Director's Weekly Post Production Blog WEEK 70 Friday March 06th...

It’s been another dark week.

I finished the Kazan book on the train to my sisters hearing. Near the end of his life he had his wife dying of cancer in one ward and his best friend dying of the same thing two floors below.

My sister got an indication of 18 months in prison pending a psychiatrists report from the judge. She is mentally handicapped. I realised at the hearing that I had failed her. Due to a previous brush with the police, since 2000 she has been looked after by social services, and for that entire time I have campaigned to stop what I thought was institutionalisation and “get her out” so that she could live with our mother. 2 months after she finally got “free” she is back to square one. In fact worse.

I had been seeing her fate through my eyes and how unfair it was for her to not have a full life, or indeed as full as mine. I was wrong.

At the de-spotting session Friday night we ran out of time before we could de-spot the whole of reel 6. It was the filthiest reel so far. One shot still had 22 spots on it! That left 1 and a quarter reels to do. About 81% of the way there not the 85% I had foreseen.

The de-spotting is going at about a third the speed it would normally be going at but compared to the grading - which went at less than one tenth of the rate you would normally expect - I should be thankful. I am.

My Father was not improved at the weekend. While he dozed I sat by his bed reading poetry by an Estonian poet, Jaan Kaplinski. Something my dear old England teacher sent me for Xmas. Margaret is always apt in her gifts and this one was a cross between Tarkovsky and Goethe. One of the poems talked of a koan in reference to DEP.

On Monday while I travelled to Synxpseed to sign the contract my Father had a second tracheotomy done. I took Nick Pocock to lunch after signing the contract. Earlier I had broached the subject of the M&E for the film, a deliverable needed by the sales agent. He told me that it had already been done. I was amazed. How ahead of the game they are! That means that not only have we completed the sound, we have also completed the sound deliverables.

After that I collected the signed contract from Molinare.

Tuesday brought a call from Charlotte at Molinare (Andrew is on holiday) while I was with my father who seemed improved with a new tracheotomy. They are so busy at present that it is unlikely that we will do any de-spotting this week. We arranged to talk again Friday.

On Wednesday I was able to raise a small amount of investment. I spoke to Marcel that day who is awaiting payment. When I told him the situation he was congenital and didn’t give me any woes. It seems also this week that Creditor X has spoken to Jonnie and relations are improved.

The next day I went to visit my father in the morning. I was chocker with meetings in the afternoon and evening. Only hours before he had pulled out the tracheotomy again. This had stopped his breathing (they had told me many times before he would die without it) and gave him another massive heart attack.

His heart actually stopped for a moment.

Was he trying to kill himself or was he just being the damn awkward stubborn bastard he always is? I don’t know. When I looked into his eyes as they flicked open for a second or two before closing again, I couldn’t discern anything.

A Doctor then asked to speak to me in a side room. The moment we walked to the side room I knew it was something bad. He told me they had reason to suspect possible brain damage along with the already massive heart damage. “If that were true” he continued “they would then consider not continuing with treatment as a favourable outcome would be unlikely.”

My worst nightmare really.

Today Charlotte at Molinare didn’t answer my calls. No progress this week. 81% of the way through the de-spotting. Deadlines looming for screenings for film festivals.

I’m in Fuengirola, Southern Spain, in an apartment overlooking the sea. Marc is eating cornflakes straight out of the packet. I have found he normally consumes a great deal of muesli and not much else. That’s how he acquired the nickname the “The Muesli kid” but now he’s “The Cornflake Kid”

We are guests of a veteran poker player and friend of ours, “The Silver fox”. I’m here to do some tweaks to the script of “The Power”, addressing things that have come up in location recces, meetings with crew and other people over the course of the last 9 months or so. This is the place I have written all the proper drafts of that script so it is only fitting. It’s impossible for me to concentrate while in London with the phone going and people constantly wanting things.

It’s been long planned so as to coincide with when Marc finished a play he was doing in Leicester. While I write, he reads scripts he has been asked to do and meditates.

This week has been a total washout for DEP. Andrew Dearnley is still away and on Tuesday Charlotte confirmed there would be yet again no time to do de-spotting this week. Andrew, I hope, will be back next week and we can progress some more.

In the meantime Neil Harris has been combining sound and picture (not fully spotted nor with titles) for a more up to date version so we can show the film to some important film festivals that are coming up.

Midweek, thanks to Jonnie’s persistence a small cheque arrived with some more investment. Like Jonnie, I am also trying to drum up some more investment to get us over the hump. Getting investment for a film that has already been shot must be about 400% harder than one that hasn’t. All the glory of film-making is in the shooting. No-one cares about what comes after.

Last weekend I visited my father as usual. He was still semi-conscious at best. On the Sunday during the lunch rest break they have on the ward I went to the old town of Stevenage to have lunch then wandered aimlessly until I arrived at the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. The rows of graves mirror the rows of houses nearby. I half understood my father’s desire to be cremated and scattered where he lives so that he could “come back and haunt the bastards”.

On Monday near midnight I got a call from the hospital. When you get a call like that late at night, you worry about the worst but it was only to tell me that he was being moved to Welwyn Garden City because of a shortage of beds.

On Tuesday I was surprised to see that they had finally taken him off the ventilator and that for the first time he was breathing for himself with the aid of some oxygen. They hadn’t done a MRI scan yet and I still had no idea if his brain was OK or not. I read him an article from the evening standard on Rafa Benitez and Liverpool’s coming clash with Real Madrid. He had missed the first round clash due to being in hospital. I had no idea if he understood what I said or not.

Wednesday evening when I got to the hospital he was trying to talk but it was unintelligible, sounding like gobbledegook. Amongst other things I told him that Liverpool had beaten Real Madrid 3-0. He smiled and cupped his hands together. The first time I’ve had a proper response from him since this happened.

Yesterday he seemed more compus mentis and talked properly for the first time. Or, more accurately, the first thing I could understand. He said “I’ve got to go!”
“Where to?” I asked, bemused.
He pointed up, to the ceiling.