Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on August 4, 2014, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Among the pitches presented during this year’s Frontières International Co-Production Market at Montreal’s Fantasia festival, one of the most fun was an interactive promo for the lighthearted fright feature EXTRA ORDINARY. Fango sat down with Mike Ahern (who wrote and will direct the film with Enda Loughman) and Ailish Bracken (one of the producers) to discuss the movie (which ultimately had its Canadian premiere at Fantasia 2019 and was released the next year—MG).
“We’re calling it a rural Ghostbusters,” Ahern begins. “It’s set in a small Irish town, and concentrates on a series of smaller hauntings that are happening there. The biggest hauntings are things like a haunted wheelie bin or cups moving or pieces of gravel flying around, that sort of thing. Our protagonist is Rose, who is a driving instructor but also has some supernatural powers. She exorcises a guy’s wife who has been nagging him from beyond the grave for eight years, and a romance ensues. That’s the basic setup, and it’s all about them teaming up to ghostbust the hauntings in the village.”
Ahern and Loughman have working together for a decade now: “We’re called DADDY when we collaborate,” he says, “and that’s a ridiculous acronym for Design, Animation, Design, Design, Yay! [laughs]. Enda did animation and I did graphic design originally, but in the last four or five years, we’ve made a lot of live-action stuff, and we love it. We did a bunch of music video promos, TV commercials and lots of short films. One was called Mr. Foley and there was a sci-fi one called The Hatch, and they did quite well on the festival circuit.”
Moving up to their debut feature with Extra Ordinary, the duo took a good deal of inspiration from incidents in their native Ireland. “There are these little stories you hear all the time, about different hauntings,” Ahern notes. “But also, we read an article about a haunting in an old folks’ home in England, with a ghost that was groping the old people. It wasn’t that part of the story that really got us, though, but the couple who came in to deal with the ghost. They were called Ray and Beryl, I believe, and Ray was a lorry driver during the day and Beryl was working for the credit union or something, and then at night they would do this ghost cancelling. So it was just the idea of two very normal people having second lives as a ghostbusting team that we thought would be good for a movie, and how ordinary their lives could be. That’s where the title Extra Ordinary comes from; it’s sort of like super-ordinary…it’s normal activity rather than paranormal activity [laughs].”
As far as casting is concerned, the filmmakers have a few names in mind and one lead already game to come aboard. “The part of Rose was written for an Irish comedian named Maeve Higgins,” Bracken reveals. “She’s quite well-known in Ireland and the UK, and she’s starting to make a name for herself in the U.S. She and Mike knew each other previously, so Rose was written with her in mind, and she likes the script and is interested. Apart from that, for the other lead Martin, we see him as a Steve Coogan kind of character, and we will approach Steve Coogan [Barry Ward wound up taking the role]. Then there’s Christian Winter, an aging rock star they have to ghostbust at the end; he’s the climax character. That’s a really good opportunity to cast a more high-profile, possibly Hollywood, possibly UK actor, and we’ve been thinking about everybody from Iggy Pop to Will Ferrell [that part was filled—hilariously—by Will Forte].”
Horror/comedy can be a tough sell, both to financiers and in the marketplace, but the filmmakers have been encouraged by the reactions to Extra Ordinary so far. “This is the first market we’ve brought it to, so it’s quite new,” Bracken says, “but the feedback we’ve been getting is that the story is great. We’ve had really positive reactions so far, and I think once the story is there, it’s really about striking a tone, which you’re not gonna know until you actually shoot it. But we really trust Mike and Enda to be able to bring across the comedy.”
