The stories we carry:
How a lifetime of experience shaped Dead Funny
By Mark Anthony, Nidd Films
Sometimes a small moment in something you are writing feels familiar before you understand why.
It might be a gesture, an object or the silence between two people. You follow the instinct, then later recognise an echo of something you studied, taught or lived through many years before.
Developing Dead Funny has brought several of those discoveries. It has made me think about how profoundly our experiences can shape what we notice, how we respond to others and the stories we choose to tell.
I think of it as literary osmosis: ideas gradually becoming part of us, until we no longer remember precisely where they began.
The presence of an absence
Strindberg’s Miss Julie has stayed with me partly through its attention to behaviour and the power held by ordinary objects. The Count’s boots allow his presence to be felt while he remains unseen.
I recognise something of that dramatic instinct in Dead Funny. There are familiar belongings whose significance rests in the relationships surrounding them. A glance or the way something is held may tell us more than an explanation.
My own experience of loss informs this. I often feel my mum’s presence. An everyday thing can bring a memory close with surprising force. Those experiences have shaped my interest in how love continues to inhabit our lives.
Voices that stay with us
In my first year teaching at Ashville College, I directed Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. I now wonder how much of its rhythm, humour and tenderness I have carried ever since.
Directing means listening repeatedly. You hear a line change as an actor discovers it. A pause acquires meaning. Gradually, you become attentive to the life between the words.
There are moments in Dead Funny where that attention feels important: a familiar exchange, an interruption, something left unsaid. I want the people to feel rooted in a community, with lives extending beyond the moments we see.
Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Büchner’s Woyzeck, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Shakespeare’s tragedies have also stayed with me. Their traces emerge in my interest in vulnerability, circumstance and the need to be understood.
Familiar ground, strange possibilities
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland feel particularly close to another part of my imagination.
Both make room for uncertainty, absurdity and wonder. They invite us to accept that familiar reasoning may only take us so far.
In Dead Funny, I am drawn to the point where an ordinary response meets something that cannot quite be explained. A moment can be funny and unsettling at once. The characters’ behaviour remains recognisable even when their circumstances are strange.
That is where my interest in naturalism meets the supernatural: in people responding honestly, with all their habits, affection and confusion.
A place that remembers
Nidderdale gives these ideas a particular home.
Local research changes how I see its buildings and landscapes. A mark in stone, a worn threshold or a fragment of someone’s history can make the past feel unexpectedly near.
Some of those details find their way into the film. They may pass quietly through a scene, offering a connection without insisting that it be understood immediately.
I like the possibility that an image might stay with someone, or acquire another meaning when remembered later.
Room to listen
The film grew from reflections on the fragility of life and the connections we share. Friendship gives it warmth; humour allows vulnerability to emerge in small, sometimes unexpected ways.
Alongside that, I keep returning to stillness.
There are moments I want to give room to breathe: a change in attention, a small gesture of care, the feeling of a place becoming quiet around us.
I hear possibilities in mandolin, harp and perhaps a gentle female voice, with a restrained Celtic influence. I also hear wind, distant wildlife and pauses where music can fall away.
Christina Rossetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter remains part of that thinking. Its seasonal imagery resonates with my interest in darkness, warmth and renewal. These ideas are still developing through conversations about the film.
Recognising what we carry
None of these influences arrived as a complete plan. Some became visible only after a scene was written. Others surfaced through a question or a tiny revision.
The audience need not recognise any particular reference. I hope the moments feel natural within the story and leave space for their own associations.
For me, discovering these connections has been a reminder that learning continues to work within us long after a lesson, a rehearsal or a first encounter with a book.
Years later, something returns. It finds its way into a gesture, a silence or a new story, carrying a little of who we were when we first encountered it—and who we have become since.
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