Film based on book by local man on general release
The award winning film Baghead, which is based on a short story by Westmeath man Lorcan Reilly, opens in cinemas around the country, including Mullingar, today Friday January 26.
“As a fan of cinema since I was a child, it is an amazing feeling to see my own name up on the big screen, and the knowledge that I have created a movie monster unlike any that has come before, that millions now around the world will experience,” Lorcan told the Westmeath Examiner from his office in Auckland.
Lorcan now lives in New Zealand with his wife Louise and their three-year-old daughter Aisling, and works as box office control planner for Sky TV in Auckland, reviewing and selecting movies.
Readers may remember Lorcan having appeared in the Westmeath Examiner last March, when he was the flag bearer for Westmeath in the Auckland St Patrick’s Day parade.
A native of Parsonstown, Mullingar, he attended Taughmon National School and St Mary’s CBS, Mullingar, before going on to study film and TV in Tralee.
Lorcan is the eldest son of Eddie and Ann Reilly (née Nally from Athlone). The family lived at Parsonstown, Taughmon, but have since moved back to Eddie’s native Rathmore, Ballymahon. They have three other children – Aideen, who is a hairdresser at Peter Mark in Mullingar, and Conrad and Kelvin, who both work in pharmaceuticals in Dublin.
Conrad is a former player with St Loman’s Mullingar and Kelvin still plays for them. Both are “big into hurling and football, but Lorcan was more into soccer”, their dad Eddie said.
He said Lorcan has sent him the trailer of Baghead and “it would frighten the daylights out of you”.
“It’s about some crowd that buy a pub and discover a lassie living in the cellar who can tell things about the dead,” Eddie remarked.
He said it is just one of several short stories that Lorcan has penned. As a short film, it “went round the world like a whirlwind, winning several awards, and was then picked up and made into a full length movie”.
Lorcan wrote the short film script for Baghead in 2017 while he was working in London. “It was the winning entry for the Shorts TV ‘The Pitch’ competition, who awarded us the funds to produce the short film,” Lorcan said.
Baghead played at film festivals around the world, and won multiple awards. That caught the attention of Studio Canal, who saw the short film, and subsequently bought the rights to adapt it into a feature film, he said.
The film opened nationwide across Ireland on January 26, and worldwide over the next few months.