Over 20 Years, ‘Kung Fu Deadly’ Filmmakers Made a Supernatural Action Comedy That Blended ‘80s Favorites: ‘To Make it Coherent Felt Like a Really Fun Challenge’

Some genre movies are stripped-back exercises: lean, mean and to the point. Some films, like “Kung Fu Deadly,” take the opposite approach, dipping into multiple genres in a sumptuous visual feast.

“Deadly” follows Danny and Frank (Steven He and Michael Tient), two hapless exterminators in Dublin, as they are called upon to combat a supernatural evil. Audiences at genre festivals from Austin’s Fantastic Fest to Spain’s Sitges Film Festival have received it warmly, and it will have a wider distribution plan this spring.

Director Fergal Costello says he and cinematographer Shing-Fung Cheung thought about the visual style of this fantastical slacker tale as “primary color that’s covered in grime.”

“I just thought that was a visual language that reflected Danny’s journey,” the director says. “He has so much depth, color and heroism inside him — if he just believed in himself and wiped the grime off, wiped off the self-doubt. We wanted the movie to feel that, while being very colorful, because I frankly don’t think movies are colorful enough at the moment. Life is there and bursting out through the frame — you just have to look for it.”

Yet getting to that point of production was decades in the making. Writer Paddy McDonald says “Deadly” originally developed alongside fellow Irish writer Paul Markey and was born from their love of martial arts movies, from Shaw Brothers classics to Jackie Chan blockbusters.

“It’s been a bit of a labor of love for quite a long time,” McDonald says. “It was an idea I came across with him 20 years ago. It’s been bouncing around my life a little bit since then, but properly started developing it in 2011. I was living in Australia at the time. There’ve been a few different iterations of it and many, many drafts. I was living away from Ireland and moved back a couple of years ago and did a page one rewrite, bringing it back home. That’s when it started to make the most sense and had its original Irish voice.”

Once it came to filming, finding the right chemistry between the two central characters was central — and could help ground all of the disparate genres the film plays with.

“If we root the film in the relationship with the two boys together, Danny and Frank, then I think we can get away with all the other tones and not feel like they’re clashing together,” Costello says. “If we experience this clash happening through their eyes as they come into the movie and become more than just those lovable losers, the monsters and the magic and the comedy and the horror stuff will all work. Making the relationship between the two boys work was critical.”

Just as Danny and Frank found themselves trying to clean up supernatural entities, Costello and McDonald brought a parallel ethos to the set, where they mounted an eco-friendly production. In fact, it was Ireland’s first to be powered by green hydrogen fuel cells, versus diesel. It’s a milestone that the team is passionate about advocating for, as they can demonstrate the great results of environmentally friendly productions.

“While we were shooting there, we were able to power the entire thing with green hydrogen,” McDonald says. “The differences are how silent it is, how clean it is, how you can control these things. It’s like the difference between a diesel car and an electric car. You can turn it on remotely, you can turn it off remotely. There’s also data available to a production to understand the actual amount of energy that’s actually required. Once we got it set up and running, it was seamless. Whilst they’re a bit anxious about it at the beginning, I ended up loving it because it was so dependable, it was so quiet, it was so clean. It was a really positive experience.”

Much like taking the environmental challenge head-on, Costello says “Kung Fu Deadly” was a complex journey he couldn’t say no to.

“The idea of all those tones clashing together and trying to make it coherent felt like a really fun challenge, to be honest,” he says. “It wasn’t something I was very fearful of. It was something I wanted to jump at.”