I started making the calls today to let the Soul Searcher cast and crew know that the project is on hold. I’m currently agonising over whether I should go ahead and make it on a tiny, Beacon-esque budget, or hold out for more money. Watch this space.

Britain sucks ass. I’ve been back for less than 30 hours (of which more than half have been spent unconscious), but I HATE it. What the hell is up with all those cars driving on the left? And why does everyone pronounce their vowels properly? And what happened to all the lard, salt and sugar?

Let me explain a little about being a freelance filmmaker. It rocks, basically. It’s well paid, it’s flexible, it’s varied, you get to travel for free, you meet new people, you get to laugh at all the poor plebs who sit in offices for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. It’s brilliant in every conceivable way, except for one: whenever you do a big shoot, you spend several weeks working intensively with a bunch of people who you end up utterly adoring, then the shoot ends and you NEVER see them again. Which is horrible, totally horrible.

So I’m really depressed now, and wondering how soon I can get my ass out of this country for good. What I need is a film, just one film, that will make people sit up, pay attention and say “That guy needs to come over to the states right now and make us a movie.” Hmmm….

Anyway, what was this journal about?

The shoot here continues to be almost farcical in many respects, but still a hell of a lot of fun. I’ve decided my next movie’s going to be made in the US. It’s so cool here, except for the fact that all the food’s coated in sugar and it’s impossible to buy clothes that fit you unless you have a waistline of equatorial proportions.

The guy I cast as Joe has had to turn the part down due to its unpaid nature, and this has led me to a big decision. If people are going to keep dropping out because there’s no payment, I’m going to end up with a sucky movie. So I’m raising the budget to a minimum of 100,000 squid. Of course it’s not going to be easy to get this, so shooting may not begin as planned in October. We’ll continue working on props, costumes, locations and all that stuff, and I’ll do everything I can to get the money together. If you see a spiky haired busker on the streets of Hereford or New York, please write a blank check (oops, been here too long: cheque) and toss it in the hat.

It’s pretty sticky here in Orange County, which I guess is what you’d expect. Hot and sticky. I’m having a whale of a time. There’s about a dozen of us crew staying in a big ole house with a white porch and a screen door, cruising the interstates in a minibus on steroids, singing Cheer Up, Sleepy Jean. There’s lots of night shooting, which is great experience from a lighting point of view; I’m getting to try out stuff that I can use in Soul Searcher. Despite it being pretty intense (last night we shot 10am till 3am in order to get ourselves back on schedule), I’m managing to squeeze in some storyboarding, currently of Soul Searcher’s climax.

James – let’s not beat about the bush here – has dropped out of the project, which is obviously not good, but the show must go on. I’m trying to find a replacement producer, but it’ll probably end up being a case of getting a really good production manager and just producing it myself. So it’s funding applications, location permissions and scheduling all the way when I get back.

I write from an apartment in Brooklyn, on a dodgy laptop that seems to click randomly without me wanting it to. What a rush glimpsing Manhattan from the plane, touching down at Jeff Kaye airport, and cruising under the Brooklyn bridge in a Lincoln. Storyboarding at 40,000ft was a new experience. More soon…

My last entry from this side of the pond for a while, I guess. Well, decisions have been reached. More, perhaps, than I had anticipated from this week at the outset. We haven’t made the all important phone calls yet, so I’m obviously not going to say any more here. Overall I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of acting we saw this week, and huge thanks to everyone who took the time to come along. It takes a great weight off my mind to know that we’ve got (assuming the people in question accept the roles) the right folks for the job – it’s going to make my job a hell of a lot easier.

Finishing the last of the auditions at about 2 o’clock, James and I made our recceing way to the football stadium (via Groovy Rick’s house), where Joan the company secretary was very co-operative. She was even happy in principle for us to switch the big floodlights on when we film, and to go up one of the lighting towers for a couple of shots. I love helpful location owners.

This evening we met (in a location so predictable it’s not even worth typing) with Kat Whiteaway (quite possibly not the correct spelling), who’s interested in helping James out with the production and organisational stuff, and Jenny (er… don’t know her surname… sorry). who is now officially our art director. We spent a long time explaining the tone of the film, the locations we have in mind, the look and feel we want to give the props, costumes and characters, and kicked around various ideas along those lines. Both Jenny and Kat were excited by what we were doing.

All in the all, it feels like the whole project has moved up a level today, which is a nice way for me to leave it.

Ooh, the excitement. Start spreading the news, I’m leaving the-day-after-tomorrow, I want to be a part of it, etc…

Another fruitful day of auditions. I’m finding it a great opportunity as a director, firstly to be able to concentrate solely on peformances without having to worry lighting, camera moves and all the other guff, and secondly in trying out different ways of playing the scenes, and different tones for the characters. What I’m finding difficult is getting the awkwardness and stlited air in the early scenes between Joe and Heather, which I’m sure is due to my failing as a director rather than the actors. It’s ironic that I’ve been in that situation so many times myself, but I can’t seem to find the words to describe it to the actors. I’ll have to videotape it next time it happens to me.

Two of days auditioning down, and we’ve seen a wide range of people, some of whom we’ll definitely be seeing again. It was like a little Beacon reunion, with Geraint helping us out filming the read-throughs, and Josh and Sarah R reading parts against the auditionees. Dante was a particularly difficult character to audition, since he doesn’t have a decent run of dialogue anywhere in the film. Even using a scene from an older, more speak-heavy draft left us with the problem of the actors having to mime sword fights in the Art College room we’d hired. And James made lightsabre noises. I was also treated to the extremely rare (once every 14 years, it seems) sight of James shouting in someone’s face, as he read the Grim Reaper’s part against Joe hopefuls.

This audition process is a veritable epic compared with the rushed few hours of chats and read-throughs that constituted Beacon try-outs. What you’re always hoping for is someone to walk through the door who pretty much IS the character, without having to act that much. Failing that, you’re after someone who looks right and can take direction well enough that you can work with them to make the character what you want it to be. One thing we’ve found thusfar is that often an actor will nail one or two of the three audition scenes, but will be way off for the others. Ironically, the two people who have consistently delivered are Josh and Sarah, who sadly can’t be involved with the shoot due to university commitments.

Nonetheless, we’ll definitely have cast our Gary by the end of the week, and hopefully Joe and Heather too. The other roles may be left in limbo until after NY when further auditions can be held.

Wow. A guy from off of Eastenders sent his CV in. How weird is that?

I took a wander yesterday and shot a little recce footage of the station, Rotherwas Industrial Estate and the area around the Leisure Centre. As a result, I now know exactly where I want to film all those scenes in the script which just say “Ext. Street.Night.” Walking around Rotherwas on a Saturday afternoon was much like walking around a ghost town. I saw no-one save for a woman locking up a factory, and a couple of guys who pulled up in their car and asked if I’d seen a black and white sheepdog. I told them I’d seen a black and white cat, but that he belonged to some postman or other. (Did you, Neil? No, I said “I’m sorry, I haven’t.”)

Today I’ve been doing more storyboarding. This film actually has more dialogue in it that any film I’ve ever directed. (Since my dialogue’s always crap, I tend to use as little of it as possible.) This makes it a bit of a challenge from a camera point of view – ie. how to make the shots interesting and varied over the course of a five minute dialogue scene, without distracting the viewer from the performances. I’d like to do some really long shots in this movie, just letting the actors carry it.

So I’ve got five more days in the country. They will consist of almost constant Soul Searchering – auditioning by day, meeting crew or recceing by night. Sleep? Pah! I can sleep on the plane.