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.