Edgy and dull...

For the past two weeks, pretty much since the minute we finished the latest version of the cut, I've been feeling terrible - some horrible virus/infection that has left me with a horrible barking cough like old man Steptoe as well as aching muscles, constant headaches and a relentless fever. At nights I wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head - fuck, I've got Springsteenitis. It's horrible, I've been trying to carry on working, but I feel like an old man, just lying in bed and blah blah bla-blah blah

Yeah, well, enough moaning. Tomorrow I'm off to Vancouver for two weeks for Jeanie's brother's wedding, so work-wise I'm going to be on a bit of a hiatus. As far as 'Mum and Dad' goes, we've had really good feedback from the execs for the last cut, although they do have some fine-cutting notes (which we don't have yet, unfortunately, or we could have got on before I went away...), so we're going to have to wait a couple of weeks to get back into it. It all feels like things have slowed down, but I guess it's still relatively speedy. It's just that people keep asking me how it's going and when they can see something, and I'm even boring myself with saying, 'soon, soon...'. It's just difficult to keep the same level of concentration on the project when you're not actually working on it, it's just running in the background. Hopefully, we'll be done by Halloween...

We found out the other day that 'Deliver Me' has got into the Munich Short Film Festival Bunter Hund, which is great news. I kind of feel like the film's been a bit orphaned - I had to go off to do 'Mum and Dad' as soon as we'd finished (before the grade was even done - Lucas had to bring it over to set so that I could approve it), Tina's been working pretty much constantly as well, and Em-media don't seem to be that behind the film - maybe because it fell between two Development Execs, so no-one really felt ownership of it. It's such a different film to 'Mum and Dad', but in a lot of ways probably more of a development of the other shorts I've done. I"ve had some really good feedback on it - but then I've also had really good friends tell me it's 'not their cup of tea'. I hope it finds an audience somewhere.

When I get back, I'm hoping to start work on the next script 'Empire of Flesh' - we've applied for some development money, and hopefully if that comes through I'll actually be able to afford to do it. If not, store vacancies at Lidl start beckoning again...

The Meat loves Dave

After a slightly uncomfortable hiatus in the 'Mum and Dad' edit (we left off midway through our 'brutal' cut of the film, and having it hang around like that has felt like spending the last couple of weeks being followed round by a three-legged animal still sniffiing aorund for its misssing limb (not a pleasant image, really, and one that seems to have jumped into my brain straight out of a scene from Lucy McKee's fantastic May)), I'm on the train back down to London, headin back to the suite and trying to block out the tinny blare of someone's iPod playing a hellish dance version of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' from somewhere down the carriage.

The past couple of weeks have felt a bit disjointed and random, and I feel like I'm having to reconstruct the state of concentration we had earlier in the edit (as I say that, the train I'm on has just passed a goods train carrying several tons of rocks and graffitied on the side with 'Dave loves the meat') and not get distracted (the iPod is now playing Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger' at what must be ear-bleedingly loud volume - oh, hang on, now he's switched to Avril Lavigne's 'Girlfriend'. Christ, it's like listening to Trent FM through a sock. Worn by a fucking idiot.)

Anyway, I'm hoping that by the end of tomorrow we'll have a cut that we're happy with and which we can present to the Execs as our cut...