Good Vibrations, the Belfast-made biopic of Belfast punk provocateur Terri Hooley, is in the running for a Bafta. David Roy spoke to first-time screenwriters Glenn Patterson and Colin Carberry about their nomination for Outstanding Debut
P UNK was about the freedom of 'doing it yourself', the liberation of just 'having a go' regardless of your ability or the opinions of others.
As everyone who's seen the acclaimed movie Good Vibrations now knows, Terri Hooley was punk before he'd ever even heard the term.
People thought the righteously anti-sectarian music-lover was crazy (or at least even crazier than usual) for opening a record shop in Belfast during the Troubles, on a street then known as 'Bomb Alley'.
The dramatic story of what happened next - his record label, Teenage Kicks, The Outcasts, Rudi and all the rest - helped make Good Vibrations one of last year's best feel-good movies.
Featuring a dynamite lead performance by Lisburn-born actor Richard Dormer as Hooley, the film is a rags-to-rags romp of defiant drink-fuelled dreaming and financial foolhardiness set to a killer soundtrack.
Given the punk milieu of their movie, it's fitting that writers Glenn Patterson and Colin Carberry had never penned a screenplay before.
Now, the Belfast pair are contenders to scoop Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer at the British Academy of Film and Theatre Awards (Baftas) tomorrow night.
Previous winners include Paddy Considine (Tyrannosaur), Chris Morris (Four Lions) and Duncan Jones (Moon). "It's great but it was very unexpected," says Patterson.
The acclaimed Belfast novelist is being literal here: the writers learned about their Bafta nod while Colin Carberry was perusing the BBC website for the previous night's football results. Regardless of whether they win tomorrow night, Patterson (53) is incredibly proud of the film he and Carberry first began work on many years ago.
The germ of Good Vibrations was cultivated back in the late 1990s, following a night spent listening to Terri Hooley hold forth in The Crown Bar, just up Great Victoria Street from where his world-famous shop once stood. "We always felt Terri's life could make a good film," says Patterson of the movie's long gestation. "But there had to be certain conditions for it to happen. Firstly, Terri had to be absolutely happy with it."
Journalist and writer Colin Carberry (38), a graduate of Queen's University Belfast, teamed up with his old creative-writing lecturer Patterson for the project. "Our initial charge at it was back in the late 1990s but it turned out that Terri didn't want to do it back then," says Carberry. "I'd say the actual writing took two-and-a-half to three years, with a big gap of about 10 years in the middle where we didn't do anything." "We'd been talking to various people but I don't think Terri really trusted any of them," recalls Patterson of those early days. "But I also think maybe it was just a time of life thing. Terri wasn't ready to have a film made about him."
Happily, a few years on from this temporary lull, Belfast had established itself as a place where films actually got made.
Not only that, a few of Hooley's old mates had become extremely successful in the meantime, as Patterson explains. He says: "His old friend David Holmes got involved. Also Johnny Quinn from Snow Patrol, who'd actually been in a band with Terri and worked in Good
Vibrations. "The fact we could do it here in Belfast and with people who Terri knew was very important for him. "Johnny and Gary Lightbody were the ones who actually rattled the cage again."
Now all they needed was a script. "Gary called me out of the blue, clearly assuming that we'd written a finished one - which we hadn't," Carberry recalls. "At this point Snow Patrol were kings of the world and Gary had all these contacts in the film industry he wanted to use. "So, Glenn and I did what anyone in that situation would do - basically, we s**t ourselves."
A decade-old two-page treatment for Good Vibrations was quickly excavated from one of Patterson's old hard-drives. Desperate not to embarrass themselves, the first-time screenwriter- indies turned to a friend for help. "I'd known Lisa Baros D'sa for years," Carberry explains of the film's eventual co-director. "Lisa had an MA in scriptwriting, so I emailed her to ask her to cast her eye over what we had - and to tell me whether it was shameful. "Within two days, she came back to say that she, her partner Glen Leyburn and David Holmes had started their own production company and would love to make the film. "So it was kismet. It was just meant to happen when it did."
With creative trust and some Snow Patrol-sourced cash in place, one of Belfast's great storytellers finally had his own remarkable and at times painfully honest tale told in glorious period-tinged Technicolor. "Obviously, there's a danger of your glasses being too rose-tinted when you look at someone's life - or too dark," offers Patterson. "You just have to try hard to stay true to the real person." "Hero" is the exact word he uses to describe Hooley, referencing a story the Good Vibrations founder used to recount about annoying Paul Weller by keeping The Jam off the top of the indie single charts.
The song, Hooley's cover of Sonny Bono's Laugh At Me, is featured to rousing effect in Good Vibrations' climactic concert scene. "Apparently, the single actually made a fair bit of money," reveals Patterson. "Terri didn't know what to do with it so, because it was just before Christmas, he gave it to Barnardo's. "For any other person, that bit of the story would have been the entire point - but he only actually told me the end of it after we'd finished the film. "It really reminded me Terri actually is a hero."
As for that Bafta nomination, Colin Carberry says the pair are delighted on behalf of everyone who worked on Good Vibrations. "I'm delighted - but really we were very lucky with this film," he enthuses. "In a way, we couldn't have failed. "It's such a great story and the songs are so brilliant that we'd have had to have been really cack-handed to screw it up. "The Bafta nomination is really for everyone involved in the film, not just us."
*The 2014 Bafta Awards will be screened on Sunday night on BBC 1. Good Vibrations is available on DVD now.