Director's Weekly Post Production Blog WEEK 18 Saturday March 8th...

Back from Devon and Cornwall without much success but a very pleasant time. Things drag on with the contract just like post production.

On Wednesday I didn’t see the assembly. Caroline was still not ready to show it. The film at the moment is a load of isolated cut scenes that haven’t yet been put together. I managed to see the last of the footage that I hadn’t seen before and also saw many snippets cut together including the climax at the lake which seems to work fine, despite on the day, Jonnie floating rather than sinking!

Hopefully I will see it next Friday. Caroline says she will finish it off at the weekend and early next week and I will see it the end of next week. I hope that is the case as things are getting tighter and tighter. Most films have a rough cut 16 weeks after shooting and we haven’t even got a first assembly yet 18 weeks after!

On Thursday Jonnie and I went out to Bucks Laboratory. They did the processing of the negative. We had to talk about the final deal and also about the post production schedule. This further brought home to me how much time we have spent since the shoot without getting anywhere. It will take three weeks to do the output back onto film which has to be factored into the post production schedule.

On Friday we also saw Neil Harris to talk about the SFX, titles and grading and about the timescale involved in that. Of course the other worry with the grading is that Roger really needs to be available for that so I hope he is.

Before seeing Neil we saw Chloe to talk about the poster and art work. We gave her feedback from Berlin and talked about some different concepts that should be explored. Bizarrely, Grace telephoned some hours after the meeting with similar ideas.

Grace also asked if she could visit the cutting room. Probably the sixth person who has asked this month. The simple answer should have been «What cutting? I’m not cutting! I wish I was cutting! I’m still waiting to cut!»

No news from HM customs and excise. They have not responded to the answers to their queries thus the VAT is still not forthcoming.

Lots of news from our creditors. They want their money!

Soon it will become a full time job ameliorating their claims. Yoram, Grace, Jonnie and I are now actively trying to raise some more money before things get too critical. While the editing process is not progressing very fast, our financial woes are getting worse and worse and worse.

Jonnie is in the South of France with Stephanie. He hasn’t seen her for a few months and she is now quite advanced in her pregnancy. Meanwhile I am still in rainswept London and another week has gone by. It feels like groundhog day or rather groundhog week.

I still haven’t seen the damn assembly!

The reason now is that Caroline firstly had to do an emergency booking, an on line editor on something she had cut some time ago was ill and she had to fill in for him as the deadline was upon them. She had no choice. That took four days. This should have left three days of course but it turns out that she had a nice little booking for a corporate – yes a corporate!!! – that erased those last three days.

I am livid!

We have done nothing again. No progress. Nothing. And time marches onwards. Caroline and I have had quite an e mail exchange on this. It seems me and Jonnie are cursed by having people working on this film who are not actually there. There’s like a shadow where they should be, an impression in the ground, but they are not there!

The final result of these e mails is that Caroline PROMISES ME that we will make all the schedules and that now we have a rigid one that we need to stick to.

People involved are desperate to move this project forward and keep asking me can they do anything to help. But what can be done? It’s like a bottleneck. Like a traffic jam on the M25.

The arrangement now is that I see the assembly on Wednesday. I’m not holding my breath though. It’s almost certain that an elephant will fall out of the sky and squash the hard drive so that we will have to re-input all the rushes and re-sync them! I wouldn’t be surprised.

Grace has been doing good work on liaising with festivals this week. There are endless forms to fill in well ahead of submission. All that does, though, is make me sad that unless we actually get a move on, we will miss them all. The festivals we are aiming for all have deadlines that before Christmas seemed an age away. Now they seem like they are instantly imminent. Also my worry is that we cannot rush things unduly, like shooting, the editing process is organic. Not something to be rushed.

No news AGAIN from HM customs and excise. They have STILL not responded to the answers to their queries thus the VAT is still not forthcoming yet. A small amount of investment trickled in this week, though. There is also the possibility of some more on the horizon.

Anyway, Lewis Hamilton, who’s unfortunate loss in last years F1 world championship is linked in my memory with the wonderful shoot we were doing in Brittany, is on pole position for tonight’s Australian GP. The race is at 4am. Come on Lewis!

The week started with my father calling me to say “I’m pissing blood”. I couldn’t offer much more advice than “call a doctor” and “call me back if you hear anything”. Now, though, I suspect it is something to do with his kidneys. He has tests next week.

I went to see him yesterday. It was his birthday. 73 years old. He didn’t want to eat anywhere fancy for lunch so we ate at Nandos – about the only fast food place I have a soft spot for. It was in a bleak retail park overlooking the multiplex cinema where Boston Kickout showed. “I’ve not been in there since” he told me. He’d never been to Nando’s before either and unusually for him, didn’t complain about the place at all!

The last time I saw my father was at Christmas. He is having even more trouble walking now through breathlessness. He reiterated to me when he dies that he wants to be cremated, not aware that he has told me that many times before. It even features in the conversation in the graveyard in Boston Kickout! I asked him what I should do with his ashes. He replied “Scatter them round here so I can haunt the bastards!”

I was strangely saddened when we went to his first floor flat and I discovered he had given away recently the only two remaining oil paintings from the time when he painted – he picked it up while in prison. My mother hated their subject matter as many were of prostitutes and alcoholics. She burned about fifteen of them during one of their many arguments. The last two remaining, though, were landscapes. One was of London with St. Pauls in the background and the other of a country scene. What saddened me is I kind of wanted those paintings to remember him by after he died as now I cannot see him without thinking of that terrible inevitable.

Wednesday was the moment of truth for the film. An elephant didn’t squash the hard drive and I saw the first assembly. 3 hours long. Every shot and every scene at their maximum length. The strange thing is it took two and a half hours to reach the lake and that seemed short. The reason being when we filmed it took about 4 weeks of shooting to arrive at the lake. Now, by comparison, it’s almost instantaneous!

My overall impression was that some scenes, the wine scene for instance, are perfect already but that the film seems to start too slowly. I remember in Boston Kickout there were a number of scenes that didn’t change from the first assembly, the nightclub scene for instance. In The Poet also the scene of them driving in the rain was like that. The wine scene seems to be similar. Caroline’s first intuitive cut works perfectly already.

Part of the reason the start felt slow might be because the first scene has not been worked on yet. This scene is one of three in the film which will take a lot of work because of the enormous number of options. The other two are the driving through France sequence and the Mushrooms tripping sequence.

The ending also didn’t feel satisfactory to me, making me think of some possible scene reordering or cross-cutting. Lots of work to do but at least we have started it.

I will now see Caroline at the end of next week. After that, we will sit together like Tweddle Dum and Tweddle Dee perfecting the film. In a way that is when I really start work on it.

Straight after seeing the cut my mobile phone was stolen on the bus into town. It felt like a repeat of losing my wallet after returning from France. I’ll get a replacement on Wednesday. It’s quite an inconvenience, not least of all I won’t be able to text my Alonso supporting friend Oscar tomorrow morning while watching the race! Not that I expect Lewis to win tomorrow. I don’t. The Ferrari’s are too dominant.