Production: Deadheading

Director Jack Hughes and DOP Ash Connaughton on the Blackmagic URSA Cine 12K LF, exploding sheds, blending genres and finding the right look for Deadheading, a dark comedy about one woman’s murderous pursuit of an allotment

Words Nicola Foley

Director Jack Hughes’ zippy dark comedy Deadheading follows Doreen (Stephanie Fayerman), a woman determined to fulfil her dying husband Jim’s (Kevin McNally) final wish of securing an allotment plot – even if it means bumping off a few people to climb the waiting list. Made on a modest budget and shot in just a few days, this cosy, quintessentially English short has already picked up several awards, including the fiction prize at this year’s Sony Future Filmmaker Awards.

The roots of the story came from a news piece Hughes read in 2023, which looked at the decline of allotments as land was increasingly eaten up by housing developments. He felt it was an important topic to bring to light, but wanted to do it in a way that felt fun. “The article interviewed someone who had been on an allotment waiting list for something like 25 years,” he recalls. “In heavily built-up suburban areas they’re incredibly valuable pieces of land, so from a development perspective you can understand why people would want to build on them. But at the same time, it’s such a shame because allotments are an incredibly important part of our social fabric, especially within working-class communities.

“That’s something that’s really important to me; representing those backgrounds on screen,” he continues. “Allotments originally came from wartime rationing, allowing people to grow their own food, and that history struck a chord. From there, I started asking myself: ‘How can I tell this story while giving it the dark-comedy edge that we love playing with?’”

The most important thing he and DOP Ash Connaughton had to get right was the tone – a delicate balancing act when the story’s heroine, whom the audience needs to be rooting for, is killing people left, right and centre. To make sure it hit right, “we deliberately made her murders feel very ‘old lady’ in the way they are carried out,” he laughs. “We avoided blood and gore and leaned into the absurdity of it all. The aim was to leave the audience conflicted about how they should feel, but ultimately hoping they’d almost forget she’d murdered anyone because they were invested in her story.”

Connaughton, who describes Deadheading as a ‘granny slasher’, loved the script immediately for its pitch-black humour but also the sweet love story at its centre. “Doreen’s doing something completely outrageous, but she’s doing it out of love for her husband and his dream. That’s what gives the film its emotional weight,” he explains. “Our earliest conversations revolved around one question: how do we make it funny while still making it heartfelt?”

Kevin McNally and Stephanie Fayerman’s performances were an essential ingredient. “They had worked together a long time ago and were already friends, so they had this wonderful chemistry together. There’s a scene where they’re talking in the flat about their situation, and Stephanie says the line: ‘If I could live my life again, I’d choose you.’ When we were filming that scene, it was so beautifully performed that members of the crew were genuinely welling up,” he shares. “Those performances are what hold the whole film together. They make the comedy land, but they also make Doreen’s motivations feel completely believable and emotionally grounded.”

The director and DOP were inspired by the tone of old Ealing comedies, but visually the touchstone was Theatre of Blood, the Douglas Hickox film starring Vincent Price. “That film has such rich, vibrant colour, and we loved the contrast between its horror elements and its colourful aesthetic,” says Hughes. “Traditionally, horror tends to lean into cooler, desaturated palettes, but we wanted to go against that. We knew we wanted something much more vibrant and saturated.”

That decision was also partly a reaction to what they were seeing on the festival scene, namely the ubiquity of moody aesthetics, heavy grain and vintage optics. “We wanted a cleaner image while still retaining plenty of character in the lenses,” he explains.

This, plus the fact they wanted to use wide-angle lenses, led them to the Blackmagic URSA Cine 12K LF, a large format camera that offered a clean, detailed image while still delivering plenty of depth. They paired it with TLS Vega lenses – full of character but also clean. “Combined with the large format sensor and Blackmagic’s colour science, it became such a magical combination,” enthuses Connaughton. “It was exactly the look we were after.”

Throughout production, the URSA proved itself time and again to be the right choice, he continues. “The biggest factors were the large format sensor and the way Blackmagic RAW works, particularly in the newer camera. Although it’s a 12K camera, we actually shot Deadheading in 4K. It was a 4K image downsampled from the 12K sensor because we were working on a very low-budget production and simply didn’t have the resources to manage a full 12K or even 8K workflow.”

That downsampled 4K image was one of the things that made the camera such a compelling choice. “You’re still benefiting from the entire large format sensor, with all the advantages that brings in terms of image quality and noise performance, without needing the storage and post-production requirements of a full 12K workflow,” Connaughton elaborates. “When we tested the camera, it immediately felt like the right fit, and paired with the TLS Vega lenses it was a fantastic combination.“

With some of the film taking place during night exteriors, the large format sensor also provided them the low-light performance they needed. “When you’re working with a tight budget,” he adds, “those scenes can be difficult to light convincingly. Having that extra light-gathering capability really helped.”

For Hughes, meanwhile, the most impressive thing was the colour science. “We shot across 11 different locations in only four days, so naturally some locations were beautifully controlled while others weren’t. We simply didn’t have the luxury of arriving somewhere and spending hours rigging enormous diffusion frames or extensive lighting set-ups. So the dynamic range gave us an enormous amount of flexibility,” he explains.

“Working in Blackmagic RAW inside DaVinci Resolve meant we could recover highlights, lift shadows and balance shots in a way that would have been much harder with other workflows,” he continues. “That flexibility became incredibly valuable since our schedule was so tight.”

With only three days of principal photography and not much in the way of budget, the crew faced challenges along the way – not least figuring out how to shoot a dramatic sequence involving a shed exploding. The solution, says Hughes, was building a half-scale shed and simply blowing it up for real (‘a lot of fun, but also quite ambitious for a production of our size’), while the multitude of murders – which includes death by knitting needles – also caused some head-scratching, especially in terms of choreography and timing.

The biggest creative challenge, though, was making the world feel bigger than it actually was. “Our characters spend a lot of time in a tiny high-rise flat, and we wanted that environment to feel lived-in, interesting and cinematic rather than just cramped. We were constantly asking ourselves how we could give that small world a sense of scale,” explains Hughes. “Shooting on a large format sensor really helped with that, it gave those confined spaces so much more depth and allowed the environment to feel larger.”

The reception to the film has been far beyond what the filmmakers could have hoped for – and the Sony award was the cherry on the cake. “There was some incredibly strong competition, so for our little short film about an elderly couple and an allotment to win in Los Angeles was pretty special!” laughs Connaughton. “More seriously, cinema has been through a tough period since Covid, and there’s a lot of discussion about where the industry goes next. For me, films like Deadheading represent the kinds of original, distinctive stories that keep cinema exciting.”

Hughes, too, promises audiences something unique from the film. “At its heart, it’s about someone trying to fulfil the wishes of the person they love most. That’s something almost anyone can relate to. But we’ve paired that with a story that’s incredibly unusual. It takes something that’s quintessentially British – the culture surrounding allotments – and combines it with another thing that Britain has always done exceptionally well: dark comedy,” he sums up.

“Hopefully that combination gives audiences something they haven’t quite seen before, and the film stays with them long after they’ve watched it.”

This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Definition