Although not a true-life story, ESSEX BOYS was inspired by a real-life incident. One snowy night in Essex police found three men shot dead in a Range Rover. Co-writer and director Terry Winsor takes up the story: "The newspaper article about the deaths aroused both Jeff Pope's (co-writer and producer) and my interest in what was happening in Essex at the time. Essex seemed to have become the centre of crime. That really got us going with regards to the history leading up to the images of the three guys dead in the Range Rover. They were found at the end of a lane in the snow. There only seemed to be the tracks of one vehicle going to the spot, and that really was the kick-off point for us writing about the sort of circumstances that might have occurred."
Jeff Pope concurs: "The murder was
the spark that started all this off. I always follow things like
that in the papers because they are so intriguing. This one was
especially interesting - three guys dead, no one knew how they
got there, or how had they been killed. It didn't look like they
had put up a struggle - it looked like they had been executed.
But it raised the question as to who would do that? We used that
as our starting point. But those are real people with real families,
so we didn't want to make it that story. Also, inevitably, when
we looked at the real story we found it was messy and confused.
You constantly find that real life is more mundane than you would
want your story to be. So, having established what happened, we
then moved on and created a piece of fiction but kept it in a
realistic framework. There is nothing happening in our story that
hasn t happened, or that couldn't happen somewhere."
The Inspiration