Only those of you with long, white beards will remember my journal for The Beacon. (Maybe I’ll re-upload it some day.) Running from spring 2001 to summer 2002, it followed the making of my first “professional” feature film, a UKP3,000 actioner which essentially took the plot of Michael Bay’s 1997 Alcatraz romp The Rock and transposed it to the Malvern Hills. While trying to find a suitably ridiculous action sequence to cap the third act of the script, I was given some typically sage advice by my friend Rick: “You don’t need lots of fast vehicles and things blowing up if you have stuff going on with the characters.” And I thought then, as I think now, how great it would be to have stuff blowing up AND things going on with the characters.
Well, if you DO have a long, white beard and you DID read that journal, you’ll know that the finished film had nothing going on with the characters anywhere in its 75 minute running time. The Dark Side of the Earth, I hope, does. Today I wrote a new scene where two characters are arguing as things blow up in the background. Conflict, character and action all in the same frame – I’m living the dream. Well, not quite, because the dialogue’s a bit rubbish at the moment. But in theory the dream is being lived.
Other things are happening, besides me just sitting at my computer and bashing the keys until a line of Shakespeare comes out, but I can’t really talk about them. Not the positive ones at least. I don’t think there’s any harm in saying that a couple of companies that attended last week were impressed, but won’t consider getting on board until we have a cast attached and a detailed budget – a.k.a. “The Package”.
So we just need to hire a casting director and a line producer and get those done, right? Well, yes, but we don’t have any money. We need development financing. Hence the many applications to public funding, and we all know how those turned out. Although you might not know how the Screen South one turned out, because I didn’t mention it. They gave us UKP1,000, most of which is already gone. And you definitely didn’t know how the John Brabourne Award application turned out, because I only got the email the other day. I did not get it.
D’oh.