Diary of a first-time-film­mak­er: Part 3 – Production

Shoot­ing a film, espe­cial­ly on a micro-bud­get, is akin to cre­at­ing a sculp­ture on an indus­tri­al scale. I’m think­ing Ron Mueck – you know, those enor­mous babies with veins the size of your fore­arm that tow­er over you, all their flaws exposed in the glar­ing light of day as you stare up at them won­der­ing who the fuck­ing hell’s idea this was and try to make sense of it? Yeah, one of those.

And oh, it was your idea. You fool.

When I think back to pro­duc­tion now, I am amazed by what we achieved giv­en the resources we had. Shoot­ing took place in Lon­don and Can­vey Island, Essex, over 16 days and one pick-up day in Seaford over April and May last year. That is not much for a fea­ture film. Not much at all.

Time great­ly impacts the cre­ative ambi­tions of any shoot. What is already a high­ly pres­surised envi­ron­ment becomes 10 times more intense as the num­ber of loca­tions and set-ups per day are increased to fit with­in a com­pressed three week sched­ule. Sick(er)’s Direc­tor of Pho­tog­ra­phy, Dar­ran Bragg, once point­ed out, this can lead to a ​‘Dr Zhiva­go in the morn­ing, Eas­t­en­ders after lunch’ sce­nario as you start with lofty inten­tions but then you need to rapid­ly adapt to get what you real­ly need when faced with the real­i­ty of your shoot day. He’s def­i­nite­ly not wrong.

Some­one clever told me ear­ly on to pick your crew as care­ful­ly as you pick your cast. I was for­tu­nate to work with ter­rif­ic cre­atives across the board, with HODs includ­ing Dar­ran, Sarah Jen­neson (Pro­duc­tion Design), Natal­ie Humphries (Cos­tume) and Saf­fron Pow­ell (Hair and Make-up). They all worked togeth­er excel­lent­ly and with such thought­ful­ness – no ego prob­lems here – that they made what was a tough job at least an enjoy­able one.

I want­ed to give them the space to col­lab­o­rate and bring ideas. That’s just how I like to do things. The notion of the direc­tor as cre­ative führer seems out­dat­ed and irrel­e­vant. That’s not to say that a direc­tor shouldn’t know what they want. But noth­ing demo­ti­vates peo­ple more quick­ly than not being lis­tened to and – when peo­ple are not real­ly com­ing to your project for the coin – you need to give them some­thing back that gives them a sense of own­er­ship and pride in their work. Because the only thing worse than a jumped-up cre­ative führer is a jumped-up cre­ative führer with no dollar.

In pro­duc­tion, every day presents pro­found and sur­pris­ing moments where you see the mate­r­i­al in a new way, usu­al­ly thanks to input from one of the crew or cast. Every day also presents some unique dilem­mas that no-one would nev­er have envis­aged hap­pen­ing pri­or to the pre­cise moment every­thing goes to shit. But some­how – and it is in this that you must trust – you will find a solu­tion. You will make sense of it.

The cast, lead by Siân Brooke and Aman­da Bur­ton, are sea­soned actors and were able to turn out excel­lent per­for­mances pret­ty much straight away on set. I am intense­ly grate­ful for that. As a direc­tor you want your actors to feel like they have the room to explore as much as they pos­si­bly can. Some­times there sim­ply wasn’t enough time for us to do all we want­ed to in the scenes, but we always got the guts out of them. Actors are such fear­less crea­tures; they use the feel­ings that most of us hide to make an audi­ence under­stand the bones of a sto­ry. You can’t not respect it when you see it there, right in front of you.

My favourite scene in the film is an emo­tion­al con­fronta­tion between Aman­da and Siân’s char­ac­ters which takes place towards the end. We shot this in the first week. Both women were aware of the sig­nif­i­cance and pow­er of the scene. On the day they made char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly intel­li­gent sug­ges­tions and amends, we rehearsed it and then we went. Although we had the usu­al issues it was such a cathar­tic and beau­ti­ful thing to shoot – it felt like so many con­ver­sa­tions I wished I could have had in my own life – that I was moved to tears. That’s when I realised how lucky I am to be doing what I do, and to have con­vinced these amaz­ing peo­ple that it’s a good idea.

Of course, you come out with war sto­ries. There was the time a bunch of extras refused to walk through net­tle infest­ed fields because of their san­dal clad feet so emer­gency socks had to be deliv­ered from the (far away) unit base as tem­pers frayed in the sum­mer heat. There was the time we showed up to shoot a scene in the sea only to find that some­one had for­got­ten to check the tide times and it was all the fuck­ing way out. There was the time we weren’t able to find an appro­pri­ate cor­ri­dor in a sports cen­tre to shoot in at short notice and thus had to cre­ate one using clever angles and props with­in about 20 min­utes. But we got there in the end.

Fol­low Lucy’s film­mak­ing jour­ney on Twit­ter @brydon_lucy