Put Money in Thy Purse

One of the routes one has to take making a film with a very small budget is that one frequently has to use friends and friends of friends to fill certain crew roles. (In the case of Folie, I also had friends in the cast, but that would be a disservice to their professionalism; they are also professional actors and I wanted to work with them again after an earlier collaboration.) The advantage of this is that they are usually willing to work for much less than the going rate - which is nothing other than the tried and tested 'Corman Method', in which the great Roger Corman used to say 'get students, they're cheap'. This has mainly paid off with Folie, and we have gotten this far with our rather limited funds, but no film is ever made without unexpected problems arising.

Hence the current post. Most of the postproduction team have been brought onto the project by my co-producer, and they have done a great job so far. It's exciting to see the final layers being added to the film, in particular the subtleties of the soundtrack. We're adding a lot of non-diegetic sound (look it up on Wikipedia, kids), and I hope that we can also add a few sequences where there is almost no sound at all. (The Italian gangster film Gomorrah uses episodes of near silence to great effect, as did Edgar Reitz in Heimat II.) I've always had a silence fetish, and I hope this will be in evidence in Folie. But, as with all such budgetarily challenged projects, people have to go off and earn money on real jobs. Heck, I've even done it myself and am looking for paying jobs as I write. So we are at a standstill once more whilst a key player in the operation does properly paying work, and I am left waiting and sending emails which rarely receive a reply. It's a bit like making a film with Lord Lucan. But, if you're going this route to make a film, then it's something you have to live with, and get through. I don't want to begrudge anyone the right to earn some cash. Speaking of such things, the film itself needs cash...

Perhaps we should rechristen this not the Corman Method, but the Orson Method, as a homage to the great man's production techniques. I'm thinking in particular of the Othello shoot, in which, when the money ran out, cast and crew were left stranded in hotels whilst Orson went off to act in other people's films. It took him four years to make the film. I can recommend Michael MacLiammoir's Put Money in thy Purse, which is a great book about the making of the film. He was Iago to Welles's Moor, and therefore had firsthand experience of what it's like to make a film piecemeal. At least they were holed up in decent hotels. But as a motto, Put Money in Thy Purse both explains the current impasse on Folie, and also sums up the need for me to raise some more money to get the film finished. Like the Lord Our God, I will no doubt be paying for the rest of Folie myself, as investors seem to have gone bankrupt. Or joined Lord Lucan in darkest Africa...

The End is Nigh!

I don't want to make any definite statement at the moment, but it seems that we are now finally very close to finishing, after a rather long period of postproduciton, one that could be safely described as a fucking nightmare. (What film isn't, though?) A cast and crew screening will probably take place at some point before the end of the year, although it's a bit early at the moment to start thinking about anything as organised as a festival strategy...

And the News Is...

Well, there isn't any. Still trying to get the final mixing sessions set up, without a great deal of success so far. We could easily have the film finished by Christmas, but it all depends on what - if anything - we can get done either this month or next. It's extremely frustrating to have gotten so far only to have the film still unfinished, especially when festivals are starting to show an interest in it. Memo to self: give up filmmaking as soon as possible...