Rich Peppiatt On Making Politically Charged Irish Title ‘Kneecap’

Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key people shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week, we’re talking to writer-director Rich Peppiatt, whose debut feature Kneecap has taken the indie world by storm since it launched at Sundance last year. The Irish-language film about Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap, which was snapped up by Sony Pictures Classics last year, has been selected as Ireland’s entry for the Best International Oscar race. The film has notched up six BAFTA nominations and won seven BIFAs. He tells us about the challenges of putting that feature together and maps out what’s next. 

Rich Peppiatt isn’t afraid of failure, so long as it’s on his own terms. When developing his subversive and politically charged Irish-language feature Kneecap, which has taken the festival and awards circuits by storm since it launched at Sundance just over a year ago, the British writer-director recalls being repeatedly asked to make the film about real-life Belfast rap trio Kneecap as a low-budget “hybrid doc”, but he was resistant to that notion. 

“I was getting overtures from people to do the film as more of a hybrid-documentary with a lower budget and I pushed back,” Peppiatt tells Deadline. “I knew if we did it my way – which would be more expensive – that it would be really good, and I held out on that. If you allow other people to influence your creative vision too much and one day you wake up and the film hasn’t worked, you’re always going to wonder, ‘What if I made that the way I wanted to make it? Would the results have been different?’ I think I would find it really difficult to live with. Failure on your own terms is just part of life, so I was very resistant to caving in on that.”

Fortunately, it paid off. The film’s Park City premiere would mark the beginning of what would be an incredible 12-month trajectory for the £4M ($5M) film about three hedonistic Irish speakers who form hip-hop group Kneecap and become the unlikely figureheads of a civil rights movement to save their mother tongue. Set in post-Troubles Belfast, the trio have to overcome police, paramilitaries and politicians who try to silence their defiant sound, whilst their anarchic approach to life often makes them their own worst enemies. The film is laden with sex, drugs and music with the Kneecap members playing themselves as they lay down a global rallying cry for the defence of native cultures.

The fiercely original title, which stars Naoise Ó Cairealláin aka Móglaí Bap, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh aka Mo Chara and JJ Ó Dochartaigh aka DJ Provaí as well as Michael Fassbender, was quickly swooped up by Sony Pictures Classics in Sundance before winning the festival’s NEXT Audience Award. Since then, it’s been selected as Ireland’s official entry for the Best International Oscar race and last month, it won seven British Independent Film Awards, including the top honor for Best British Independent Film. It’s up for six BAFTAs including Best British Film and Outstanding Debut by a British writer, director or producer. It’s backed by Northern Ireland Screen, Screen Ireland and the BFI while AC Independent and Charades repped sales. 

“I think we were all surprised at the traction it got in Sundance, and it was very welcome after,” says Peppiatt, who recently just signed with Anonymous Content and WME. “I’ve had a handful of films that I’ve tried to make in the past that have crashed into walls somewhere along the line and never got made and that’s the nature of the game. But it was certainly a different feeling with this one – it felt like the stars were aligning on it.” 

Belfast beginnings

Peppiatt had long been interested in the idea of writing and directing a music biopic. “I felt it was a genre that was very tired, and I wondered if there was a different way to approach it rather than at the end of an artist’s career looking back,” he says. 

But he was also searching for a human story that could possibly link to a bigger political backdrop. No stranger to challenging the status quo, Peppiatt began his career as a journalist who hit UK media headlines in 2011 after writing a resignation letter to Daily Star proprietor Richard Desmond, which accused the paper of being unethical and promoting Islamophobia. That letter went viral after being leaked to the Guardian newspaper and Peppiatt would go on to become a critic of tabloid behaviour and even gave evidence at the Leveson Inquiry. 

After that, he made a stand-up comedy show about his experiences as a reporter dubbed One Rogue Reporter, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2012. That stage show was turned into a documentary with the same name, starring Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan and John Bishop, and was picked up by Netflix. Through his production company Naughty Step, he directed shorts Backseat Driver and Grounded, with the latter being long listed for the 2020 Academy Awards. 

But it wasn’t until he relocated to Belfast, Northern Ireland, just before the pandemic and birth of his second child, that his feature debut would begin to take shape. Intrigued by a poster he saw advertising Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap, Peppiatt decided to attend the event. 

“I’m very into hip-hop and when I saw them, I felt that their sound had quite a classical, old-school hip-hop sound,” recalls Peppiatt. “While I didn’t understand what they were saying, they had this rawness and authenticity about them. And beyond that, there was a crowd of about a thousand or so people that were going mad for them.” 

Peppiatt was aware of the political situation which was happening at the time over the fight for recognition of the Irish language in Northern Ireland, a language only 6,000 people spoke there. “There was this interesting political backdrop of the fight for recognition of an indigenous language and then you’ve got this band, who have never released an album, weren’t signed and rapped in a language that not many people speak. It didn’t scream that it was the basis for a film that would get made but I kept thinking, ‘What if?’”

Peppiatt was also drawn to seeing young, working-class men in tracksuits whose politics ran counter to stereotypes so often depicted in European media, which often shows working class men embracing right wing politics of hate. “Kneecap shows that you can be someone who embraces street culture and is working class and young and disenfranchised without wanting to start blaming it on people who have less than you.”

Peppiatt then joined forces with documentary producer Trevor Birney’s Belfast-based Fine Point Films and after many failed attempts to reach the band, a colleague of Birney’s admitted she used to date a member of the band and passed on his number. After a few meetings over pints, the pair were able to convince Kneecap to entrust them with their story. Irish distributor Wildcard then boarded as a co-producer and the project snagged development funding from the Mother Tongues award, backed by UK distributor Curzon and French sales agent Charades, which was targeted foreign-language projects from UK-based scriptwriters.

The pandemic would ultimately slowdown the early momentum of the project. “It was a blessing and a curse in a way,” admits Peppiatt. “It slowed everything down but also gave me the headspace to really sit down and write.”

For the band, their live music shows came to an abrupt halt and while Peppiatt recalls their disappointment in being unable to perform live, that time ultimately strengthened ties between him and the band. “Sometimes I would bring a crate of Guinness down to the band and we’d sit in their garden socially distanced and drink and talk through the script. There was a sense of disappointment for them because it felt like Covid threatened to stall their momentum, but the film felt like something that could maybe, just maybe, be the thing that would get them back on track.” 

Commitment and bravery

Kneecap was shot in Belfast and a small town south of the border called Dundalk across 24 days in March 2023. It’s described as a biopic, but Peppiatt admits some parts of the story are fictitious. While the film is fun and raucous (and yes, there is a scene where the band takes what they think is cocaine but turns out to be ketamine), Peppiatt stresses that it was much more serious affair during the shoot. 

“People think the film was just one big piss up or something but there really was a huge amount of commitment and craft and bravery from the boys to allow what we see on screen to happen,” he says. 

He points to the storyline with Ó Caireallain’s mother as being a particularly sensitive as she took her own life while Peppiatt was writing the script. “It was devastating because she had mental health issues and was agoraphobic,” he says. Conscious of the affect this would have on the rapper, Peppiatt says they considered removing all scenes with his mother (whose character is played by Simone Kirby). Ó Caireallain, says Peppiatt, was insistent on keeping the scenes in, deciding that it would be a better dedication to his mother to tell the truth in the story rather than gloss over it. The film is dedicated to her in the end credits. 

“It was so brave of him because imagine then, 18 months later, when you’re still in a state of grieving, having to walk on a film set and have someone playing your own mother in a situation that very much mirrors your relationship with her and you have to go through all of that stuff again,” says Peppiatt. “It was really tough for him.” 

Peppiatt also credits the film’s DOP Ryan Kernaghan in helping him bring to life more than 1,000 storyboards for the film and “indulging” his vision to shoot the film in a less traditional way. 

“It was a hugely laborious operation to do that but in order to capture that level of anarchy on a tight timeframe and a tight budget and pull of the creative and challenging shots, we knew we couldn’t shoot it in a traditional way, which would be to get your coverage, where you get your wide, you get your mid, you get your close up and if you’ve got a bit of time, maybe do that little creative shot at the end.”

He continues: “It was a matter of getting the creative shots and maybe one safety shot and then shooting from edit,” he says, admitting that he did get a lot of pushback from that approach. “I did get comments like, ‘Who do you think you are? The Coen Brothers shoot from edit – you haven’t made a film before.’ It was a fair comment.

“But I knew that if I didn’t do it this way, I would have to do it in a more traditional way and end up with a bunch of rushes that look like every other film. It comes back to this thing where I was ok with failing, but it had to be on my terms. And it was always a conversation with the band as well and they were hugely supportive.” 

Fassbender was the last cast member to board the project. The actor was renowned in Northern Ireland for his performance in Steve McQueen’s Hunger where he played IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. When writing the role of exiled IRA member Arlo, who is Ó Caireallain’s father, Peppiatt had that characterization in mind. “You could see him as that sort of figure and Michael was the obvious choice for that.” 

A week after receiving the script, Fassbender texted Peppiatt to talk about the project and said that Bobby Sands was one of his favorite characters. “I think the opportunity for him to play a character in that same realm, but later in life, is sort of the continuation of the exploration he’s been having as an actor with the cause of republicanism,” says Peppiatt. “And beyond that he knew it would just be a good craic.” 

Next steps

Twelve months after that Sundance premiere and on the eve of the Oscar nominations, Peppiatt is grateful that the film has resonated with audiences all across the globe. “In specificity, there exists great universality,” he says, citing some of his favorite films such as Amélie and Trainspotting as being good examples of films that are “very, very specific in a sense of place and time.” 

“I think Kneecap does that and tells a bigger story and it’s been really gratifying to travel around the world and have people from all over the world react to the film.” 

The writer-director has formalized his relationship with producer Birney, with the duo forming new production outfit Coup d’Etat. They have already optioned Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick’s Bad Bridget, which tells the story of women who left Ireland for North America between 1838 and 1918 during the Irish famine. Peppiatt is currently adapting the script and will also direct the project. He’s also in talks to do a project in the U.S. with a U.S company but set in the Caribbean. 

“I do think that I don’t deserve any of this and I really pinch myself sometimes,” he says. “But I don’t take any of it too seriously. My happy place is being at home with my wife and kids, away from all of that. I want to keep working in Ireland. This is my home.”