Fuck. I seem to have started smoking again. Not properly, though. Never properly.
Too tired to make it up onto the roof so i’m distracting myself elsewhere.
We’re closing the finance on Last Passenger at the moment, and the days are pretty intense. All the financing agreements, producer agreements, cast agreements, crew contracts - everyone wants to have their say in the small print. It stretches on for weeks and is pretty draining for everyone involved
I can’t help thinking there must be an easier way. There are dozens of movies made every year in the UK (too many in fact, but that’s a whole other story), but every time you close it seems you’re re-inventing the wheel.
However, we are the eye of the storm - calming, reassuring, soothing the hysteria which seems to fuel the process. A lot of it comes from the fact that film is really a marriage of art and business, and the cohabitation is not entirely a happy one. Explaining to an actor (or even, shamefully an agent), that the reason the film isn’t yet green-lit, because some wording is wrong on the third paragraph of page three of the music publishing agreement, is usually a pretty unrewarding experience, but you have to keep all the plates spinning.
Last friday we had a moment that brought back into sharp focus why we’re really doing this. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in the paperchase that you forget we’re really here to make movies. Standing on the studio floor on stage H at Shepperton Studios, watching giant low loaders maneuvering the train carriages that form the set of our film Last Passenger into place, there was an electricity in the air - the kind you feel before embarking on an adventure.
Four years have passed since Ado and I met our director Omid Nooshin and started working on LP, and to tell the truth it’s been pretty rough going, but as Omid, Ado and I stood watching, LP was genuinely crystallising before our eyes. As one hundred and fifty tonnes of metal swung gently into position inside the massive studio, none of us could really think of anything to say which would really capture the magic of the moment, so for a while we just grinned at each other like goons.
Finally, Omid turned to us and said:
“This is really happening guys. Nothing can stop us now.”
