Thanks to Chris Roebuck at Speade we have now finished cutting PHYSICS! Ania Przygoda is working away on the sound and Isobel Waller-Bridge is composing the score whilst we are busy grading at compositing at The Moving Picture Company in time for our June 27th deadline!
After 4 days on the Essex and Suffolk coasts my short film PHYSICS is in the can! Thanks to all involved for your hard work and dedication.
Thanks to Producer Emily Morgan my short film PHYSICS has now raised over 70% of its finance. We are currently casting and location scouting on the Essex and Suffolk coasts. Shoot dates are set for 31st March-3rd April and we have a fantastic crew on board from BAFTA award winning DoP Rob Hardy to multi-award winning Production Designer James Hatt. If you are interested in finding out more or in contributing please click HERE
My short film PHYSICS has won funding from Film London and Working TItle Films . We are currently looking for an Exec Producer who will be able to help us with the £5000 we still have to raise. In the meantime its full steam ahead with pre-production…
Reference pictures for my next short film set in a coastal town living under the shadow of a nuclear power station. The script has been short-listed for funding by the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
So PlayStaion was meant to be shooting an ad next week that involved kids breaking into a store to steal PlayStations because they simply had to have one. The ad has been shelved because of recent events, but what exactly were PlayStation thinking in the first place? We talk about the 11yr old looters not having any idea of social or personal responsibility, but is it really responsible to brainwash kids this heavily into wanting stuff, suggesting to them that if they can’t persuade someone to buy it for them they should steal it?
If the kids are monsters then the modern day Victor Frankenstein, who ignores all “duties of a creator”, must surely be Consumerism? Advertising has unashamedly instilled a deep love of ‘stuff’ (PlayStations, trainers, TVs…) within a generation, and continually encourages it to grow, unchecked: “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other” says the monster…
Berlin
His Puppet.
Undressed, he stripped me of my skin.
Exposed my insides out, my outside in.
My body, limp and full of longing,
Lay there aching for belonging.
He built my back and arms and thighs,
Turned my heel, popped in my eyes.
He fed my brain with what I was,
All the things he saw and loved.
Musings on BLUE VALENTINE
This film has stayed with me. Small scenes, some lines, a moment pops into my head every now and again and I have been trying to figure out why. I found it moving but it also explored a subject that is universal, that effects everyone in one way or another – the nature of love, the fleetingness of it, the importance of it, the destructiveness of it, the creativeness of it, the support it gives and all that it takes away. Old themes for sure, themes that have been explored time and time again, yet this film still manages to make me think, to point out something new about the huge conundrum, perhaps because it does it in a way that doesn’t suggest what is right, or who was wrong. There are no should haves, no what ifs, no why didn’t yous, it is more fatalistic than that, it simply charts the fact that people fall in and out of love. There are never any reasons, love is a feeling and it doesn’t abide by reason. It just happens. Or it doesn’t. It’s chemistry. The film investigates it without offering any answers; it just shows the joy and sadness of it all. I read a poem by Galway Kinnell the other night, perhaps even the same night I watched the film, which seems to say all that the film says about the cyclical nature of love, the falling in and falling out like the seasons or waves on a shore, like everything else in nature that is inconsistent and changing and beautiful.
The Feast
Juniper and cedar in the sand,
The lake beyond, here deer-flesh smoking
On the driftwood fire. And we two
Touching each other by the wash of blue
On the warm sand together lying
As careless as the water on the land.
Now across the water the sunset clooms.
All the pebbles wearing each other
Back into sand speak in the silence;
Or else under the cliff the surf begins,
Telling of another evening, and another,
Beside lapping waters and the small, lapped stones.
The sand turns cold – or the body warms.
If love had not smiled we would never grieve.
But on every earthly place its turning crown
Flashes and fades. We will feast on love again
In the purple light, and rise again and leave
Our two shapes dying in each other’s arms.
By Galway Kinnell
He turns the hot tap off. His hand shakes, the skeleton beneath his skin strains, eager to escape its leathery prison. Clouds of steam punch their way through the cold bathroom air. He stands naked on the mat waiting for the water to cool. He watches his creased body grow smooth as steam hugs his glasses. He once read an article in Russian entitled ‘A Device for Preventing the Steaming up of Eyeglasses in the Operating Room’ hoping to find a solution to the problem of reading in the bath. He didn’t.
The room is veiled in a heavy white mist. He fumbles for the edge of the bath and tentatively reaches in, readying himself for the necessary recoiling of his hand if the water were still too hot. It’s not. His fingers pinken. His presses his hand against the wall. His wrist clicks and when the cold tiles touch his skin it shrinks, and the glint of a marble mortuary slab can be seen in his eye. He is shaking. One at a time he immerses his feet in the heat. He stands, unsure of the surface beneath him, his toes grasping at nothing. His heart beats; his head pulsates as the blood pushes through his veins frantically seeking a way out. He breathes and then gradually lowers his aged body into the water, clenching his teeth as his tough skin turns soft. He listens as the water washes back and forth, then he takes off his glasses; the smooth fog is replaced with an indistinct picture of his naked body. He dips them in the bath. Back on his face he can see every imperfection of his loose skin, every sagging excess of his underused body. His hairless ankles, his raw shins, the bones impatient to find their way out of his hopeless flaking skin.
There is a faint trail of black ink dancing its way off his hand. The word cannot retain itself. It dilutes into nothingness, never able to tell its important reminder to his forgetful mind.
His mind drifts and he thinks of the time when, as a boy he had just finished reading ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’ in German and had leant back, pushing it away across the table. It knocked against a glass of water and for a second he thought it would be all right. It wasn’t. The glass tipped and the water flowed, washing over his father’s unfinished watercolour. Colours ran into colourlessness, drowning the shapes they had so deftly defined, melting into a terrifying worthlessness. His father watched, helpless. After a long silence he looked up and said: ‘Son, there is value in nothing’ before signing his prestigious name in the corner and hanging the washed out masterpiece above his son’s bed.
He takes in a long, deep breath. His lungs shudder. His stomach cramps. His heart stops. A drop of blood finally finds its exit and lands in the water, immediately extinguished it melts into pure clear transparency.
My short film ‘Beautiful Enough’ is screening this Saturday (20th) in Shoreditch in the directors category at the Underwire Festival. Tickets available from their website.
Just finished the script for my next short - a mystery about a girl who returns to a small Italian town where her best friend went missing 6 years earlier.
Stills from my short film ‘Beautiful Enough’
