Deliver Me - Shoot Diary - Day One

4.00 Just got to the location. Have decided to carry the motto ‘WWDD’ with me for the duration of the shoot, inked onto my wrist. It stands for ‘What Would Dario Do?’

4.40 Chris Cooke (DOP), John Ross (Grip and Additional Camera Op) and John Banner (Camera Asst.) are lighting the first scene, the actors are all toasty warm in Donna Bowyer’s new MiniWinnebago and I’ve just forgotten and then remembered a crucial bit of costume detail which I’m hoping won’t slow us down too much. We seem to have about 25 people around at the moment in this tiny flat which is by far the biggest crew for a film I’ve directed (and is in stark contrast to the 2-man crew we had for ‘Awake’). They all seem to know what they’re doing though, so I’m letting them get on with it. We’re aiming to get the first shot done by about six…

9.00 Just had ‘lunch’ – or ‘supper’ I guess – vegan bolognese (for Cooke’s benefit – although later we will have bacon cobs to satisfy the meat-eaters). We’re all on schedule. Got the sex scenes out of the way – the first I’ve ever had to direct (even if they both only involved a bloke on his own each time, pretening to have sex with Cooke’s camera). Apart from a weird moment after the first take of the first shot where the camera decided to stop working (heart-stopping…), everything seems to have gone well. The crew seem happy, the shots look great and apart from regularly glimpsing Mat – who’s doing the ‘behind the scenes’ documentary and keeps filming me when I’m doing things like demonstrating the appropriate ‘fucking rhythm’ on the bed, I’m feeling quite comfortable. Early days yet, though.

10.00 Planning for a very complicated track and jib shot, which requires expert timing from Cooke, Ross and Myanna, who’s playing Heather. Ross decides to improvise and borrow a mop handle to utilise as a vital bit of grip equipment. Maybe he should patent it – the JR MopHandle Extreme.



1.00am Onto the last shot. Cooke is on his back on the sofa filming a ceiling. Yes, a ceiling – how inventive, Sheil. It all got a bit faffy around midnight where we found a shot looking much uglier than we’d anticipated and had to run around trying to find a bit of set dressing to pretty it up a bit. That took up about 20 minutes, until Cooke decided to break every normal rule of filming and place a mirror in the middle of the shot. Still, unless this ceiling shot tuns into a drama, we’re going to wrap early tonight, and get some sleep.

A graphic illustration of the stresses of being a filmmaker

Everyone keeps asking me if I'm feeling really stressed - what with it being the day before the shoot and all - and the truth is that the mood of fatalistic calm I was talking about the other day seems to still be prevalent. Although, thinking about it, maybe calm isn't the right word - my brain is still running at a hundred miles an hour, zigzaging off into different directions (What should Erin wear? How do I shoot the 'Paul fuck' scene? Have we got a crying man yet?) - it's just that everything seems like it's dealable with - we start shooting at four tomorrow and then that's it - we keep rolling until the film - for better or worse - is done.

I've drawn a terrible graph to illustrate.



Here, red equals stress levels, which steadily climb throughout pre-production until the number of decisions made starts to outweigh the number of decisions yet to make, when it starts to fall again - until the first moment of the shoot when there's a spike of all-encompassing anxiety (usually accompanied by an urge to vomit), which quickly settles once the first shot is in the bag, then gradually diminishes as the shoot progresses.

Green represents adrenalin, which pretty much keeps climbing through the whole process - luckily enough, because if it didn't you'd be too knackered by the shoot to actually do the work. One by-product of this constant climbing adrenalin accompanied by fluctuating levels of stress, seems to be the possible (or even probable) formation of a number of ulcers in the stomach region.

Blue represents the icy dread that you've forgotten something of immense importance (probably the key thing that made you want to make the film in the first place). This climbs and climbs until it's too late to do anything about it. The thing that you've forgotten usually pops into your head about an hour after you've packed everything away and everybody's gone home. Then you have to spend the next few weeks convincing your editor that you actually planned to miss it out and it wasn't that important anyway, so that they don't think you're a bloody idiot.

Today, we checked through the camera kit, I finished off the shotlist (now typed up and ever-so-organised looking) and then I went home and moved all the furniture out of my spare room, because that's where we're shooting on Saturday night. Nothing like spending a couple of hours dusting and hoovering to get you in the mood for a shoot. Tonight, I'm meeting one of the actresses, Myanna Buring. Myanna was in, amongst other things, 'The Descent', which is probably the best British horror film I've seen in years.



I haven't seen Myanna since the casting session, so we're going to talk over the film, in lieu of having a pre-shoot rehearsal. The actors all seem really keen on working on the film, and so far none of them have come up with any questions (I don't know why I was expecting them to have questions - maybe the script's clear enough...). We're going to be shooting the film pretty much in reverse order - all tomorrow's stuff happens at the end of the film and the stuff we shoot on the last night is the opening. I think this is the first time I've had to work this way around (Cry had to be shot chronologically according to the script because of the amount of room destruction that went on). My worry is that the possibilities for continuity fuck-ups exponentially increases the more out-of-sequence you film, but I guess I'll just have to keep my mind on it.

I got some notes today about the rewrite for 'Mum and Dad' and realised (again) that I'm pretty much going to have to go straight onto that after I've done this. In a way though, despite the unrelenting head-fuck of it all, it's good to do the two back-to-back - at least it means that I'll be in some way prepared for all the things I have to do for the feature, having just done them for the short. Anyway, that's weeks away - let's get the short out of the way first...

A Fatalistic Calm

We’re into the last few days of pre-production before the shoot starts on Friday and the stress of last week seems to have begun a strange transformation (at least for my part) into a kind of fatalistic calm. Essentially, the closer we get to the shoot, the less possibilities there are, either because a)I’ve done all the work I should have done and made an informed and hopefully wise decision or b)I’ve had to say yes or no to things I’m not sure about because there isn’t enough time left for me to fuck about anymore.

Either way, making decisions is good, because once made they generally don’t have to be made again, so the millions of possibilities that presented themselves at the start of the shoot – encompassing casting, locations, crewing, art-design and storyboarding – have now shrunk down to mere thousands. Whatever decisions we’ve made prior to the shoot will force an outcome during the shoot and the edit, so that’s when we’ll find out if we’ve fucked up or not. In a way, this might be the most exciting bit – when you’ve got all the elements but they’re not assembled yet – because the film starts to exist in your head as a mixture of those possibilities, and the reality of your decisions hasn’t yet had a chance to force itself onto the screen.

When I was writing about making an ‘unperfect’ film last time around, I think what I was trying to get at was this - because I think that films, if they are writer/director led, often present a worldview which is distinctive to the filmmaker, the decisions you make are often informed by subconscious prejudices and fetishes and so the best you can hope for is to make a film which is revealing - not only to an audience but to yourself – an element of what you think about the world – or maybe, more distinctly, what kind of stories you translate the world into. And as such, it's never going to be perfect - because it never could be - but it might be well-translated enough to make the audience feel or think something that you have thought or felt.

Chris thinks ‘Deliver Me’ is a Seventies British horror film – not in a campy, take-the-piss kind of way, but in a way that it evokes a feeling from that era. He might be right – I’ve seen a lot of films from that time and I think it was probably the last moment when British horror had a really distinctive feel. But I hope the film doesn’t feel like a ‘homage’ or some kind of fanboy wank – I want the story to work on its own merits. Maybe he’s just saying that because he somehow pictured the lead character (who is actually now only in her late twenties…) as being played by the incomparable Sheila Keith from Pete Walker’s Frightmare)


I guess in my head it’s always going to be ‘a story’ rather than a slice of ‘real life’, so the script has a stylised feel which I’m hoping to carry through to the shoot. It’ll be interesting to get the actors’ take on it and see how it works. This’ll be the first time for ages I’ve actually directed something that has more than one character in it (or at least the first time for ages where the other characters haven’t been a demon, a corpse or a niggly little tree demon…) so Christ knows how all that’s going to turn out. Ah well, they’re professionals, I guess they do this kind of thing all the time…