Dev Patel’s 2024 action revenge flick is gnarly, surprisingly thoughtful, and was almost derailed by a broken hand. Here’s the astonishing story behind Monkey Man. Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, arrived in UK cinemas by a strange route. The story of a young man on a violent campaign to avenge his mother’s death sounds ... The bone screw that saved Dev Patel’s Monkey Man
Dev Patel’s 2024 action revenge flick is gnarly, surprisingly thoughtful, and was almost derailed by a broken hand. Here’s the astonishing story behind Monkey Man.
Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, arrived in UK cinemas by a strange route. The story of a young man on a violent campaign to avenge his mother’s death sounds like a no-brainer for a major studio like Universal. But the task of getting the martial arts movie over the line was more difficult than most. For a start, Patel never intended to direct it in the first place.
“I became a reluctant writer and then a sort of reluctant director”, he told The Hollywood Reporter. The Skins alum had originally pitched the idea to his Chappie collaborator, Neill Blomkamp as a project – but was persuaded to hop into the driver’s seat himself instead.
Scheduled to enter production in India just as the pandemic hit, for a moment it looked like Patel’s directorial debut would fall apart before a single scene was shot.
“I begged our financier not to shut us down a few weeks before principal photography,” the director revealed in a Reddit AMA. “I lost my initial production designer and [cinematographer] and the film was basically dead, then we pivoted and went to a tiny island in Indonesia where we could create a bubble in an empty hotel for the whole crew of nearly 500 people”.
The situation only got stickier from there. Strict border closures made shipping in new equipment almost impossible, so the crew had to make do with what they had. A broken camera meant strapping Patel’s iPhone to a tuktuk. A damaged crane meant swinging a camera over a crowd on a rope.
“I literally had two or three breakaway tables”, Patel told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. “I was throwing all these bad guys [around]… I call cut, and straight away we’re on our hands and knees trying to find all the pieces of balsa wood, and we’re gluing them back together for take two”.
But equipment wasn’t the only thing in need of a quick fix. “I broke my hand in the first big action scene, broke some toes, tore a shoulder, eye infections, bruises,” Patel told Variety.
That hand nearly derailed the whole film. A sneaky hop on a medical jet to Jakarta found a doctor willing to, literally, screw Patel’s bone back into place. The crew called it “the one screw that kept this production alive”.
Once the cameras had finished rolling, Netflix soon snapped up distribution rights for a cool $30m, hoping they had a simple “John Wick in Mumbai” on their hands. But finding the finished product too “gritty” for the Indian market, they quietly started shopping it around – which is where Jordan Peele stepped in. He persuaded Universal to pick up distribution rights for under $10m.
“He took us from this thing that was brushed under the carpet to putting us on top of the mantel piece,” Patel told Deadline.
Peele’s insistence on a cinema run seemed to pay off. The cheap-as-chips film made $35m at the box office, its combination of gnarly action and surprisingly political story proving catnip to critics and audiences alike.
Netflix was right about one thing, however. India’s film classification board, the CBFC, demanded cuts before it would sanction a release. Whether the body’s concerns related more to the fight scenes, or the portrayal of a right-wing Hindu nationalist as a villain, we might never know. The film never made it to Indian cinemas.
Monkey Man is available to buy and rent now.
