Began shooting in October 2008 with only a £3000 budget which was upped to £5000 total shoot budget by the end of filming 4 weeks later. The total budget to get it to market was 4 times its shoot budget.
The script's first draft was penned in 2004 when director Kris McManus first met Chris Manns (Big Man Barrett) who had been in Travelling circles for sometime. The two thought a Traveller movie could be worth a watch, but naively conceived as a horror with the Travellers playing straight villains. The re-write which happened 2 weeks prior to the shoot decided to challenge that stereotypical view and question who the villains of the piece really are.
The Bar-knuckle boxing sequence did not exist in the script until a week into shooting when director Kris McManus suggested it after the film-makers were told the Barn they had been lent as a production base had hosted Traveller brawls in the past. McManus choreographed the fight with it 2 pugilists Shane Sweeney (Chris) and Dean Jagger (Martin) in one afternoon then shot the scene the same evening over six hours. Extras were called in with virtually zero notice and as a result many of the fight crowd are the same actors from the opening pub scene. In fact Tom Geoffrey (Andy Baxtor) and Alex Edwards (Dan Marsden) are also in the crowd disguised in hoods to make up the numbers.
Several of the actors / extras are or have real life connections to travellers and former bare-knuckle fighter and rules man Joe Bowers (a Romany Traveller) acted as advisor on the film. His wealth of knowledge on the subject of bare-knuckle fighting led to Joe being cast as the fights 'Rules Man' in the penultimate battle between Martin and Chris.
Charley Boorman's cameo was not 'Deliverance' inspired as most reviews suggest but down to the requirement of having a known actor in the film and one that brought a comic irony to a character who was a grumpy, biker-hating anti-adventurer - things Charley can't be accused off.