Post: The View from Here

I'm now back in rainy, windy Old Blighty, and have to crack on with the rest of post. The plan is still to show the film in Cannes this year, at least in the Market, which will mean filling in the online forms and, of course, paying for the screenings. Whilst sorting this out, the cut as it currently stands needs to go out to the various interested parties to see who - if anyone - will come on board as a co-producer. And while this is going on, I need to start looking around for alternative sources of funding, just in case no one comes on board. Plus I'm also supposed to be re-working an old, now out of print book for republication, and also getting on with the Bill Douglas documentary. No rest for the wicked (I'll leave you to guess who they are...) Nor filmmakers.

Picture Cutting Complete (ish)

We've now finished picture cutting - for the time being. The film runs 99 mins without credits. Now it's time to get feedback from various interested parties and see what they have to say. I'm happy with a lot of the film, and will be looking at the few things that I'm not sure about once I get back to Old Blighty and proper (i.e. bad!) weather. LA is tediously warm, and I'm looking forward to my car arriving to take me to LAX in about 3 hours' time (time enough for a final visit to Amoeba and the Cat and Fiddle while singing that Clash song I'm So Bored with the USA quietly to myself.)

The things that I'm not entirely sure of are the dreams, the first and last shots, the final scene and the start of the second pub scene. Apart from those things, I think the film has a stylistic coherence that I'm pleased with (a lot of long-ish takes, with the camera simply following the actors around; very simple blocking in general), some humour (mainly courtesy of the supporting characters, especially Steve Dineen's tie salesman), and also a quietly spooky feel to it (or so I've been told by the people over here to whom I've shown clips). I hope we can still make Cannes, but if not, it's not the end of the world, and however long it takes to get it fully completed from now, it won't be as bad as your average Bela Tarr shoot (I believe the great man has been trying to get his few film, The Man from London, completed for the last two years now). All being well, we'll have a fully finished film in a matter of months, not years...

98 Minutes and Counting

We now have a 98 minute cut of the film, which is certainly getting there. I've just emailed Wendy (the editor) a few pages of notes for what we should do for the next version of the film. Although we've had to control our urges (well, my urges, to be honest) to do everything in long takes (we'd have ended up with a 3 hour film otherwise), the film still has a convincing real-time feel to it, and a lot of the scenes are shot with a moving camera (our trusty and esteemed colleague Figgus Riggus in action!). So I'm quite pleased with the style of the film, and its overall pace. Once I get back to Blighty next week, I'll be showing it to various interested parties to get their feedback. Hopefully they won't ask for too many changes, especially reinstating the Busby Berkeley ending... Actually, I'm not sure what changes any one could ask for, other than the film be quicker, which I think would be wrong, so acquiescing to demands of various sorts may not be possible, other than demanding the finest wines available to humanity...