A wrap

Danny Broderick, our chaperone on the Eurostar, appears at the concourse cafe and tells us it’s time to go through. The mountain of kit has spread like a landslide. From somewhere Harry finds a huge cage on wheels - the kind of thing you might see standing full of bread outside a shop in the morning. We load it all on and roll through ticket check and passport control. Everything has to come off for the x-ray machines which take exception, again, to the weights for the jib arm. We’re in coach one, just behind the nose of the train, at the far end of the platform.

There is a gentleman sitting in the seat we want to shoot: he stays wonderfully unperturbed as we set up around him. We move off and Danny finds him another, better seat, one without a camera peering at him. There is a metal bar for breaking windows across the window we want to film from and Danny temporarily removes that. Train and camera rolling now, Danny even gives us a cameo appearance while the rest of the people in the carriage play cards and chat like proper extras. Everyone is fine about being in the film.

Martin W remains good-humoured about the sound, which changes pitch as we enter the tunnel. We run the scene once, twice, three times. The space and the time put a limit to how many angles and performances we can get - in that sense it’s a microcosm of the whole shoot. I’m hoping that these limits - of time, space, money and technology are actually helpful, forcing us to keep it simple and so help the telling of the story. We’ll know when we edit.

We’re supposed to catch the moment of exiting the tunnel but when England arrives I am rubbing a smear from the window, desperately trying to lean out of shot. And that, as they say, is a wrap. There is time for celebratory plastic glass of something and then St Pancras is here and we are last to disembark and say our goodbyes and be out into the night.

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