetic. "If you set out to make a comedy and no one laughs, you have failed," he says. "When you make a thriller or horror film, you have to frighten people, to confront them with stuff that makes them feel uncomfortable." He points out that the women are initially in control of the orgy and that "the men are punished for being sexually active, too – it's equal opportunities". Every character takes drugs. "I'll probably get loads of stick for this, but doing half an E is not that big a deal to this generation," says Blackburn. He also makes a convincing case for the characters being more socially realistic than in your average horror thriller, and less compartmentalised by class than in your average British film. But he admits Donkey Punch was hard on the cast.

"These are young actors who, having connected with the characters, had to enter into states that were very challenging for them – they were undergoing real trauma," says Blackburn. "Because we were shooting with natural light, in cramped locations, at a frantic pace, we effectively shoved them onto the sets and just went. It was that realistic. In some ways I think it helped the performances. After the sex scene everyone was knackered. The last day of shooting was a 20-hour day and Nichola (Burley, who plays Tammy] was covered in blood, having had to act watching two people die. There came a point when we maxed her out – she was so deep in character she literally couldn't take any more. But that's low-budget film-making. We were all stretched to the limit."

So was the budget. A couple of days of reshoots in the Pinewood water tank – which really lift the film – cleaned out the coffers. "One day, right at the end, I was doing something technical (in the edit suite] and someone came through the door to tell me the money had run out, and literally shut us down," says Blackburn. "It was only the kindness of the people we were working with that day who let us stay on and finish up."

A good job they did. Donkey Punch is certain to draw fire for its misanthropy and aspects of its sexual politics. For the record, Blackburn's French girlfriend Valerie considered the original script "stupid" but the finished film "much better than she expected". And she's right.

It is smarter and more realistic than the average British thriller, tautly plotted and with some superlative creepy performances. Although one can detect Blackburn's influences – Michael Mann, David Fincher, Larry Clark – it has a visual style all its own and lives up to Blackburn's hope that it could "sit on a shelf alongside similar Hollywood films that cost 20 times as much".

When I ask what he's planning next, he mentions a couple of treatments he and Bloom are preparing for Warp X, and a script he co-wrote about a couple who lose a child in the Asian tsunami, which is being directed by France's Fabrice du Weltz. But he's too shrewd to slag off the thriller genre, having delivered so superior an example for so little cash.

"There's always the Donkey Punch sequel," he deadpans. "Or the prequel, 'Monkey Slap'."

&#149 Donkey Punch is released tomorrow

FILMS THAT ENRAGED THE FEMINISTS

Grease, 1978

IT all starts off fairly well, but the final scenes in which Olivia Newton-John ditches her old persona, takes up smoking and changes into a skintight catsuit and platforms in order to lure John Travolta leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. Evidently she believes he can only accept her if she becomes a completely different person.

Pretty Woman, 1990

PRETTY WOMAN's message is Pretty Tiresome. Beautiful, happy hooker falls for rich man who showers her with gifts. The only way for her to escape her life as a prostitute? To be "saved" by a rich man. Basically, it's Cinderella in thigh-high boots.

Hostel II, 2007

THE 'torture porn' genre has taken off over the past five years. Horror films featuring beautiful women being tortured have become mainstream, with the Saw and Hostel series being among the worst offenders. Hostel II, below was particularly vile, featuring a woman being strung up and having her throat slit before the blood was rubbed on her breasts.

Teeth, 2008

THE response to this film – in which a young woman, Dawn, finds that she has teeth in her vagina, which come in handy when she's raped – has been mixed. The director has said that we live in a world where "women are raped, forcibly circumcised, so maybe Dawn is an example of nature adapting to this male-dominated world". However the fact that in order for Dawn to defend herself, she must be penetrated rather undermines this claim, suggest some feminists. They have also pointed out that the mechanism is involuntary, leaving her bewildered and disturbed.