A Dundalk screenwriter has just had his first film produced.
Barry Keating
Barry Keating from Mount Avenue, has co-written ‘Nymph’ with Serbian directors Milan Konjevic and Marko Backovic, with the film currently debuting at an international film festival in Berlin.
Barry, son of Rosemary and Frank Keating, started out in journalism, writing a film column for The Argus 15 years ago. He also contributed to a film segment on LMFM before moving to the UK to study screenwriting for film and TV.
He continued to write while there, having articles published in the likes of DVD Review, HotDog, Total Film and Empire, to name but a few.
Barry’s heart was also in screenwriting, however, and a couple of years ago he co-wrote a comic based on George Romero’s Day of the Dead with his friend Sam Hutchinson.
The comic was nominated for an award at a horror festival in Italy and it was here he met Milan and Marko.
“Over a coffee we struck up a friendship and I pitched myself for the job of writer on the sequel to their film, Zone of the Dead,” explained Barry.
“After that I went away, wrote a treatment based on their notes and got the job.
“The script is finished and will hopefully be released next year.”
However, a chance to work on Milan and Marko’s horror flick, Nymph, came about by chance when Barry lost his job in late 2012.
“I was living and working in Liverpool as a Narrative Designer for Sony PlayStation, but the studio was shut down at the end of the year along with everything we were working on, so at the start of 2013 I moved back to Dundalk.
“During the summer of 2013 the guys approached me about another project they were working on for a September shoot, which was NYMPH. From there I worked on the script throughout the summer, and moved to Madrid in September to write video games for Gameloft.”
Barry is still in Madrid to this day but insists he loves what he is doing and is overjoyed at seeing his work on the big screen.
“It’s a surreal experience because I grew up watching horror films in my aunt Patricia Donnelly’s video shop (McConky’s, long since closed), so to finally see something that you’ve written come to life like that is pretty cool, and I think that Milan Todorovic – the director – did a fantastic job of taking what was on the page and making it work on the screen,” he said.
Eic Pictures Group will handle the worldwide rights to ‘Nymph’, which stars screen legend Franco Nero (Die Hard 2, Django Unchained), Kristina Klebe (Halloween, Proxy) and Natalie Burn (The Expendables 2).
The film is about a sexy killer mermaid and debuts this week at the European Film Market in Berlin.
Check out the trailer above or the poster below.
The poster for Nymph
