EXCLUSIVE: UK actors Robert Bathurst, Lee Mack, and Sue Johnston, along with Johnston’s pet German Shepherd are lining up to appear in Roy Boulter’s dog-walking musical Fetch to be produced by Liverpool-based Hurricane Films.
Paul Heaton from The Beautiful South has written a song for the film and UK band The Lightning Seeds are also working on songs.
Fetch marks the feature directorial debut of Boulter, the award-winning producer of Terence Davies’ Of Time And The City and Sunset Song and of Gillies MacKinnon’s The Last Bus.
The bare bones of the plot are that a disparate and eccentric group of dog-walkers band together to clean up their local park and to teach a group of less community-minded fellows a lesson that they will never remember.
“The idea came from a conversation with a friend of mine who told me he walks his dog twice a day, sees the same people every day but he didn’t know any of their names,” Boulter told Screen. “He knew everything about their lives, everything about their dogs but he didn’t know their names and nor did they know his.”
Ray Fearon and Alice Lowe will also appear in the film, said Boulter.
Before launching Hurricane Films with fellow producer Sol Papadopoulos in 2000, Boulter was the drummer for 1990s band The Farm, whose hits include ’All Together Now’ and ’Groovy Train’. He recently directed the feature documentary Algorithm Party, featuring Liverpool author and spoken word performer “Roy” (real name PJ Smith). The Farm is working on a comeback album and may contribute a song to Fetch, Boulter confirmed.
The filmmaker revealed he was encouraged to make Fetch as a film by the late Chris Collins, the BFI and UK Film Council executive who died in 2014. “I’d initially written it as a sitcom pilot but felt it could be a feature. Chris encouraged me to adapt it as a feature and he read the first draft. It was 2013 - around the time he championed Sunset Song. He was the reason that got made.”
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