Inspiring books

Director Harry Bradbeer recommended Mike Figgis’s excellent Digital Filmmaking. Figgis’s main point is: get on and do it. He meets, he says, dozens of friends whose projects are not happening for one reason or another, which could all be summarised as failure of nerve - or will. David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife is another inspirational text. Why wait forever for a greenlight from a gatekeeper when you can do it for yourself?

Put the money on the screen

I was at school with George Every, who has worked as First Assistant Director on some Very Big Pictures. George gives me classic advice ‘Put the money on the screen’ (I love this and its old Hollywood cousin ‘Put the light where the money is.’) This impeccable logic, followed to its conclusion, would see us shooting in England and faking Pere Lachaise, The Gard du Nord and the rest of it (especially with the pound at 1.2 Euros). But the place is important - it’s another character isn’t it? Then again French, Italian and Spanish cemeteries look very different to English ones. Catholic or continental cemeteries (I remember visiting the one Buenos Aires) are tightly packed cities of the dead; English cemeteries replicate a rural idyll. The solution, squaring George’s solid advice with my hunch that we need to be there is to decide that by dragging cast and crew out to Paris we are ‘putting the money on the screen’. Hm.