Phoenix Nights and Peep Show actor Neil Fitzmaurice shows off at Cannes Film Festival

May 20 2009 By Staff Reporter

PHOENIX Nights and Peep Show star Neil Fitzmaurice is leading the charge of Merseyside talent at the Cannes Film Festival.

The 39-year-old actor and stand- up comedian wrote and co-produced the long-awaited Charlie Noades RIP, which had its world premiere at the prestigious film festival on Monday.

The film, made on a shoestring budget and shot entirely on location in Liverpool, was shown at the Palais cinema, the most famous in the French seaside resort.

It will be repeated next week in a larger screen at the same venue.

Neil, whose brother Tony is a producer on the North Star Productions’ movie, said: "I am incredibly proud. Tony has done an amazing job and I am really proud of him too.

"We are looking to fly the flag for Liverpool.

"It has been tough to get this far but we just would not give up. We shot the film on fumes.

"If you consider a low-budget movie in this country costs about £3m-4m, we did it on about one- tenth of that."

Fitzmaurice, who lives in Knowsley and regularly comperes his weekly comedy nights at the Slaughterhouse pub in Liverpool city centre, wrote the screenplay seven years ago but funding problems meant filming did not start until 2007.

The comedy is his follow-up to 2000’s Going Off Big Time, and has a cast including John Thomson, John McArdle and Suzanne Collins, as well as Phoenix Nights alumni Justin Moorhouse and Dave Spikey.

Based around an old scrapyard, the plot involves secret diaries, missing gold and a band of misfits who spend their days trying to make a living in a business which belongs to a different time.