Soul Searcher: November 23rd 2003

The second day in the nightclub was equally disastrous from the point of view of the amount of material shot. Our martial artist, David Sheppard, didn’t turn up due to an injury, meaning Chris Jones had to step in. It took a while to get him made up to look satisfactorily scary. A couple of shots into the fight we split into two units. Simon Wyndham continued shooting the fight, whilst I shot close-ups of Kat and Gary in other parts of the room, utilising the dozen or so extras that Jason, our newest crew member, had drummed up.

David Dukes’ props are not standing up well. His swords tend to fall apart as soon as they’re used in a fight – which proved very dangerous as the blade of Van Beuren’s sword detached itself from the handle whilst Simon was rehearsing the fight. AJ and Edd had to go to Gloucester yesterday to buy a replacement sword. Edd has spent many an hour glueing Luca’s guns back together with a variety of adhesives, but we may have to remake one of them from scratch.

We finished at the nightclub on Friday evening with half of the scene still left to shoot, which means two more days of pick-ups in January. Depressing as this was, I was very pleased with everything we did shoot, particularly a performance from Ray which won him a round of applause from his fellow actors.

Last night we shot Van Beuren vs. Dante – the movie’s only sword-on-sword fight. AJ (Dante) was choreographing, since Simon was not available, and he was looking forward to getting some Highlander references in. Richard Brake (Van Beuren) had never handled a sword before, but he picked it all up in an hour or two and the fight looked fantastic. We were shooting under a bridge with a bunch of graffiti on the walls and some fluorescent tubes and dust on the floor which got kicked up whenever they moved. There were also lots of needles and other dodgy things lying around – in fact, as we were packing up to leave some guy with his home in a bin liner turned up, presumably to doss down for the night. That gave us pause for thought.

Half way through the evening I realised that Richard in costume looked almost exactly like Judge Doom – Chris Lloyd in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? “Arrrgggh! I’m melting!!!!!!”

Edd was astonished when he turned up just after 11pm with lunch, to discover that we had just wrapped. The night almost didn’t happen at all because our generator turned up without an ignition key. Fortunately a very kind lady in a neighbouring house let us run power from her place and the day was saved.

I had yet another dream last night that I was on set and all the crew had vanished. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Soul Searcher: November 23rd 2003