On most weekday evenings during the Covid years, two small green dots glowed on a Zoom screen.
On one side of Dublin, filmmaker and actor Gerard McKenzie hunched over a laptop; on the other, in Louth, John McFadden paged through notes dense with arrows, beats, and scene math.
They showed up six days a week. They argued. They re-blocked scenes that already worked. And when one flagged, the other pushed.
“I asked him straight out,” McKenzie remembers. “Do you want to keep going?”
RM Block
“One hundred per cent. There’s no turning back,” McFadden replied.
They call it the climb. The long, oxygen-thin stretch of a decade spent writing without the relief of a feature credit. Both men are in their fifties. Both are dyslexic.
Both have been at this long enough to watch peers get their breaks, change careers, or simply stop. They didn’t.
McKenzie’s day job would have been reason enough. For 15 years, he has run Jump Films, producing story-led commercials, corporate pieces, and shorts; work that taught him how to marshal crews, manage budgets, and deliver under pressure. Alongside it, he kept acting. Classes, theatre in the early days, roles in his own shorts so he could feel what dialogue does in a mouth, how a beat lands in a body, where truth hides between lines.
“Acting lets me interrogate the page,” he says. “You learn what an actor can actually play.”
McFadden, by contrast, burrowed down into the machinery of drama. Ask him about a scene and he’ll talk about conflict, plot development, and the idiosyncrasies of a character.
What’s withheld that the audience still feels. Friends joke that he treats structure like a watchmaker, a hundred tiny calibrations that make the whole thing sing.
Dyslexia, he says, didn’t slow him; it rewired him. “I hear a story,” he shrugs. “Rhythm first. Then I build the logic that earns it.”
Their partnership began in 2012, when McFadden sent McKenzie a script. McKenzie, already producing, saw a voice he could trust. Humane, funny, prickly in the right places.
They started working together and haven’t stopped. A curious twist of fate. Both men were born in Co Louth, McFadden from Ravensdale, McKenzie born there before moving to Portmarnock.
“We might have ended up in the same classroom,” McKenzie laughs. “Instead, we met on a script.”
The shorts came first. Over the years, their films travelled to 40-plus festivals, and On the Spectrum, inspired by McKenzie’s own daughter’s autism, picked up awards across Europe and North America.
The festival laurels helped, but the pair insist the real pay-off was repetition: write, shoot, cut, learn, repeat. “Shorts taught us discipline,” McKenzie says. “They also taught us the humility of the bin. Plenty went in.”
After 10 years of pitching to Screen Ireland, Jump Films has finally opened the door. McKenzie is now producing a short with emerging Irish talent, an opportunity to prove his company on the national stage while helping nurture the next generation of filmmakers.
Now they’re hiking toward a bigger summit, their debut feature, a dystopian thriller set inside a rehabilitation clinic where the vulnerable are managed for profit.
The protagonist, Rene Dupont, checks in for help and discovers manipulation at the hands of lead counsellor Jacob, a system nudging its guests toward their own demise. The theme is blunt and timely. Freedom eroded by institutions, addictions, censorship, and control by stealth.
They write underdogs because they are underdogs. Flawed, stubborn, allergic to easy victories. “We side with characters who earn redemption,” McFadden says.
“Not saints. People like us, battered by systems bigger than them.” McKenzie nods: “And as an actor, I’m always chasing the playable contradiction. If the line is tidy, it’s probably wrong.”
Momentum is real. Their project, The Color of Silence is currently in development with Los Angeles-based Samaco Films, led by executive producer Franco Sama.
It’s a signal that their voice travels beyond Ireland and that the years of quiet work are starting to hum. It hasn’t made the climb easier, just more purposeful. They still meet relentlessly. They still re-break scenes, then re-break them again.
Their differences are the engine. McKenzie brings producer toughness. Calendars, call sheets, a director’s eye for blocking and coverage, and an actor’s insistence on truth. McFadden brings forensic craft.
Cause and effect, set-ups that invisibly pay off, dialogue that sounds unpolished because it’s finally human. Dyslexia threads through both men’s processes, not as a hurdle but as a lens. They feel the story in rhythm, picture it spatially, and trust performance over prose.
Breaking through in your fifties is not the industry’s favourite narrative, but it might be its most necessary right now. Audiences snap to authenticity, and investors quietly look for teams who finish what they start.
McKenzie and McFadden can point to years of finished work, a production company that knows how to deliver, a writer who can tear a scene apart and stitch it back stronger, and an actor-director who understands what will live on set.
“The mountain metaphor sticks because it’s true,” McKenzie says. “The closer you get to the summit, the harder the air. But the view keeps opening up.”
McFadden smiles. “And we didn’t come this far to turn around.”
Their debut feature is, at heart, a fight for personal sovereignty. A warning about soft coercion wrapped in a human story.
It’s also a mirror of the men who wrote it. Dyslexic, determined, slightly out of step with the standard route, and therefore capable of seeing paths others miss.
And now, they’re looking for companions for the final stretch of the climb. Investors who see themselves in the underdog story, who believe that sometimes the most powerful voices arrive late, but arrive ready.
To find out more information, visit jumpfilms.ie
