Director's Weekly Post Production Blog WEEK 24 Friday April 18th...

Monday was a long, long day. It started with a meeting with Jonnie regarding money and the coming post-production details. The problem I face is that we are rushing towards deadlines and soon I will lose half of the production team. Jonnie has sold his flat and is moving to France on the 30th of April. Soon after that he will become a father for the first time. All of this coincides with when I will need him most. Basically I will be stuck doing all the difficult post production things with no co-producer, no post production supervisor, no Line producer and at present no more money. To ameliorate this, Jonnie is now starting to do a lot of the things that need to be done while I am still stuck in the cutting room.

One plus point is that some of the money that Jonnie makes on the sale of his flat, he will invest in the production. As we are still waiting for the VAT money and other investors who have flirted with investing to finally decide at least that will be something. That is of course if the deal ever goes through. Now is not the best time to sell a flat!

After those discussions we met with Axle to talk about the sound post production schedule. I will see her on the 24th to show her the cut and talk creatively about sound. She will start on the atmospheres and SFX before we lock the picture. That is the only way we can gain any time and get ahead.

When Axle left Jonnie and I continued our meeting about test screenings and the timescale. We devised a test screening questionnaire. The screening has to be in two weeks time as we need to shoot an insert on the notebook that will improve the ending. That insert shoot is provisionally scheduled for next Tuesday.

In the afternoon I raced to the cutting room to continue working with Caroline. We continued implementing the trims and things we had seen when we watched it through last Thursday. By the end of the day the film was 1 hour 58 minutes long. Progress! No chance now of the film being too long. It will get there! Under two hours is 6 reels rather than 7. That is a big difference in the cost of post production. Boston Kickout is 6 reels. The Poet is 5. The Frontline is incredibly only 4!
 
On Tuesday we continued doing the things we had spotted last week and then turned our attention to the mushrooms scene. We must have edited, re-edited and viewed it over and over for maybe 5 hours. It was quite intense stuff. Finally we got a shape and a progression that we were both happy with. The film was reduced to 1 hour 56 minutes.

Grace popped into the cutting room Tuesday. She wanted to just watch the action. After 4 hours in the mushroom scene she laid down on the floor and went to sleep. I think she found the whole process quite exhausting which it can be. As a viewer she must be one of the most receptive I have ever met. She gasped at the moment in the tripping scene where I hope it will have that effect on a cinema audience. That made me so happy, that the moment I had sweated blood trying to get right, had exactly the desired effect. When I played her the end scene she cried like a baby, tears rolling down her face. God, I hope it can work this way for a cinema audience who aren’t involved with the production in any way!!!

On Wednesday we started our second pass, reaching the mid point of the film. It was getting harder to cut things but we still managed to trim it to 1 hour 54 minutes thanks in large part to an absolutely revelatory trim of 30 seconds from a scene that Caroline found. I couldn’t believe it but amazingly the lost dialogue was quite unnecessary. Caroline is doing a wonderful job so far.

Yesterday was broken by me needing to trek to deepest Wimbledon to collect possible music from the music supervisor. We had been waiting for it to arrive for the last two weeks and I couldn’t wait any longer. At the end of the day the film was 1 hour 53 minutes. Our rate of trimming is starting to slow.

In the evening me and Jonnie met Chloe to go through some completely new ideas for a poster. We need to finish it within 10 days. We have also started an application for finishing money from the UK film council.

Today my father had an operation to remove a growth in his bladder. It seemed to go fine. I will visit him this weekend.

Caroline now has two days on her own without me bugging her.

I am so so scared. Petrified maybe. I can hardly sleep. The moment of truth is dawning. Tomorrow we show the rough cut to David Gamble, a brilliant and experienced film editor. On Tuesday we show the cut to thirty people who also know nothing about it. We are doing this to evaluate the film and the progress we have made with the cut. At present I do not truly know if the film works, if people will like it, love it or hate it. In fact “like” is probably not even good enough for me! I can’t expect everyone to love it but I hope to God that someone does. To me that is important.

The high point of my life was when “Boston Kickout” screened for the first time in San Sebastian and the film really worked, the audience loved it and afterwards a woman came up to me with tears rolling down her face, told me how much she loved the film and that she promised devoutly to see everything else I ever made. The poor woman will have had a terrible time trying to keep that promise!

I don’t make films just to entertain. I make films to have an emotional impact, to move people and maybe get them to see the world a different way. If DEP doesn’t have any emotional impact then I will have failed. I will have wasted the last 11 months of my life and I will be distraught. When “The Poet” was an abject failure I could blame the Producer who destroyed the wonderful film me, Roger, Dougray and Laura tried desperately to make. On DEP I will have no-one to blame apart from myself. I cannot blame Jonnie just because it is his script because I signed off on that script and accepted its central premise wholesale on the first reading on the lawn of the Grand Hotel in Cannes last May.

Time will tell! In fact not much time will tell!!

On Monday we finished our second complete and thorough pass including another 4 hours editing the tripping scene, the last two minutes of which currently have 494 shots in! The film is 1 hour 52 and a half minutes. I presume this will be the length we show the film at tomorrow and next week.

On Tuesday we shot the insert that was needed for the end while the rest of the week was spent trying to fit music tracks sourced by Samantha Compton, our Music Supervisor. Some of them fit, others don’t. So far we have gone through about 80! The insert is now in the film. I will see soon enough if it truly works as we hoped.

On Thursday Axle saw the film so that we could talk creatively about the sound. She laughed in strange places and seemed to have different favourite moments than anyone so far who has seen any of it. She started worked on atmos and fx immediately. If the screenings go well we hope to start locking reels in 1-2 weeks time.

A small amount of welcome investment arrived during the week which eases the burden a little. We were able to pay some long standing bills including the last of the shoot’s travel expenses and the final camera hire bill. Amazingly, for the latter, Boyd Skinner had been incredibly patient despite his desperate need for the cash. He didn’t call to hassle us once. Not once! What a nice guy he is! The complete opposite of Cristina Corazza, for instance, who can’t fail to use any opportunity to remind us of her outstanding telephone bill!

Telephone bills are next on our list anyway so as soon was we get the VAT all will be cleared. Inquiring at HM Customs and Excise on Friday, me and Jonnie learnt that they have suspended our claim as they didn’t receive the information I sent them many weeks ago. How incompetent can they be? We will chase this up next week but it looks like another 2 weeks delay.

Tonight is Jonnie’s leaving party. He nearly wasn’t available to attend his own party as Stephanie starting having 5 minute contractions on Thursday. Luckily, the baby still is not ready to see the light!