Directing

Adam William Cahill

Biography

Adam has always been a creative person and had initially longed to be a performer. He began to sing as soon as he could speak, and as early as six years of age he sang in karaoke bars and in his school choir. He also took part in school plays and went to drama classes. He wasn't much of a reader until he became enamoured with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy at fifteen, and felt compelled to read Tolkein's novels. This galvanised Adam's desire to take up creative writing. After finishing school he developed his skills as a video editor working for an alternative media group creating short documentaries. He would eventually use these documentaries in his college application portfolio, and as a result he was deemed eligible to skip the first year of a Media and Communications course. In college his attentions quickly turned from documentary film making to narrative drama, and he started writing stories again. In his final year of college, he wrote, produced, and directed his first short film, Inertia (2017). In 2016 he graduated from the University of Wolverhampton with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film Production. During his college tenure he'd spent time working in diverse capacities on various TV series that were being filmed in Ireland at the time. This included a role as Samuel Barnett's body double on Showtime's Penny Dreadful (2014). While on set he paid close attention to all of the production elements in order to get a better idea of how things operate on set, and became very friendly with the assistant directors and camera assistants. Adam wrote his first feature film, Follow the Dead (2020), a month after finishing college and went into production shortly thereafter, having taken a loan from the bank in order to invest in himself and his colleagues. Follow the Dead had a very successful film festival run, amassing nineteen awards and thirteen nominations from all over the world, including winning the Best Narrative Feature award at Kerry International Film Festival. The film is now streaming on Amazon. Adam is now the company director for Wild Stag Productions, and his ambition is to use the medium of film to tell affecting, thought-provoking stories, with an emphasis on making Irish genre films.