Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Nine

Our second (and last) day on the Dad’s Tool Room set and we were scheduled to do the following: finish the scene we’d left off filming last night (three shots), shoot a four page scene involving a severed head (which would take a good few hours), then shoot three more scenes in that room, before moving back into Lena’s Room to shoot another two scenes. At lunchtime our wildly optimistic First A.D. Andrew McEwan was wondering if we could also slot in a whole range of pick-ups at the end of the day and I just burst out laughing. I mean, I know we’ve got to do all this stuff, and I know our schedules tight, but sometimes the sheer amount of stuff we have to get through in a day really does my head in. By the end of today both myself and Jonathan (D.P) were almost in a daze because of the number of different scenes we’d had to think about.

Still, bar one shot, we pretty much managed to get everything done today that we’d hoped, which meant that we were clear to move out of the Tool Room and onto the next set of locations around the house. And the severed head stuff, featuring Mark, turned out okay as well – at the start I thought it was going to be a nightmare – Mark couldn’t hold a comfortable position, the latex prosthetic didn’t work as it should, we couldn’t get the right angle – but then we adjusted the workbench that we’d had made specially and all of a sudden it seemed to work. And Mark put in a great performance – even though he attempted to undermine me in front of the crew by insisting that I personally took the chewing gum out of his mouth before the take, something I got him back for by subsequently depositing the same chewing gum behind his ear. Where it stayed until we let him out. That'll learn him.