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Death and the Making

Irish filmmaker Paul Duane is no stranger to extraordinary characters, but he was pushed to the limit filming Very Extremely Dangerous. He tells Roe McDermott about working with infamous musician and ex-con Jerry McGill – and the project that nearly killed them both.

Roe McDermott, 01 Aug 2012

A man with an eye for a fascinating character and untold stories, filmmaker Paul Duane’s work has included Happy, a documentary short about artist and dandy Sebastian Horsely, and he once also approached Brooke Magnanti – more commonly known as Belle Du Jour – seeking the rights to turn her blog about life as a prostitute into a television show. The result was the hugely successful Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, starring Billie Piper. “The show was a lot more mainstream than how I’d envisioned it,” admits Duane, “but it did give me the financial freedom to work on my other projects.”

His “other projects” include what he’s half-jokingly referred to as ‘The Geezer Trilogy’; a triumvirate of documentaries about extraordinary and infamous men. The first instalments include The Making Of Rocky Road To Dublin about filmmaker Peter Lennon, while Barbaric Genius examined the career of scandalised virtuoso and The Grass Arena author John Healy. It was during the arduous editing process of Barbaric Genius that Duane was approached to make a film about ex-con and musician Jerry McGill.

“I had hit such a brick wall with the John Healy film that I thought I’d never finish it, and then got a message from Jerry McGill saying that he had lung cancer and was going into the studio to record a follow-up to his only other release which was 50 years before, in 1959. I just thought, ‘Yeah, that sounds like a good idea for a movie and I better go do something’, because I was driving myself crazy.”

But if Duane was looking for sanity, he picked the wrong man. Endlessly shocking, Duane’s documentary shows the rarely-seen softer side of the infamous musician, as a frail-looking McGill breaks down in tears speaking of the lung cancer ravaging his body. But as the documentary continues, it becomes clear that neither McGill’s hedonistic ways nor his love of performing have waned in his old age, and the dangerously unpredictable character begins to play up in front of the cameras.



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