Hay Festival

Film & Book have been accepted into the Hay Festival! As the programme stands we are on last thing on the Sunday. Gordon Brown is also going to be there as well which could be quite interesting… We’re up against Ronnie Corbett just to give you an idea of the literary calibre that is attending.

Trailer is now onlined and finished and on the website. Pretty shit hot if we do say so ourselves… Thanks to Rachel Tunnard for coming in at the 11th hour and sorting it out.

Film locked but not finished. All the grading, sound design score and graphics still to do… 1st screening is on the 10th May and there’s about 2 months worth of work to do in 3 weeks. Hey ho. Daniel the assistant editor now scaring everyone, but we still can’t let him sleep as he’s the only person who knows where all the multitude of archive material has come from. The BBC have screwed up tape dubbing so many times we’ve now despatched Daniel down to White City to scare them into actually giving us the clips we need (eg Blair saying that “The Rules of The Game have Changed”) rather than those we don’t need (eg The Price is Right in 1974)

Recorded Ashley Jensen’s narration for the animation which is stunning. Sadly we didn’t get tot fly out to LA to record it, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology we were able to do the whole recording session over the interweb and the results are as good as if we’d been in the room. Probably better as she didn’t get to see what 5 months without sunlight does to a man.

The book has finally been delivered!

Now we just have to finish the film. Not much work there then - 150 hours of footage, and countless violations of the rights of our country, all to be shoehorned into an hour and a half. Oh and it needs to be funny, informative and make people want to get up and do something about their government.

Who’s bright idea was it to make this film then?

Bollocks, that was me.

Oh, and the government decided to change the tax laws this week, decreeing that Sale and Leaseback was no longer possible and therefore wiping out half of the funding of our film (and about 50 others) with a stroke of their pen. Fortunately, one of the other films affected was Casino Royale so the Treasury got out their Tippex and sale and leaseback was back on again. Whew, James Bond saves the day again.

Altogether, a pretty quiet week.

Taking Liberties the Book is officially not finished.

Admittedly it was probably a considerable error on our part last November to promise Revolver unconditionally that we would be able to deliver a book on time on 7th of Feb. But we’re film people for chrissakes… and we never for a second expected them to take us seriously. There is an abundance of legal precedent showing categorically that film directors talk cobblers and will promise absolutely anything to get their film made.

Anyway, legal defences aside, we will be pushing what we laughably call the deadline back another week, in order to cut some of the dross, sort out the references, and make sure the thing actually works as a complete book.

The basic plan was to break down the destruction of civil liberties into 5 main chapters:
-Freedom of Speech/Right to protest
-Surveillance
-Detention Without Trial
-Extradition
-Torture

But of course this went through the mangle a bit…

Originally conceived as a 100 page concise addition to the film, it currently stands at over 300 pages and that has taken some brutal editing. It seems that the destruction of liberties has been greater than even we anticipated.

Anyway, off into the night armed with lots of black coffee, an ever growing case of RSI and resisting the temptation to find inspiration through alcohol.