For film student Hazel, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. She and four of her classmates at the University of Birmingham were being offered work experience on the set of a proper feature film. Better yet, the movie was tied to the legacy of a global cult classic. And filming would take place amidst the rugged beauty of remote Shetland, travel expenses covered.
The project Hazel and her classmates would be working on was The Ill Man, a film inspired by 1973’s iconic The Wicker Man and directed by Justin Hardy — son of The Wicker Man’s director Robin Hardy. How five UoB students ended up on the crew is part of a new model being trialled by some arts programmes at British universities, where the institutions themselves are partially funding feature films. Birmingham is one of a handful of universities leading the way. Of course, alumni have always been able to secure pockets of funding for indies but this is different: The Ill Man wasn’t being made by a former student. Instead, a UoB film department faculty member served as a producer on the project, and brought with him more than £21,000 in cold hard cash.
As soon as The Dispatch heard tell of a gaggle of UoB youths marooned on a rock in the middle of the North Sea, tasked with filming a quasi-sequel to one of the world’s most famous horror films, our interest was piqued. We also had an academic interest, of course — has Birmingham’s oldest university come up with an ingenious new way to help boost an increasingly flagging domestic film industry?
‘The making of a ‘micro’ horror’
At the end of the first week of shooting, Hazel walked around a corner, and found Justin Hardy standing outside a pub. “Fuck,” Hardy was saying, in a low, clear voice. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck”.
“He repeated it for a whole minute,” Hazel says, apprehensively. She retreated back the way she had come, unwilling to disturb her boss.
Up until this point, shooting on The Ill Man (formerly titled The Ill Wind, which had a touch too much of the flatulent about it) had been a breeze, says Hazel. The 22-year-old is halfway through completing a masters degree in film and television. Like her peers, she’s keenly aware that, post-Covid, the bottom has completely fallen out of the UK TV and film industry. A survey in July 2023 found more than half of film and TV workers were out of work. So when the opportunity — albeit unpaid — arose to gain experience as a production assistant on a film being partially funded by the university itself, she jumped at it.
Hazel had never been to Shetland before. Originally from China, she’s always lived in large cities. When the crew arrived at the start of May, she was immediately awed by the wild landscape. “When it gets sunny, it's so beautiful,” she says. “I could see the reflections of the hills in the water, even when it's foggy and raining. It has a breathtaking kind of mystic beauty.”
It was that beauty that inspired Justin Hardy to land on Shetland as the setting for a long-held dream to become reality. The Ill Man is a deep personal project for Hardy. Last year, he released the documentary Children of the Wicker Man which tracked his difficult relationship with his famous father during the making of his 1970s magnum opus. Robin Hardy died in 2016, and had a complex private life, having been married five times and fathered eight children. In his documentary, Justin highlights how the original film led to his father’s bankruptcy, the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, and the selling of the family home to pay his debts. In the end his mother had to divorce his father on the grounds of not knowing whether he was still alive.
With The Ill Man, described as a ‘micro horror’(meaning its budget is less than £500,000), Hardy Jr had a chance to step out of his father’s shadow, while carrying on the family’s horror legacy. On board as producer was Dr Chris Nunn, assistant professor in the University of Birmingham’s film department. Nunn had previously worked with Hardy at the University of Greenwich and directed Children of the Wicker Man.
Hardy is clear that the University of Birmingham is funding the film because of his relationship with Nunn. “It’s Chris’s vision for what Birmingham’s film vision can be, and it's already outstripping most of the universities in this country,” he says.
Along with the University of Falmouth, UoB is pioneering this type of initiative. Here’s how it works: a funded film is closely tied into courses. Students can be assessed and graded on work contributing towards a finished film that’s being funded by their university, and the entire undertaking can be used to advertise the expertise and prestige of said university’s film department — not to mention win awards for the institution.
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“Universities are always looking for projects that intersect and interact with the real world, and at Birmingham there’s a burgeoning point towards the creative industries,” says Nunn when explaining the university’s £21,400 investment in The Ill Man.
‘No one fell off a cliff and no one drowned’
Jamie, a UoB student who worked on The Ill Man, says that being a smaller scale production like that “meant we were in the thick of it” — the students actually got to participate, not just hover around nervously. There was a necessary communal spirit, with everyone performing multiple roles — producer Nunn can be seen as an extra in the film carrying a coffin.
The set was suitably chaotic — in a good way, he stresses. He describes one day of filming to me, trying to convey the experience. The magic of movie-making is in full swing — or at least wobbling along. Jamie and the crew are crammed into a basement, they’ve valiantly transformed it into a labyrinth of secret tunnels beneath the fictional island. Today’s scene? A sex dungeon, naturally.
An actor stands stiffly in the corner, wearing what should be a sleek, menacing gimp suit. Instead, it’s a secondhand wetsuit that probably still smells faintly of seaweed. Hostages whimper from inside ‘cages’ — which, thanks to financial constraints and risk-assessment, are really just wooden pallets.
While The Ill Man’s low budget resulted in some scenes that wouldn’t have been out of place in an Alan Patridge episode, other incidents could be a bit more dicey. Fantasy can quickly collide with the reality of the squabbles and upsets that occur when a group of humans are thrown together for weeks at a time. Two of the students on set I speak to remember one event in particular.
