What do you do when everyone tells you that you can't make a film without the right connections, the right funding, the right people saying yes? If you're Geoff Barrow, you spend everything Invada Records has on proving them wrong. And the result is a fantastic watch.
In this week's episode, Sean Adams sat in the sun outside Geoff's home near Portishead to talk about GAME, the debut feature from Invada Films, a gripping rural thriller set against the backdrop of the 1993 British rave scene. It stars Marc Bessant and Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods as a dealer and a poacher locked in a tense standoff deep in the Somerset woods.
It was shot for £150,000 (essentially all the money Invada had), and it was written, produced and distributed from Bristol, by people who actually lived in that world.
Geoff Barrow started out as a tape op for Massive Attack before co-founding Portishead. He runs Invada Records in Bristol, which has released soundtracks for Drive, Stranger Things and Red Dead Redemption alongside records by Gazelle Twin, Billy Nomates, Beak> and more.
Alongside Ben Salisbury, Barrow has scored Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War, Black Mirror and many more.
However, GAME is something different: his first credit as producer and co-writer of a feature film.
They talk about why making GAME felt like a reaction to being told no, and how a five-hour session with a friend who had been both a poacher and a countryside rave supplier in the early 90s shaped the script.
The conversation also gets into why casting Jason Williamson was an obvious call the moment it came up, why Geoff stripped the score back to almost nothing (he has spent enough years watching low-budget films drown themselves in music to know what it does), and how a football teammate called DJ Smudge ended up making the period-accurate 1993 bangers on the soundtrack.
From there the conversation goes wider: the inside story of how Invada came to release the Drive soundtrack, why Mica Levi's Under the Skin changed what Geoff thought a film score could be, why Kangding Ray's Sirāt gave him a similar jolt more recently, what it was like working with Alex Garland and Ben Wheatley, why Low's Double Negative is one of the most important records of the 21st century, how the people who went to those countryside raves in 1993 ended up voting Reform, what he'd do with £500 million if he had it, and what all of his records would taste like.
GAME has its live stream premiere on Thursday 18 June at 7:30pm BST. Tickets are £5 and available everywhere except North America. Geoff, director John Minton, Marc Bessant and screenwriter Rob Williams will all be in the live chat taking questions, hosted by Paul Weedon. Get your ticket at https://watch.eventive.org/invadafilms/play/69c69adff08307d6b404d921
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Edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt)
GAME (Invada Films)
https://www.invadafilms.co.uk/
GAME tickets, Blu-ray, vinyl and more
https://linktr.ee/InvadaFilmsGame
GAME Limited Edition Orange Vinyl (300 copies, signed) pre-order
https://www.invada.co.uk/collections/game
Invada Records
https://www.invada.co.uk/
Recorded, engineered and hosted by Sean Adams (seaninsound.com) at Geoff's home near Portishead, Bristol.
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