Writer x Director
HARDEY SPEIGHT
SCREENPLAYS
When All The Lights Went Out. The Last Hurrah.
Love Me, Hold Me, Always. Invitation to an Execution.
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“I believe cinema is a frontier. Absolutely. And the films I'm most interested in are the ones with that in mind. [2019]”― Jonathan Glazer
When All The Lights Went Out.
Logline
When the steelworks close, Michael chooses to take his own life, shattering his family.
As Penny finds love again, their sons wrestle with the demons of their fathers selfish act, and the broken miracle of his survival.
Genre - Drama
Directors Statement - taster
When All the Lights Went Out is an emotionally weighty British drama Inspired by films such as Manchester by the Sea, My Left Foot, and The Deer Hunter.
The storytelling is raw, intimate, and emotionally devastating. Set against the brutal beauty of South Wales, it explores the masculine pursuit of a heroic role, lost purpose, and the psychic cost of the industrial hollowing out of small communities.
The film is a gripping saga, a portrait of a family caught between grief and love, violence and care, realism and transcendence. It is not just a tragedy but a meditation on what survives, and can even flourish, when the lights go out.
Screenplay (Taster)
Film Treatment
“A haunting portrait of the working-class and inherited trauma. When All the Lights Went Out fuses the quiet realism of Manchester by the Sea with the operatic intensity of The Deer Hunter, tracing a father and son's broken relationship, bound together by a single violent act, that changes the course of their lives”
If you're interested in reading the full screenplay please contact me.
A pandora's box of cruel delights, Invitation to an Execution is 'Sexy Beast meets Severance' exploring our desensitisation to brutality, our complicity in consuming it, and our endless appetite for more - more thrills, more violence, more blood'.
Screenplay (Taster)
Invitation to an Execution
Logline
When petty gangsters Lenny and Vincent kidnap Mimi, daughter of a powerful businessman, they soon become pawns in a bigger game. Luckily Mimi likes games and wants to play too.
Genre - Crime Thriller
Directors Statement
Invitation to an Execution is a psychological gangster thriller that constantly shifts the ground beneath the audience. As allegiances flip between our two leads, the film reframes them in turn as hero and villain, victim and predator. It’s a study of power, cruelty, elitism and entitlement — and of how cinema itself toys with our hunger for violence.
At its core, the film interrogates the voyeuristic sadism baked into entertainment. Stories are engineered to sate our darkest impulses, and Invitation to an Execution makes that explicit: the audience isn’t just watching, they’re complicit — invited to witness, even crave, the inevitable death of its central figures.
Stylistically, the film lives in the echo chamber of the British gangster canon — Get Carter, Performance, Sexy Beast — while bending and fracturing its tropes. The genre’s hyper-masculinity, its fetishisation of violence, and its sidelined women are all on display, but here those archetypes are exposed, twisted, and turned back on themselves. Each character feels trapped — prisoners not just in the story, but in the genre’s conventions.
Visceral, surreal and unrelenting, Invitation to an Execution is a mind-bender pitched somewhere between David Lynch, Gaspar Noé and the Safdie Brothers. It refuses easy answers, instead cracking open Pandora’s Box: our desensitisation to brutality, our complicity in consuming it, and our endless appetite for more — more thrills, more horror, more blood.
Film Treatment
The Last Hurrah
(scenes from a mid-life crisis)
Logline
When Adam dies, his friends set off on a reckless road trip—an absurdly comic journey through grief, masculinity, and memory, eventually forcing them to confront the truth of Adams death.
Genre - Drama Comedy
Directors Statement
The Last Hurrah is a wildly absurd, darkly satirical portrait of grief and masculinity in freefall. When three friends — Marco, Ewan, and Stefan — reunite after the death of their old uni pal Adam, whose possible suicide haunts them, they make a pact to recreate a road trip from their youth. Still dressed in their funeral suits, what begins as a solemn ritual soon unravels into farce, as their attempts to “perform” grief warp into something stranger.
The film probes the contradictions of modern masculinity: men conditioned to suppress emotion who, when faced with loss, can only express it obliquely — through bravado, competition, or misplaced performance. Their stoicism gives way to comedy; repression fractures into moments that are tragic, surreal, and ridiculous — from talking dodos to flying dildos.
Adam himself becomes a paradoxical presence. His absence haunts every frame, yet his figure lingers in visions, in gestures, in ambiguous background details that suggest he has been with them all along. On second viewing, a fourth shadow, a fourth hand, a fourth body emerges — the friend they cannot let go of.
Stylistically, the film is at once naturalistic, sensory, and deeply human, whilst spiralling into the absurd and poetic. The Last Hurrah examines the fragile illusion of being, where life and death sit in uneasy proximity, and where the lust for life and the pull of self-destruction are not opposites but mirror images — two sides of the same desperate search for meaning..
Film Treatment
Screenplay (Taster)
'A film about dildo's, dodo's and death, The Last Last Hurrah is satirical black comedy portrait of the male ego in free-fall - at once hilarious and profound - it is the story of modern masculinity struggling to shift into a new gear'.
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“A bruising yet tender portrait of survival, Love Me, Hold Me, Always transforms the ordeals of systemic neglect into raw poetry, asking whether love can endure when survival itself is under siege.”
Love Me, Hold Me, Always
Logline
Fresh out of prison, Chrissie searches for her lost siblings and mother - an urgent descent through an urban underbelly, in a fragile bid to reunite a broken family.
Directors Statement
Love Me, Hold Me, Always is a desperate love story — not romantic but familial — forged in the margins of a society that erases the poor and invisible. At its centre is Chrissie, released from prison with nowhere to go, trying to rebuild a family out of scraps. Her journey reflects the fate of many ex-convicts: damaged and dehumanised long before release, then abandoned by a threadbare social net.
This film is rooted in lived experience. I know that cornered existence — wild, feral, dangerous — where drugs, violence, and criminality are not choices but survival. That proximity to the edge, where systems fail and people disappear, is what drives me to tell this story.
Formally, the film balances raw realism with fleeting moments of poetry. It is unflinching but empathetic, transforming grime and institutional decay through Chrissie’s gaze into something strangely tender. Her longing casts a fragile glow over her brutal world, raising the question: is her dream of redemption survival — or delusion?
Thematically, the film interrogates systems that fracture families and punish care when it exists outside sanctioned structures. It confronts incarceration, housing precarity, and generational poverty, while exposing Britain’s wider contradiction: lives lived in the shadows of billboards screaming “Dream Big” and “You Can Be Anything.” Chrissie embodies this tension. Raised on slogans of aspiration yet crushed by neglect, she clings to the belief that love alone can save her — even as the world proves otherwise.
This is not “poverty porn” nor a sensationalised portrait of working-class life. Its lineage is closer to Nil by Mouth: unsentimental, brutal, but truthful. Love Me, Hold Me, Always is more than a narrative; it is a raw case study of what happens when love collides with systemic neglect.