The film is about what happens when real people do ghastly things to each other, and sure, it shows those things because that's the tone of the film … - Olly Blackburn

I suppose my mega heroes are the films of Michael Powell and Sam Peckinpah. I would have loved to have looked over their shoulder. I’m a bit of a cinephile. I love cinema. It’s an amazing medium. I can go and watch anything from very, very arty films to huge Hollywood spectaculars and everything in between.

Donkey Punch is a very extreme, real-world thriller – it’s about characters and events that are based in reality and it pushes them into very dark and extreme situations where they have to do things that they would never have imagined. The film shows all this quite realistically and doesn’t pull its punches.

I knew we needed brave actors - the story called for scenes that might be frightening to some - and we needed it to be real and believable.