Director's Weekly Post Production Blog WEEK 34 Saturday June 28th...

In John King’s novel “The Football Factory” there is a chapter where the firm go down to Millwall and get surrounded down a dead end by hundreds of thugs with paving slabs and bricks raining down on them. This week has been like that.

On the train back to London on Sunday I got a call from Grace. She confessed she had missed a couple of festival deadlines, now seemingly struggling under the workload. I told her they were unimportant ones, not to worry and that she should concentrate on the important ones for now. She seemed to me a bit demoralised. I offered to take over the job from her but in reality I have no idea where I would find the time except by cloning myself! Later I agreed to meet her once a week to give support and guidance. I hope that will help.

On my return I found a letter from the UK Film council waiting for me. It was a rejection for funding for “The Power”, the film I want to shoot next. The letter had three of its four paragraphs absolutely identical to the one I received two weeks ago about finishing finance for DEP. This gave away that it was nothing more than a form letter with a paragraph added giving a reason for rejection.

This shows that it’s all about finding a reason to not fund a project rather than the reverse. The last paragraph states “We receive 250 applications a year and 9 received funding last year”. With the projects of Michael Winterbottom, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Shane Meadows certainties and an equal number of A list Producers also certainties that means there is, in reality, about a 1 in 250 chance of ever getting finance out of this film body. Statistically it’s almost a waste of time applying! In Cannes we were one step away from financing this film. Now that one step is revealed as being almost impossible. Back to the drawing board!

Tuesday was the most demoralising day on the film so far. After a day of chasing up Sales Agents, at 4pm, after much persistence, I had finally got things running with the scanning and the picture grading such that I could see the end of post production in sight for the film. We were scheduled to finish it in 5 weeks time. Grading will finally start next week. We were nearly there!

At 4.30pm I got a call from SynxSpeed where we are mixing the film. They asked could we start pre-mixing next week on the 30th of June, a week early. The tracks were not all layered and ready to start on Monday. They then offered me a start date of August 18th, the date we should have finished the film! This would lead to another 4 weeks delay and would mean we miss the key film festivals. I was utterly gutted. The process seemed endless again.

The next day things went from bad to worse when I discovered that the sound mixer we want, Nicholas la Messier isn’t actually free on August 18th. He is now busy until September 1st! That seems to make it almost certain that we will not have Nicholas as our Dubbing Mixer. A terrible loss! “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” springs to mind.

On Thursday even harsher news came in. Steve Lindsey got a quote on the music tracks I want and that I have been asking Sam to get me a price on for the last three months. The quote is ridiculously high. I wish I had known this before locking the picture and could have acted accordingly. It took Steve one week to do something that I’ve chased for twelve. Anyway, it leaves me with a number of choices now. None of them are ideal.

On Friday Sam cancelled our meeting to go through contracts again. This time due to a death in the family. In the afternoon I went to the cutting room to try to address other music problems to no avail. Last night I discovered Channel 4 had also passed on “The Power”. Then I discovered, despite the promise on Tuesday, that the scanning still hasn’t started yet!
 
This morning I woke to discover I am going grey, not just one or two grey hairs but a whole crop of them. If nothing else, the timing is apt! Shortly after that my father called to say that the doctors now think that he has cancer.

As of today, we have agreed, although inconvenient for Axle, to salvage something from the situation and do the dialogue pre-mix next week. That will mean we have done half the pre-mixing. One step forward, eight steps back. When and where we do the rest I do not know but by small steps we will get there – I hope!

Yesterday during a text exchange with Jonnie I said “Sometimes an army can advance, sometimes it has to retreat but as long as it never surrenders it can always prevail.”