Special Report: Kung Fu Deadly (2026)

0:05 Hold your ears, folks.

0:07 It's showtime.

0:08 People pay good money to see this movie.

0:10 When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn and no monsters in the projection booth.

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0:40 Hey folks, welcome to The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I am talking with Fergal Costello, the director, and Patty McDonald, the writer-producer of the new film Kung Fu Deadly. It is a Jiangshi, or Jiangshi, film that is set in Dublin, Ireland. Very unusual, but a lot of fun. Definitely check out Kung Fu Deadly when it comes near you. I hope you have a great time listening to this interview.

1:06 Enjoy.

1:07 Paddy, I want to start with you. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into movie making? Because you've been working in this industry for quite a little bit here.

1:16 I was doing a postgraduate business course in a university here in Dublin. There's a thing called the milk round, where they used to be, where the big insurance company and the consulting companies and the accounting firms would come in and you'd interview. So all my peers and classmates were getting dressed up in suits and going to these interviews.

1:34 And I realized that really wasn't for me. So my way into the industry started through business affairs and working at the Irish Film Board. I was able to do a project, a postdoctoral project, about the film industry in Ireland. And after I left university, it led directly to me getting a job at the Irish Film Board. Andrew Lowe, who was one of the principals at Element Films, hired me at the film board. And then it's just been a really long journey since, from working on studio-level films on the financing and co-production side, through to producing myself in Ireland, then moved, lived in Australia for a long number of years and produced there as well. And slowly, the journey went from being that kind of financing producer

2:20 more and more into the creative space, which kind of has led me here.

2:25 Has it been when you were in Australia that you did Predestination?

2:28 That's correct, yes. That was an incredible experience, actually, the whole thing. Working with Ethan, the Sperry brothers, Peter and Michael, Such an incredibly good script. And Sarah Snook, what an amazing performance from her. Yeah, that one was a bit of a blessed one. Super proud of that film.

2:45 That's wonderful. And Fergal, how about yourself? How did you get involved in moviemaking?

2:49 I had the classic thing of just seeing something at a young age. It was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And basically, I always, even before that, having analyzed kind of me gauging and interested in filmmaking in general, I was really into... really into Die Hard, as everyone is, but at a very young age, I became really interested in, you know the shot when McLean jumps off Nakatomi and he shoots his way back into the building and then there's the focus pull of the fire, the fire escape, Bessie falling behind him and he books his head up.

3:24 I used to rewind and play that shot over and over again and not really understand why I liked it so much. But that was like the first little peak of interest in filmmaking. And then after I saw the Lord of the Rings trilogy and reading about the making of that, that's when I really started to galvanize about wanting to make stuff. And from then, since then, really, I've just been making short films with my buddies and friends and eventually went to film school, the National Film School in Ireland. And based off that four years, I got a job in, there was a comedy sketch show on our national broadcaster that was similar to Saturday Night Live.

4:00 Called the Republic of Telly.

4:01 And from there, from film school, I got to work in there for nearly four years of just directing and editing sketches, which was amazing. It was almost like a second film school because brevity was king in there. You had to make these three minute shorts and you had to make one a week or else you had nothing on air that week. So you learn quite a bit about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking through that. And then based off that, then I continued making short films until I started getting opportunities with BBC. which was wonderful, and one of them was lucky to have quite a successful little festival run with the awards, and from that, then I got an agent, and then I treated my agent, my paddy, and then that's how we led to Kung

4:43 Fu Deadly in a very small snapshot.

4:45 Tell me about Kung Fu Deadly. It was so unusual to see an Irish Jiangshir film.

4:51 I grew up watching every film from Johnny Westmoreland, Weissmutter Tarzan films, to Big old Hollywood films, Jimmy.

4:59 I watched everything.

5:00 And when I was growing up, one of the things that I watched a lot of was Kung Fu films. Because a lot of strange movies would be on very early in the morning.

5:06 At the weekend.

5:07 Back in the old two, three channel television land, back pre-streaming. And back in the day, you'd have a couple of channels. So any movies that were on, you would watch. A lot of old, half of them, I wouldn't even remember the names. A lot of old Kung Fu films, I remember watching them and being obsessed. There was actually a version of this script written by a projectionist in Ireland.

5:27 He still works. He works at the Irish Film Institute.

5:30 It's a very, very, very different script, but there was a core of an idea, and I came across it about originally 20 years ago, and I tried to get the rights to that version of it many moons ago. They weren't available. And then when I was in Australia 14 years ago, starting my production company there, I had remembered the idea and remembered the script so the rights had gone back to the to paul markey so the journey started proper then in 2011 option those options the underlying rights of the script and then went on a very long the film was i think this is the third time the film was set up i've probably done 30 drafts of different versions of the script set up in different countries in different places but it was when

6:14 it came home just before we met fergal bringing it back to when the script started to get its own voice and it started to make a lot more sense.

6:25 And then meeting with Fergal was a real.

6:27 Stroke of luck because he just got the vision for the film and knew the film references, knew the genesis of where it was coming from, understood it completely. And I think from the point of meeting Fergal, it happened relatively quickly. It happened within a nine months a year of us kind of meeting. So once we got to that point, It happened.

6:49 Relatively quickly after 12 and a half years. What was that original script like? It was about, I think there were air traffic controllers. There were Irish characters.

7:03 It's been so long since having even touched back. Because when I optioned it, once we had posted, I'd optioned it. It said strong ideas of where it was going. We just kept the core idea, which were the Jiangxi. The other alums are truthfully, at this point in time, I can't really remember. It was 12, 14 years ago when I last even read it or would have skimmed it.

7:24 It's been a long, long time.

7:26 I love that you guys are using this Chinese vampire because they're malleable, right? Crazy Safari, you have Jiangshi in Africa. The rules are always so different, too, so it really isn't beholden to anything. Every single time you see a Mr. Vampire film, it's different rules that they're throwing out there as far as, oh, if you hold your breath, they won't be able to hear you, all these kind of things.

7:51 So I love that you're doing it.

7:54 I mean, that was a big one in the writing. There were so many things that we didn't put in. There's so many different myths and rules and fun things, like dropping rice, so they're always so easy to pick.

8:05 Them up for her. the urine of an adult male.

8:08 There's so many things that you, and look, one of the things in all the research that I'd found is there's an original kernel of kind of the Jiangxi myths in folklore, but a lot of the actual modern myths are cinematic creations.

8:23 They were created for cinema. So it is a very malleable thing.

8:28 And you're right, there's versions in Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, there's different versions all over Asia and Southeast Asia, but One of the challenges was actually letting a lot of that fun stuff go, because you're trying to shoo all that stuff in for gags, and a lot of the times it just wasn't working.

8:45 It kind of distracted from the core of the story.

8:46 So, yeah, they are very available, which is great when you're a screenwriter because you feel you have a license.

8:53 You have some license. Virgil, when was the first time you encountered Chinese vampires?

8:59 I saw Encounters of the Spooky Kind very young. Yeah, and that was like, it was just... I remember it was one of the first times I registered that something could be funny and scary at the same time. It was definitely before I saw Evil Dead 2. And it was definitely just starting to... I found it scarier than I found it funny. But I definitely felt that it was silly.

9:21 You know what I mean?

9:23 But I think that was definitely the first time. And then in research for this again, when suddenly it was like a flashback. Suddenly you remember that movie you saw when you got the screenplay for Concrete Deadly. And then you go back and you re-watch the likes of Mr. Vampire and just basically anything that you can find, even, even like specific graphic novels, which were, which were informative to the look of the, of the Jiangxi in our, in our film. But I think encounters of the spooky kind was like the first one I definitely registered and remembered seeing, which is one of the better ones.

9:53 So you're not making it easy for yourself. You've got multiple languages in here. It's, comedy and horror, which is a very tough balance. You've got fight choreography. You've got special effects. How do you even begin to approach a project like this?

10:09 The way I found, and I was talking to Paddy about this initially, and we've talked about it a lot since, the rooting of the entire thing for me was the two boys and their relationship. and basically felt like if that worked, then everything else around the movie would work. If you felt like there was a bit of a brotherly bond and a love, genuine, unironic love between them, then you can... That was the main thing I worried about, weirdly, because when it came to the fight sequences, we had a wonderful team involved in the fight sequences who we heavily collaborate with, but it is a team effort.

10:43 You're not alone in that.

10:45 And with the makeup, you have a wonderful makeup team, so again, you're not alone in that. Whereas the directorial work of trying to make sure that the boys have chemistry together.

10:54 That, for me, was kind of the biggest challenge.

10:57 But then, the biggest challenge, but then you cast Michael and Stephen, and suddenly they're talking like they've known each other for years, and they're bouncing off each other like they've known each other for years. So, I think that was the main intimidation going into it, was to make sure that it was all balanced the right way, rather than expressing too much of one tone to defeat the others.

11:16 Everybody in the cast is doing a wonderful job, but yeah, your two leads are so good together and it does feel like they have known each other for years they bring a real nick frost simon pegg type chemistry to it and i know those guys have worked together for they had spaced and all that stuff before they even got to shauna the dead feels like these two guys just.

11:37 Yeah click yeah they just met on a zoom call it was because steven was already attached before even i came on board he was part of the cast and he was initially going to play a frank which was, but we thought, I think the thinking was that that'd be a funny, fun role for him and maybe expected of his audience that he might play the kind of the, the whatchacallit, not the straight man, the comedic relief. But then as we were prepping the film and not very far into me coming on board, I think there was a few conversations with myself, Paddy, and our producer, Nick, that maybe he should be the lead. And I think that that was even more appealing to Stephen. But then from that, then you had to do auditions initially for

12:14 the character of Frank, where we meet quite a few people. And then whittling that down then to people to do chemistry tests with Stephen. And Michael, who played Frank, he's just out of drama school. He's only 23. And he's just, he's never been in front of a camera before. All his work has been stage work. And he went on the Zoom with Stephen and they immediately started laughing about something.

12:37 Like they almost immediately had private jokes. And you're going, what are you laughing about? And it just became clear, very evidently clear after that they belong together on screen. And then Paddy and I rang each other after. I think you saw the tape then, Paddy. And that was it then.

12:55 Yeah.

12:56 Look, Michael was a standout.

12:59 And just to explain, there was a whole page one rewrite with.

13:03 This version of the film.

13:04 So that's why, because Stephen, there was another version of the film that Stephen was attached to before Fergal. So, In the process of doing that entire rewrite, we created the whole thing. It all just organically changed, which made much more sense to Stephen's character as the lead character. That was all part of the scripting process as well.

13:27 In terms of.

13:29 We just did a wide casting call for the role of Frank. Right from the outset, Michael was the... like he was outstanding no grudge from the off so really easy decision to cast really easy.

13:44 Tell me a little bit about the lean character for us and when we were developing and we were putting it together we needed to we felt we needed to create a character who was a proper counterpoint to the two boys she needed to be kind of really strong kick-ass kind of the like chewing bubble gum and taking names and kicking ass kind of character.

14:06 We felt really, really strongly that we needed that.

14:07 And the film needed that kind of seriousness in the sense that her character needed to feel real and it needed to feel that like her as a foil to our demons, like the two things are related about actually they have to be really scary. They have to be straight down the line. There can be a little bit of fun, but they need to be real. You need to feel like they're fully realized scary characters and So she needed to come in with that sense of seriousness about the whole thing.

14:36 And really is put upon.

14:38 For a very large part, you know, for the first half of the movie is put upon by the fact that she's gotten kind of saddled with these two guys in Dublin who she'd never, ever anticipated running into and running into other kind of fateful things in her own life that happened to be in this really, which we like, by the way, the fact that we're playing into the idea of how the hell did she end up in Dublin and kind of which I think a lot of people have a reaction to the film. Like a Zhang Shi Kung Fu film out of Dublin is not the most usual thing. So we liked kind of playing on that as well. So I love her as a character.

15:14 Always thought she was great. It was really important for us that she'd be a really good character and a strong character. Gemma was... I don't even know how to... Do you remember how that... I do remember my oldest daughter didn't mention her at one point because she's a big fan of Heartbreak High. But I think she was around the same time I think she was on our radar.

15:34 But again, the casting process for her was once we started seeing her audition tapes became.

15:42 She just had this kind of punk rock energy to it as well.

15:45 She did everything you needed and then had her own edge as well. You know what I mean?

15:49 And then she, similarly to the boys, she did a chemistry read once Michael was cast. Then Gemma did a chemistry read with the three guys where they just have an argument and it was really funny and they're stepping out all retailers lines. And yeah, just, I just loved her. She had a bit of a, not a wildness, but she had, there's a way of playing character. There's a, there's a correct way of playing Leanne where you play completely straight and that's done. That's completely valid and totally fine.

16:15 But then Gemma did that, but then added this kind of little edge and a little bit of fatalistic humor and a tiny bit of a lovely nihilism, you know, between it all.

16:26 Which I really, really enjoyed.

16:28 You mentioned your fight choreographer. Can you talk a little.

16:30 Bit about him? Yeah, so it was with the Li Huang and Kai Fung-Rek. They were amazing. Because I had never done any.

16:37 I'd done action stuff in short films, but it was always guys shooting at each other and hiding behind bins. There was never anything elaborate like this kind of stuff. So that was definitely something I had to learn. And yeah, so initially I was tentative and a bit nervous about the role of action director and you're like what does that mean in relation to director and you know you don't want to give away too much creative control as much as you can but then as was the whole movie the opposite was true where it's just an extremely collaborative environment where lee would use communicate what you needed from the screenplay and patty's people it was all there what needed to happen and then i'd come in with

17:15 my ideas of what should happen in the fight and then lee would take all of that on board with the screenplay kind of as god and And then, um, he put together this kind of like iPhone version of the fight, like a previous of here's what he thinks would work in the space that we selected.

17:30 Cause it was so malleable.

17:31 So we were, you were using this location and then he would make that work to fight and then bring in the geography of the location we had that wasn't specified for the fight itself, but became specific, specific just through the choreography. And then you'd prepare this kind of previous on his iPhone, show the editor that to you, you come back with your notes, which he was very grateful to have.

17:52 And then you basically do that over and over again.

17:54 You iterate and iterate and iterate, reiterate, and then suddenly you're left with exactly what you think would work or feels good. And because it was such a process-driven, it takes away all the anxiety from it because it's so well-practiced by the time you're actually shooting it that it's like shooting a jigsaw. You just do that piece, that piece, that piece, and you know exactly what you need. It was really cool.

18:18 A bit of a revelation process to me because I'd never done that before.

18:22 We started talking to Lee a long way before we even started pre. So the planning for the pre-vising, so there was much more rehearsals done and pre-vising done for the fight sequences. And so getting the locations early became a really core part of that because they were able to actually pre-vis in the actual location and actually build the pre-vis into how they were going to rig it.

18:46 And then with the idea being that you're ready to shoot on the day that you turn up It's all done just so they know exactly what they're doing. So it was a very evolved from literally being on the floor where they're mock punching, which I loved, is what you don't realize at the very beginning of this process. Well, you're there with your mates when you're a small kid and you're pretending to punch somebody and that's literally where it starts. And then you see it evolve and evolve and evolve to this flying across massive ruins on wires.

19:15 So it was just interesting how you have to actually build a thing into the DNA at.

19:20 Our budget level.

19:21 It's different if you're a studio and you can throw a lot of money at a sequence but for us we didn't and we had to get a value for money it had to you know it had to look good it had to show character it had to show it had to.

19:32 Do all those things that we want lee was very that was very important to.

19:35 Lee as well but it was a really was a very involved process that was built into our location scouting everything right from the off was built into the dna of how we were actually going to make it.

19:46 I'm sure that budget was a concern but i have to say this does not look like an inexpensive film. This looks like a million dollars of that, way more. It looks terrific. Can you talk a little bit about your DP and especially capturing that.

19:58 Feel of Dublin?

20:00 A big thing we found in it to capture the feel of Dublin was the sound and like post sound after. Just like there's a very specific kind of energy in Dublin cities during the day and night. Lots of shouting, lots of seagulls. But yeah, but then when it comes to our DP, Fung, he, again, someone I'd never.

20:20 Worked with before. So again, that has a certain nervousness to it.

20:24 But like, he just, again, because the project was lovely this way, it was just a bit of a blessing because he was, he's basically A, so experienced and B, he's so unafraid of color and he's so unafraid of making stuff vibrant for vibrancy's sake.

20:41 I like the idea. We both enjoyed the idea.

20:43 That color was kind of bursting from the frame the entire time. Even in our version of Dingy in the guy's apartment, it's still this kind of lovely kind of teal, luminous green. We were working with him. It was a very easy collaboration. We would share back and forth. We'd share shot decks, what kind of imagery we'd like based on locations and the color schemes we'd like based on locations.

21:07 He and I were big collaborators with the production designers. and John Beer on how to colour something the right way so we can serve our lighting better, and vice versa. But yeah, we wanted this kind of movie to take place in Dublin and feel very specific to Dublin, but have this colour and this life to it. There's a vibrancy that sometimes isn't there in Irish movies, and I wanted it to be a very romantic, idealised version of Dublin, where adventure can take place. The way you root all of that is by matting it down slightly with Dirk and Grime and smoke and dust and muck and clay just to bring those priorities down a tiny bit then you have us rooted in the real rooted in a reality but that was that was all just true conversations

21:50 with phone yeah and just what we were after and looking at that beautiful 235 framing of the films of john carpenter that was a big big reference point and like the easy reference is big trouble in china but also like how he kind of crafts And Bloch's white shots in the thing was a big, big influence. Whenever the trio, whenever Danny, Frank, and Leanne shared the screen, that was a big reference, was like the way Carpenter crafts his whites and his masters to make them cinematic first and then go in for.

22:20 Overage when you need it. Yeah, that was what it was like together.

22:25 To bump up.

22:27 The makeup effects of the Jiangshu as well, they look fantastic. I just really like the makeup effects that are going on.

22:34 The brief was like, you take encounters of the spooky kinds as the artistic, the artist's interpretation.

22:41 Of what the real world junk show were like. And our ones were the real world ones.

22:46 It's like Garrett Edwards said, when he saw it, when he designed his Godzilla, he said he wanted to see Godzilla in real life and run back and try explain what it looked like as quickly as possible to an artist and have them draw it.

22:56 Whereas we felt like, what if we're the real junk show, you know, based on the movies were based off our ones. Cause I really want them to be funny and silly, which is fine. But then when they change and become threatening, they're really, you know, to varying degrees, depending on which character you're playing. But when you meet Min Chun at the end of the movie, like you want her to feel like a creature who was there to just kill.

23:18 With Tong, he's a bit more of a lighter, he's a lighter touch. But also when he changes, he really changes and you want to feel like he's a beast. And so that was kind of the thing that you want to feel like they're, I wanted them to feel like weapons, just real predators. And to put that down to you, it was Tom McInerney who did our makeup, our makeup effects, and it was pretty, pretty great. For what he did for the budget he had, it was pretty miraculous.

23:42 Is there going to be the continuing adventures of Frank and Danny?

23:47 We've talked about it. We'd love there to be. Kung Fu Deadlier. Kung Fu Deadly.

23:52 And now Kung Fu Deadliest. We've got the trilogy of updates. You're all set. We just need to convince them to pay for us.

24:00 When did you get to see this with an audience for the first time and what was that reaction? That was our world premiere at the Fantastic Fest.

24:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

24:09 The first time I saw it on the big screen was the cast and crew. Like the final, the final version. So that was the first time seeing that on a video. And that was about two weeks before Fantastic Fest.

24:20 Was it Kergelson?

24:22 And it felt brilliant.

24:24 Like it really took me by surprise because at that point I hadn't seen it since we just locked all the sounds and it was fully finished. So I hadn't seen it in about three, three months or something. And it really took me by surprise.

24:36 Yeah.

24:36 And then for task class, that was the, the first kind of Joe public screening.

24:41 That was amazing. Which was nice.

24:42 And then we had three subsequent screenings as well. And they almost felt even better than the premier than the first screening. It was just, it felt like we kind of built up a head of steam, you know, And when it got to the final three screenings, the child happened at the same time.

24:56 That was me and our producer, Nick were there for those. And it was just, that was amazing feeling.

25:01 It was just a culmination of, it went beyond like just the satisfaction of watching it with an audience. It felt like a culmination of just the past year and a half. Patty and I meeting in cafes at 7am every morning, talk to the movie. And that's where it started. And then ends there. And curling myself from the fetal position for long enough.

25:19 Yeah.

25:19 Yeah. Yeah.

25:22 What's next for the film? Where's it going to play, and how can people keep up with that?

25:26 We have our European premiere in Sitges on this day week.

25:31 So then post that, it's going to go to the Dublin Film Festival at the end of February, and then will be released in the UK and Ireland within a week or two of that. And it'll go out in the US at a similar time frame, and hopefully Australia as well. So We're trying to do all English language territories, kind of the beginning, sometime the start to mid-March next year.

25:55 Cool.

25:56 Is there a website for the film? There is, kungfrideli.com. Paddy, what's next for you?

26:03 In development, I'm writing a number of things. Would you believe I'm writing a high-end, highbrow Christmas movie called The Tinkerer, which is like a superhero origin story for Santa Claus, turn of the 19th century. And developing some more comedies. So yeah, just building a slate of things that I'm writing and working with other creatives. And myself and Fergal are in the foothills of planning something else as well.

26:33 How about you, Fergal?

26:34 What's next for you?

26:36 I'm in prep right now on the next feature. It's a kind of full-on terrifying horror movie set over one day. So we're shooting November 16th, so We have a lot to do before then, so I'm location scouting for the majority of the week.

26:54 And then I'm meeting cast now for about two weeks' time, so it's all getting a bit real. Yeah, yeah.

27:01 I'm jealous I'm not producing this.

27:03 It's a vampire movie.

27:05 Eastern vampires, western vampires?

27:07 Western vampires, but it's more like natural-born killers mixed with Mad Max characters.

27:13 I look forward to seeing it, and I look forward to seeing your next project as well, Paddy. This has been great, guys, and thank you so much for taking the time. I know it wasn't convenient for you, and especially you, Fergal, if you're actually prepping for your next movie already. It's no rest for the wicked here.

27:27 You look far too calm, Fergal.

27:29 Yeah, yeah.

27:29 I'm surprised I was then I am so far. The panic was gone.

27:32 Well, gentlemen, thank you so much. This was really wonderful talking with you, and thank you for making Kung Fu Deadly. I had a really good time watching it.

27:38 Thank you. Thanks for having us.

27:41 Yeah, great questions.

27:48 I just can't get it.

28:20 You boom boom is is.

29:36 We look so good together Mr.

29:38 Vampire Shall we dance together? So that our pale skin.

29:43 Can be drawn to the sunlight So that the reflection of the mirror is dazzling Feel it, this moment is trembling I'm drawn to you, I can't hold it in, like a spell Yo yo, immature for the first time We're fools, we only know love.

30:08 What's wrong with dating?

30:10 I was in the basement, I was so tired.

30:13 I was so tired of being in love.

30:15 I was tired of meeting you.