I’ve just rewritten this paragraph since what I put originally was so surreal even I didn’t understand it. James finished the second draft of the script last week, and I spent some train journeys and other quiet moments going through it. The early scenes with Joe, Gary and Heather are working great now – really tight with potential for some great performances. We’ve also added in a new, mysterious character. As James and I were saying earlier, there’s so much in it – a lot of little subplots and some very nice character interaction. The audience are really going to be looking forward to seeing how it all pays off.

The main problem with this new draft is a large cluster of dialogue scenes about three quarters of the way into the film. The scenes in themselves are really nice, but are slowing the film down massively where they are at the moment. James is going to try moving them or getting rid of them all together. I sent the poor guy away today with a hard copy covered in scribbles and a long e-mail detailing more general issues. To be honest though, we’ve done the difficult stuff – aside from fleshing out Heather’s role a little more (taking a leaf out of Spider-Man‘s very cool book), the characters are sorted. It’s really just structural stuff, stemming from my failure to tighten up the treatment before we began the screenplay. Spider-Man, if I may return to it again briefly, also highlighted for me the importance of having the right ending, or more accurately, setting up the ending properly. Brilliant film as it was, the actions of the two leads in the movie’s closing scene seemed to fly in the face of everything that the rest of the film had told us about them. But kudos though, it was one of the best written films I’ve seen in a long time, and pretty feckin’ entertaining to boot.

I’ve sent Jim “the comic guy”, or Jamie as I guess he’d prefer to be called, as in “Jamie, clean your room!” or “Jamie, your dinner’s ready, boyo!” or “Jamie for christ’s sake put some socks on and get your arse down the Prince of Wales.” Anyway, how did that sentence start? Oh yes, I sent him the script so he can start drawing more stuff. We aim to have an art department consisting of two or three concept designers, a props master, a costume designer and a make-up artist, and we hope to recruit these people from those that have approached us after The Beacon screenings.

I can remember a time – it doesn’t seem that long ago, when the shoot for Soul Searcher was a whole two seasons away. Now it’s a trouser-browning three and a half months away. We want to have cast our actors by the end of July, so that we have two months to rehearse them, tweak the dialogue with them, and train them in the arts, martial in nature. (Hello? Martial arts? I’d like two arts, martial in nature.) This means we’ll be holding auditions on the week commencing July 22nd, which in turn means the official casting call will go out on July 8th. I remember when I sent out the casting call for The Beacon – I thought “This is it. I’ve committed myself now. I have to make this film.” It was kinda scary. This time it’s not scary, it’s great. The only question is will we get the money?