Dr. Easy from Shynola on Vimeo.
Download the eBook of The Red Men from Amazon UK.
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Dr Easy and the police
Tom Hollander, Geraldine James and Alex McQueen star, and the film was shot by Barry Ackroyd, cinematographer on The Hurt Locker and many Ken Loach films from Ladybird, Ladybird to Looking for Eric.
Shynola are working with visual effects studio Jellyfish to bring to life the robot of the title, Dr Easy. In the book, Dr Easy is tall and light, the bodies fairly disposable and a mere casing for an intelligence that exists in the cloud.
Dr Easy descending stairs
The first publicity still from Shynola’s short film ‘Dr Easy’ features star Tom Hollander.
From The Red Men:
The room was dingy. A dirty single bed. A Baby Belling oven on a peeling melamine surface. A microwave. A stereo. A half unpacked suitcase. Michael Michael was crouched in the corner. His shirt was slick with blood. At the sight of the robot, he gurgled and gesticulated with the handgun.
‘He has a bullet wound to the mouth,’ observed Dr Easy. ‘And there is an overpowering smell of petrol in here.’
‘Ask him what he wants,’ ordered the police captain.
‘He can’t speak,’ said the robot. ‘The sniper shot him in the tongue.’
‘Can he write it down?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I know what he wants.’
Dr Easy moved forward to comfort the injured man.
Michael Michael made a gesture that was like Atlas trying to shake some sense into the world.
Anna Higgs at Film 4.0 has announced that Shnyola’s short film ‘Dr Easy’, which is taken from the universe of ‘The Red Men’, will be released online March 2013. The action of the film follows the first chapter of The Red Men: a siege in a rundown flat in Hackney that is resolved by the arrival of the robot, Dr Easy. It features Tom Hollander.
See also the Film4 blog:
and Warp’s page on the film.
and Shynola’s online production diary, TheRedMen. The film is shot, edited and currently having the VFX put together.
From The Red Men novel:
The siege house was a Victorian terrace carved up into bedsits. Six doorbells clustered beside the shattered front door. Dr Easy went inside. On the screens, we watched the robot’s slow progress up the staircase. Its inner monologue came through the monitors. It could already smell Michael Michael. He was giving off waves of fear hormones, the stink of a wounded and hunted animal. The robot crept up a tilted cobwebbed staircase until it came to an unlocked door. The gentlest pressure from the robot’s paw swung it back on its hinges.
The room was dingy. A dirty single bed. A Baby Belling oven on a peeling melamine surface. A microwave. A stereo. A half unpacked suitcase. Michael Michael was crouched in the corner. His shirt was slick with blood. At the sight of the robot, he gurgled and gesticulated with the handgun.
“He has a bullet wound to the mouth,” observed Dr Easy. “And there is an overpowering smell of petrol in here.”
At Cannes Film Festival, Warp Films announced that The Red Men is one of their projects in development, directed by Shynola. (The film might be called “Redmen”). Indiewire cover the story in depth here.
Fingers crossed.
I met Shynola in the bar of the Phoenix on Charing Cross Road to pick up a copy of their script for The Red Men, delivered within a wrapper embossed with their redesign of the Monad logo. Everything within that wrapper was new to me, as I had no part in the process of turning my novel into a script.
Shynola and Matthew De Abaitua (far right) with the script of The Red Men
A script is so changeable. Who doesn’t have notes for the scriptwriter? The form is provisional, built for redrafting, tearing apart, trimming, expanding. Alongside every script, there are shadow scripts, plotlines not chosen, characters deleted; every script has its doppleganger; every script has its Red Man.
A fake trailer from Shynola, part of their on-going online mood board for The Red Men adaptation, to be found at A Whole New You.
Many years ago I wrote and presented a series of documentaries about British Science Fiction, called SF:UK.
It was a low budget affair, and most of my assertions don’t hold up, but nonetheless we snagged a few giants, such as our interview with the late Nigel Kneale, creator of Quatermass and The Year of the Sex Olympics, which opens the show.
I would love to remake the Year of the Sex Olympics for 2012. Enjoy.