| Don't Get Me Started | |
| Director: | Arthur Ellis |
| Producer: | Steve Clark-Hall |
| Starring: | Trevor Eve Ralph Brown Steven Waddington Lorna Heilbron |
| Music: | Roger Bolton |
| Cinematography: | Gilbert Taylor |
| Editing: | Michael Bradsell |
| Studio: | TiMe Medienvertriebs GmbH Skyline Films |
| Distributor: | British Film Institute |
| Runtime: | 76 minutes |
| Country: | United Kingdom Germany |
| Language: | English |
Don't Get Me Started is a 1994 Anglo-German film directed and written by Arthur Ellis. It was shown that year at the London Film Festival and at the 51st Venice Film Festival, before going on general release in British cinemas from the beginning of June 1995. The film stars Trevor Eve as Jack Lane, Ralph Brown as Larry Swift and Steven Waddington as Jerry Hoff.[1] It was the celebrated cinematographer Gilbert Taylor's final film.
Jack Lane, a murderer who has managed to get away with his crimes and build a new life for himself in suburbia, finds it difficult to give up smoking. He also struggles to overcome a sense of encroaching paranoia after meeting a stranger with a worrying interest in his past. When Lane finds out that the stranger is an investigative journalist who has discovered the truth about his identity, he resolves to take matters into his own hands.
The film was originally shown out of competition at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, where it was given the title Psychotherapy and ran for 98 minutes. Variety magazine later described the Cannes screening as "disastrous".[3] It was then withdrawn and re-edited under the supervision of Paul Cowan and Martin Walsh.[4]
Although set in London, it was filmed mostly on location in Cologne and Düsseldorf.[3]
Don't Get Me Started was regarded by critics as interesting but slight. Peter Matthews of Sight and Sound, although celebrating the film's "witty touches", viewed it as offering "scarcely more than dry conceits and tickling wordplay".[5] Variety, meanwhile, praised Eve's "excellent" performance and conceded that the film was a "much tighter piece of work" than the original edit shown at Cannes, but concluded that it was "a neat idea on paper that doesn't survive its journey to the screen".[3]