Having taken Thursday off, though I don’t recall actually relaxing in any way, we spent Friday night shooting the scenes in Dante’s lair. The location for this was a derelict romney hut on Rotherwas Industrial Estate, just outside of town. Filled with random junk (and, in the recent past so I’m told, unexploded grenades), it was a fantastic location to begin with. Once Ian (the art director) had worked his magic and we’d set up a few lights shining in through the gaps in the corrugated iron and pumped it full of smoke, it looked like a million dollars.

It was supposed to be a fairly short day, but by now I’d hit my stride and wrap times were going out the window. It was Andy Nicol’s first day of shooting in his role as the villanous Dante, and I worked with him to adjust some of the scenes’ dialogue and blocking to improve on what was on the page. Ian’s drawbridge chains and The Book of Fire came to the fore, though the latter got kind of trashed after being thrown across the room several times.

The former got trashed tonight at LaFarge quarry, our second port of call after paying a visit to a blacksmith named Alex Wilkins who we shot transforming the drawbridge chains into smaller, chained-library-style chains. Muchos fire, muchos sparks. The rushes look amazing. Edd, Colin, James and I then squeezed back into the producer’s car with all the gear to travel to the quarry. We got lost, but had lots of fun on the way.

We rendez-voused with the Companions of the Crow, a medieval re-enactment group from Oxford who were portraying soldiers in the flashback to the battle between Mankind and Demonkind. They were all enthusiastic, particularly when we got to the bit where they could actually kick the crap out of each other. We would have come close to wrapping on time, were it not for a bout of rain just before nine which threatened to shut us down for the evening. But it cleared eventually and we were able to grab the final scene before coming home for some pizza and a look at the budget. We’re not as wildly out of control in that area as I’d feared we might be, but I will be spending a lot of 2004 in debt by the looks of things.

It stopped raining. But the package did not arrive until ten. And unfortunately some of the contents were not quite what we had hoped for. I decided to drop the sequence which required them from the night’s schedule, to buy us some time to get the demon armour redone. This meant that Max and his two make-up assistants had spent hours putting bald caps on Chris and Andy for nothing. It also meant we did a lot more standing around in the cold than we needed to.

Around the same time I discovered the next massive cock-up, when I sent some of the crew to get the crane from the hotel car park. It was gone. Due to some bad communications, James had thought we’d used it the previous night and had it picked up. So crane shot to open the movie. Thoughts running through my mind at this point included jumping on the next plane to New York, and the pros and cons of various methods of suicide.

Most of the crew repaired to the Green Dragon Hotel for an emergency production meeting, during which it was decided to move tomorrow’s filming back to Friday, previously planned as a day off. This sorted, my spirits lifted considerably.

We still went ahead with the remaining street sweeper shots however, once the vehicle arrived at 2am. These went well, with Phil the driver letting Ray take the helm for a couple of shots, and cheerily letting us unbolt his rear bumper to simulate Joe-related bollard damage.

All in all, I’m very glad the High Town sequence is over. I always knew it was going to be the most unpleasant part of the shoot (touch wood), with its public location, nasty orange streetlights getting into shots, and the necessity of directing-by-numbers in order to get all the disparate and wildly out-of-sequence elements of the scene shot within the time constraints of the location, martial artists and street sweeper. All that said, I’m confident we’ve got a really cool opening sequence for the movie.

I’m really looking forward to the scenes that are just two people talking in a room.

It threatened to rain as the call time neared last night. Then it did rain. But I had absolute faith that it would stop before we started setting up. And it did.

It was our first sequence with the martial arts team, choreographer Simon Wyndham and assistant choreographer Chris Jones, plus young martial artist Andy Shinn, who looked pretty damn scary in his demonic Shifter make-up courtesy of Max Van De Banks. The first half of the night was dedicated to shooting the fight between the Shifter and one of the leads, doubled by Chris.

After “lunch” we moved on to the short chase between the characters and our friendly neighbourhood street sweeper machine. Phil, the vehicle’s driver, got quite into it and drove along at a fair old lick. We wrapped shorly after 4am.

Today has been manic. David Dukes dutifully dispatched Joe’s armour and scythe, required for tonight’s shooting, by next day delivery yesterday. There’s a postal strike. Edd m,ade phone calls. At 3:45pm the package was still in Boston. We rang a courier. Special trip. Should be here by eight. UKP120. The post office will pay for this. Oh yes, they will pay.

And it’s raining. Hey ho.

We got to location, plugged in our big 5K lamp and the power tripped. I freaked out. For that moment all I wanted to do was go home to bed and never think about making films again. After a minute or two of mad panic I saw reason – we could just shoot close-ups today and do the wide 5K-requiring shots on other High Town days, when we’ve had chance to get hold of a 40A breaker.

So we got started. After three set-ups I replayed part of the tape.

It was blank.

This news I took suprisingly well. H. Lehmann Ltd. of Stoke-on-Trent – expect lots more angry phone calls. Repaired my arse.

So we got out the back-up camera and began again. At about this time David Dukes turned up with some of the props, namely Ezekiel’s armour and scythe. They’re fantastic. That cheered me up no end.

By this time it was getting pretty frigging cold, but we all seemed to be dealing with it well. The hospitality of the Green Dragon Hotel at “lunchtime” (11pm) was most welcome. Mmm, soup. Mmm, pie. Mmm, coffee.

After eating we picked up the slack, then had a brief hiatus whilst we awaited the belated arrival of the street sweeper. Its entrance made, we proceeded to shoot all of the cab interiors, in the waving-lights-past-and-shaking-the-camera stylee. Ray felt like an idiot. Having just watched the rushes, I can state for the record that he actually looked great, In fact, apart from a couple of dodgy shots where the lack of 5 kilowatts of illumination was sadly in evidence (and I hope to reshoot those tomorrow), everything looks fantastic.

And we wrapped only ten minutes late, having dropped a couple of shots but picked up others from the next few days. So a pretty good first day (apart from the heart-stopping technical catastrophes).

Right, now it’s 7:42am and I’m going to bed….

Edd’s fast asleep behind me. He just woke up briefly. The conversation went like this:

EDD: What time is it?

NEIL: Quarter to eight.

EDD: Balls. [Rolls over, goes back to sleep.]