Paranoia, retro cars, IRA threats galore. This is London in the 1970s, and the setting for a new period piece film by brothers Charles and Thomas Guard. Their film, Dead Shot — the title deriving from a quote from the character played by Mark Strong — hits theaters and on demand this week and is worth a tune-in for the production value, supporting performances by Felicity Jones and other recognizable faces, and more. The story starts with a border ambush gone wrong, leading a young widower (Colin Morgan) to venture into London to seek revenge with the help of the IRA.

We recently caught up with the Guard brothers, who opened up about working with Mark Strong and achieving the ’70s London look on an indie budget. It’s exciting to see real-life brothers team up for fun projects like Dead Shot, which has plenty of behind-the-scenes factoids worth mentioning thanks to our recent sitdown with them.

Stories About the Troubles

First off — for anyone unfamiliar, a word about the “Troubles,” which lasted from about 1968 to 1998 in Northern Ireland between the Protestant unionists, who wanted the province to remain part of the U.K., and the Roman Catholic nationalists, who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic of Ireland. These years of tension were also laced with paranoia and, of course, violence across England and Ireland.

“On our mom’s side of the family, we have quite a lot of Irish families,” Charles Guard told MovieWeb. “So we kind of grew up really intrigued by the effects of the Troubles and hearing lots of Troubles stories. So the background of the politics was something that was very much part of our lives. So we sensed that duality.” He continued:

And I think that we’ve always gravitated towards the sort of the moral ambiguity of the protagonists involved in stories about the Troubles. So when we heard about [Dead Shot], we were immediately really taken by the idea and keen to sort of take a look at it. And it just went from there.

That moral ambiguity is a big component of Dead Shot, which centers on two separate protagonists in a way, played by Colin Morgan and Aml Ameen. The kicker? One wants the other dead. “It was very much an ambition of ours to tell a story from two equal points of view and create an ambiguity about who they are and what they want,” said Thomas Guard.

“And we were always quite excited by the crossover that could happen between the two, where one begins really angry and then actually kind of dips down, while the other one is now being kind of provoked and prodded and actually becomes angry himself,” continued Thomas. “And there was a great crossover there. We felt that was very exciting to embrace. And then, that just developed onwards with the actors, and with the shooting and the editing.”

Mark Strong and Felicity Jones in Dead Shot
Quiver Distribution

Charles Guard continued regarding the gray area between good guys and bad guys in Dead Shot:

We love the idea of having a movie that doesn’t really have heroes and villains, that the heroes are sometimes the villains, and the villains are sometimes the heroes, and you don’t know who to root for. That struck us as a very kind of modern way of telling a story like this.

Beyond Morgan and Ameen’s performances, cinephiles will love to see big names like Felicity Jones (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) and Mark Strong (Kingsman) take the screen. It’s always refreshing to hear good things about famous actors behind the scenes. “Mark’s just a brilliant, brilliant person to collaborate with, to have on set. He’s an incredibly generous performer. He’s incredibly generous with the other actors,” Thomas Guard told us, sharing an anecdote:

“There was a very nice scene actually, a little anecdote with the chap who was playing Lynch, who’s getting tortured. He’s quite a young actor. And Mark very sweetly said, ‘Don’t do it all in the first couple of takes. Save some for later because you might be here for a while.’ And he always had an eye out for other people, and then the cameras would roll and he would just become this other character.”

Felicity Jones, meanwhile, was heavily involved in the project, beyond just her supporting role as a distressed IRA photographer. “We were in the incredibly fortunate position to be working with Felicity because she was involved in the project from an executive-producer standpoint, because she was doing that with her brother through their company Piecrust,” said Charles Guard. “And we were just incredibly lucky to be able to involve her in conversations about the direction that the character could take and what would appeal to her, what you didn’t know.”

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The Rubbish Was Crucial
Quiver Distribution

When you don’t have a Christopher Nolan-style Oppenheimer budget, achieving a period look has more than just a few challenges. But leave it to the Guard brothers to make it work. “The realities of the budget were just so present every single day, and every second,” said Charles Guard.

“And even before we actually came to shoot, we were really adapting the script all the time to try and hold on to stuff that we felt was really important to the movie, and also to kind of doing justice to certain action sequences. The sequence around Paddington was extremely challenging because originally, we were scheduled to have four days for the whole extended sequence and including the chase. And we ended up shooting Paddington in one day.”

So, what kinds of things become crucial on set to achieve the look for a film like Dead Shot? When the movie looks the part, the success sort of becomes invisible, in that you don’t seem to notice the behind-the-scenes struggles in the finished product. “We had great cars and used them in the fabric of the film, because they created so much of the period,” Thomas Guard told us. “And even though we didn’t have very many of them, we just kept reusing them. And it’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have the means sometimes.”

Quiver Distribution

Another material thing that became clutch in getting the ’70s look: garbage. Says Charles Guard, “The rubbish was really crucial. We used a lot of documentary photography as a reference for how we created the world. And we put a sort of look-book together before we knew we were even shooting in Glasgow. And a lot of the components of that, we drew really heavily on when we got up to the city, because it was things like rubbish just on every single street corner.” He added:

And not just garbage — it was like furniture, because you could see, when you look at images from the time, you could see all of that. And you also saw that there were kids playing in the street, and they weren’t sort of like kids today. They were unaccompanied, they have black eyes, there was mud a lot, it was extraordinary.

“What really struck us was how close the ’70s were to the war period, and just how much of a sort of hangover the war still had on the ’70s, and whole city blocks had been devastated by the bombs,” concluded Charles.

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As it turns out, real-life brothers can become dynamic duos in bringing quality cinema to life as a joint effort. I grew up with a brother who also was interested in filmmaking, but looking back, it was really just a phase that at least one of us grew out of. Such is not the case for guys like the Coen brothers and, now, the Guard brothers. “We’ve been making films together since our early teens, just fooling around with cameras and roping in friends into little stories,” said Thomas Guard.

“And so it just goes back to a childhood dream of kind of creating something together. A film is always incredibly special when you share an experience with someone, and if that person is a family member, like a brother — and we grew up loving the same films that we would watch time and time again — it almost became an aspiration or ambition to kind of do something similar to create that experience for other people. And we’ve always wanted to create that, to try to reach that feeling.”

From Quiver Distribution, Dead Shot hits theaters and on demand Friday.