Back (side) from Cannes

I spent a few days in Cannes last week, having what are euphemistically known as 'meetings'. This should mean, in normal (i.e. non film industry) circumstances, that you arrange to meet someone who might, perchance, be beneficial to your current endeavour, and that you meet at arranged said time and place, and business proceeds forthwith. In Cannes, however, that usually means that whoever you have arranged to meet isn't actually there when you turn up, and you then spend all your available time trying to leave messages for all the people you missed, while trying to see some films and having a bloody good time. Because, if you don't have the latter, the whole business is a waste of time. I mean, on the one hand, you have the great auteurs and a few geriatric critics expressing their belief that film is/can be/ought to be an art form here and there, but for most of us, it's not; it's sadly a load of old shite most of the time.

Look at the poor response Béla Tarr's marvellous The Man from London got in Cannes. Is this a recognition of art? No, it's a bunch of ignorant, self-appointed cultural arbiters (e.g. Simon Mellons or whatever he's called at The Grauniad) talking about that which they are not intelligent enough to talk about, except which parties they've been to. Whoever said there is no high culture or low culture, there's only culture, is clearly wrong. Most of our self-appointed experts are decidely low culture, and they wouldn't recognize a masterpiece if it came up behind them and had their way with their fat ignorant bottoms. Viva Béla!

Anyway, enough of ranting about the intellectually challenged. Better out than in, as Jung said. (Well, it might have been that Freudian who encouraged his patients to go to the toilet as often as possible.) There are vague filigrees of interest in Folie, from various parties in Europe, North America and the UK being the usual wastelands of the Challenged, as I think I shall refer to them from now on. We are still ploughing on with post, just in case. Wendy is trimming the film down a little, as I feel we could improve the pace somewhat. The film is 90% there, it just needs that little extra je ne sais quoi. (For the Challenged, that's French for 'I don't know', whose meaning is rather more along the lines of 'A Certain Ineffable Something'.)

I did manage to chill out on my last afternoon there on the wonderful Ile St Honorat, where I visited the C11th/12th fortified monastery, and generally tried to think about what really matters (in other words, Cannes wasn't on my mind much).

Congratulations, finally, to Christian Mungiu, whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days - which cost under £500,000 to make, had no stars and was about a tricky subject - won the Palme d'Or. I wonder which party Simon Mellons was at when that was screened?

Off to Cannes

Off to Cannes first thing tomorrow. I don't normally go this late in the festival, but was away last week in the wilds of North Wales, writing. While in Cannes, I hope to sign a distribution agreement for Folie à Deux, and also discuss festival strategy with the sales agent.

We are hoping to get a near-finished version ready by the end of June, so that we can get it into the Mannheim Film Festival, but that all depends on raising more money. Right now, the piggy bank is empty, and more of the old folding stuff needs to be procured ASAP.

I also hope to visit St Honorat and go to the monastery, catch the new Béla Tarr, The Man from London - the first time the great man has been in Competition - and of course visit the Scandinavian Terrace every day for Happy Hour. (The one place you're always guaranteed to find me.) Wih me luck. We need more cash, otherwise the film will remain an unseen and rumoured masterpiece...

Online Editor and Grader Needed

We are in search of some facilities and hard-working, inspiration-filled folk put at our disposal to online the film for next to nothing, and also to grade it. The film has been made on a wing and a prayer (OK, not forgetting Magners and Glenmorangie, with the odd spot of Thai massage), and we don't have the wonga to pay for a day's onlining, plus the marrying of the sound to the master. If you can help, or know of someone who can, drop me a line. We would need to do this probably early summer (e.g. June-ish), so that the film can be ready for autumn festivals.

Trailer Online in April

A trailer will be up online sometime during April, hopefully before Easter. A link will be put here, and also on www.myspace.com/891filmhouse.

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...

Editing

I'm currently editing the film in Los Angeles (the 'g' should of course be pronounced hard, like the narrator does in The Big Lebowski...) with Wendy Elford-Argent, who cut The Notebooks of Cornelius Crow. Folie is, of course, a very different film, and we have to trim out anything that reminds us of Crow. The film has gone down from 135 to 118 to 108 mins. Not bad for something with a shooting script of only 38 pages. We need to cut it down even further, of course. The dream sequences aren't really working at the moment, and the other characters tend to deflect too much from Adam Napier and Sally Scott's characters in the second half of the film, so they may well end up getting cut or judiciously trimmed. Adam and Sally are superb, IMHO, and the best of the rest at the moment is Steve Dineen as the wonderfully ridiculous tie salesman. That's all I have time for at the moment. More later.

BTW, Happy Birthday Sir John (Tavener)!

Cutting

We now have the first 4 pages of the script roughcut. The footage runs for about 15 minutes, so we're averaging about 3 minutes per page at the moment, rather than the traditional 1. Well, balls to tradition. The script for Stalker was apparently only 35 pages long, and the film was 161 minutes, which works out at about 4.5 mins per page. Anyway, it's looking good. We should have a roughcut of the whole film by January.

Mannheim

I spent all of last week at the Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival, where Folie had been invited to participate in the Co-Production Meetings. They generally invite projects that are still at script stage, so we were quite lucky to get in. Only one other film, an Italian film called Nemesis, had already been shot. I also spent most of my time there suffering from some sort of flu-like virus, which knocked me out completely for a day.

When not in meetings, I visited Heidelberg and also managed to catch a couple of films: a Turkish film called Times and Winds that used a lot of Arvo Pärt's music, a Swiss film called Stealth, a very low budget Polish film called This is Me Now and a couple of Kieslowski films that I'd never seen before, Short Working Day and The Calm.

Now that I'm back in front of my desk, I'm realising that I still need another few days to recover. Still, we have a lot of interest in the film. Fingers remain devoutly crossed.

Editing Begins

Editing begins this week. Last week was spent getting all the material digitised at Doghouse in Bristol, which was then Fed Exed to our editor Wendy in LA. I'm hoping she can cut a scene by next week in order to have something to show in Mannheim, but I'm not sure whether she'll have enough time to actually finish something by then. We're aiming to get the fine cut done by the end of January, and spend Febuary doing the sound and grading. Our first market screening will probably still be Cannes, where we hope to get a few festival scouts along to watch it...

The Movie Poster

The poster. At least for now. Photo by David Hamnett.

Lucas's Photos

Lucas, the character played in the film by Adam Napier, is a photographer. These are some of his pictures, as seen in the film. Photos by and (c) Louise Milne.

William Styron

William Styron, who wrote Sophie's Choice and Darkness Visible, the billiant memoir of depression that we've relied on a lot for Folie, has died. Obit here:

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article1951248.ece

Thank you, William. Sleep well. We'll raise a glass of whisky in your direction.

Cry God for Larry!

We wrapped yesterday. More posts will be uploaded once I've found time to re-enter the Pepys Zone (if you know what I mean). Or, to put it another way, once I've found time to do a John Evelyn (another C17th diarist, whose diary actually covers a much greater time span than Pepys).

But for now, a huge thank you to everyone who worked on the film. As Ray so memorably got his lines wrong: 'Cry God for Larry, England and St George!'

Day 11 - All Hallows

The biggie: the final scene. The morning was taken up with finishing off the hotel room stuff, and then we had to shoot Adam and Sally driving to the beach, which saw our trusty Manfrotto car clamp being used yet again. Rich hit upon the idea of having the B camera taped to the dashboard for some shots, and then taping it to the boot area, facing the windscreen.

The beach scene itself was incredibly difficult to shoot, mainly due to the howling gale that was blowing. The chill factor was almost unbearable, so much so that Rich, who has often worked in just a T shirt, asked for his coat, declaring that he would die if he didn't get it. Someone fetched it for him, and he promptly put his hood up, and stayed in hoodie mode for the rest of the afternoon. I must say, I can't blame him; I was absolutely freezing my knackers off, and had to go and sit in my car while takes were going on (there not being enough room in Adam's car for more than him, Sally, Rich and Stu). Sally was totally frozen, bless her, given that she was only wearing an evening dress. (You'll understand why when you see the film.)

The scene on paper is now only 2 pages long, but Adam, Sally and co-writer Nick and I all knew that, for it to work, it would have to be a 10 minute scene. The first take was precisely that long, and after I'd called cut, Adam got out of the car looking somewhat ashen (maybe it was just the perishing cold), but all he said to me was, 'That was so sad.' I was greatly encouraged by this, as this is precisely the feeling I've always had about this scene. It is incredibly sad. Bresson once said something like 'your film is beginning when your secret desires pass into your models [actors]' - I feel that, with Adam's comment, the film really is achieving itself. This feeling was borne out by a comment Rich made a night or two ago in the hotel bar (or The Regency - my memory gets a tad hazy the later we get into the p.m.), when he said that at some point - I think it was during the hotel scenes - that the penny dropped as to what the film is actually about, and he said that he felt sickened.

Again, I have had the same feelings reading the research books (things like William Styron's Darkness Visible, and Kay Redfield Jamison's Night Falls Fast). What we are ultimately dealing with here is a sickening and inexplicable subject that makes one question almost all of one's values. It's a story that calls everything into question. And again, I think that Bresson was right: the film has now taken on a life of its own, which will hopefully see it through post, and out the other side into festival land.

Day 10

I forgot to add that yesterday's cafe scenes between Lucas and Ogilvy (Adam and Chris) were rehearsed for the final time in the Queenswood bar late on Saturday night in what has come to be dubbed 'The Glenmorangie Rehearsal', in which the scene somehow got better as more refreshment was taken. Quite extraordinary.

Anyway, this morning Rich decided that we needed more bridging shots, so we spent an hour or so shooting Adam and Sally walking around, either together or on their own. After lunch, we started the hotel room scenes, whereby hangs a tail.

I'd envisioned a large hotel room, with that rarity of rarities, a large bathroom. We were going to shoot at the same hotel where we shot Michaels's mother's scene, but their bathrooms proved to be far too small. Will, our tireless production manager, found an alternative on Friday, which we recce'd during the lunch break. This was a lot better, and I had my heart set on it until last night, when Rich suggested over his nightly Magners that we shoot the scenes in his room (Room 10), as he has a decent shower cubicle. A quick recce proved right, so we started the scenes there. The other hotel were a bit pissed off when I called them to blow them out, but fuck it, the Queenswood is a much nicer hotel, with better WCs! (I would say it's one of the best hotels in the whole of Weston; I stayed there on Thursday night, and it was marvellous! And again on Saturday night, in the fabled Room 1, which has a very New England feel to it.) Because of the unscheduled bridging stuff this morning, we're now a little behind schedule, and wrapped at the ungodly hour of 8pm. Most days we've wrapped at 6. Mind you, as feature shoots go, this has largely been a picnic, especially compared to Cornelius Crow. And we have the nightly blessing of the Queenswood bar...

Day 9

Today was potentially the most confusing and demanding day of the shoot, in that it's the one day of the film where we have the most hands on deck, mainly in the shape of extras for the cafe scenes. It was also one of the few scenes to not be shot in sequence, as the main cafe scenes - between Lucas and Ogilvy - happen early on in the film. The reason for this is quite simple: the cafe we were using - the Heritage Coffee House in Wadham Street (does great veggie good!) - is only shut on Sundays, and we couldn't shoot during the week as that would have meant recompensing them for a day's lost trade, which we couldn't afford, and we also couldn't shoot it last Sunday, as Chris (Ogilvy) wasn't available.

Things got off to a slightly slow start, with Steve Dineen coming down again to do his final turn as the by now rather sympathetically sad, rather than annoyingly sad, Paul, who is now faced with the prospect that he won't be able to get to the Cravatter's Guild Conference in Torquay (something he boasted about to Cleo in the car just after he picked her up). We then re-made the scene where Ogilvy and Lucas head off for the Dream Roads, the consensus being that the scene was working a lot better (probably due to a miraculous absence of busses, taxis and buzzsaw wielding stonemasons).

The main cafe interiors were all shot with Rich's patent Two Camera TM method, which again speeded things along nicely, although, as we haven't had a shot list for the entire film - a partially deliberate ploy - it was a bit of a headache trying to remember what coverage we actually needed. Again, the reasons for this are due to the nature of the story: when Lucas and Cleo are together, there is a definite 'conspiracy of two' feeling, conveyed by knowing, troubled silences, looking away, minimal dialogue. When they're with other people, however, things are different; they wear masks, play along, try to pretend that all is well. So with Lucas and Ogilvy, we need to have as much 'normal' coverage as possible, and keep the Bogo Tarr stuff on the back burner. One splendid moment occurred during the wild track, when Stu called for general cafe ambience. Suddenly, everyone was a percussionist, moving tables, coughing, clattering knives and forks etc. I even reiterated Ray's words from Wednesday: 'Any chance of another, dear boy?'

The final hour or so of the day saw us shooting the scene in which Sally's character buys a dress for her 3 year old niece. We shot this in my sister Lois's shop Mya Rosa, with Chris's daughter Catherine playing the shop assistant. As the clocks went back last night, we lost the daylight at 1700, meaning that Rich had to frame out the window onto Waterloo Street. Again, 2 cameras were called into play, one on the good legs (my tripod; the hired tripod, which came with the hired camera, turned out to be shit, hence being called the Bad Legs) and the other gaffer taped to a shelf.

I now feel like I'm heading towards a state of relief: we've broken the back of the schedule, but still have two very demanding days to go. Thank God for licensing hours, I say.

Day 8

After the semi-debacle of yesterday afternoon, I was keen that today went better. Thankfully, it did. The main grumbling points were shaky camera (again), due as ever to bumpy ground. We tried another Bogo Tarr tracking shot from a wheelchair, but none of the takes came out smoothly. And on the way back up the lane where we were filming, Rich decided to turn the camera on and shoot Adam and Sally walking up the lane instead of down it. This inevitably meant that our two crew members at the top of the lane - Helen and stills photographer David - were in shot. Helen realised, and ducked into Grove Park. David, on the other hand, didn't realise that our waves to him were meant 'get out of shot!' He thought we were being friendly and waved back. Repeatedly. Such was his enthusiasm, he even started jumping up and down, making him even more visible in shot.

This gaffe was followed by a return to Dog Shit Car Park, where there was a bit more actorly annoyance. This time they were complaining of being rushed. I must say, I agreed with them; I felt rushed and unable to think as well, but what do you expect when you're trying to shoot an entire feature in ten days?

Things went a lot smoother after that, with the Picnic Scene going remarkably well, much to my surprise. (For whatever reason, it was one scene I was sure would be a bitch to shoot.) We ended the day with more semi-improvised Ogilvy/Paul stuff, before we all descended on both the hotel bar and the Regency for much needed refreshment. DRINK! FECK!

Oh, I forgot to add from earlier in the week, that my camera has been bench tested at Visual Impact. Apparently, there's nothing wrong with it. The hiss is simply a design fault. Even Z1s have hiss problems, so they told Stuart. Anyway, good to know my kit is AOK.

Day 7

Today was very much a game of two halves. The morning's work entailed an improvised scene with Martin walking about looking pissed off. I myself was in quite a similar mood: just as we were about to start shooting, I stepped in a veritable Somme of dog shit. Nobody seems to have poop scoops in Weston and, as a result, canine faeces are everywhere, much to my - and Rich's annoyance (dog diarrhoea being one of his pet hates, if you'll pardon the pun). We got some good stuff in the can, and then allowed Martin to get the train back to London (incidentally, he'd found Ray slumped unconscious in the hotel bar yesterday afternoon - we all got a bit worried that he hadn't made his 8pm train due to getting wrecked).

The rest of the morning went pretty well, with more Ogilvy/Lucas scenes, and the scene where Ogilvy encounters Lucas and Cleo. We shot this around Holy Trinity, one of Weston's more prominent landmarks, which can be seen the Grand Pier end of the sea front.

The afternoon, however, was a different matter. Although so far when the actors have been given free reign to change scenes, the scenes in question have improved, today's bit of thespianic re-jigging came a cropper. Nobody was happy with the scene, something they only realised when we were trying to shoot it. The public were a bloody nightmare as well, and to cap it all, a ghastly little woman whose cafe we were shooting in front of came out to complain that we were scaring off her customers (one awful piece of housing estate trash who'd taken offence when she was politely asked to move out of shot a few paces). I could have punched the fucking bitch.

I left the location fuming, vowing to never again try and shoot a scene that hasn't been thoroughly nailed down beforehand. I'm afraid to say, the actors were the main culprits in this fuck-up. But Rich seemed to think we got the scene in the can, and the Queenswood bar has never been so welcoming.