Red Mercury

Hello all!

Sorry it's been so very long since I've posted, but for the last seven days I have been in sunny (well, drizzly and cold) London, shooting material for a behind the scenes documentary on a movie called Red Mercury. (That's not an IMDB link btw, not because it's a cliche, just because there isn't one yet : ) The movie stars Stockard Channing, Ron Silver, Juliet Stevenson, Pete Postlethwaite, Navin Chowdry, David Bradley and lots of other very fine actors whose names I'm not 100% sure of yet!

It's a post 9/11 hostage drama, but very human, funny, bittersweet, and strangely profound. And I suspect it will cause something of a stir when it comes out. I've seen an assembly of the first two weeks shoot, and it brought tears to my eyes and made me laugh - the shoot inside the siege has finished, having been shot in basically chronological order and we are now shooting what goes on in the outside world while the siege is taking place, the police and MI5 and such...

It's been an amazing experience so far - highlights include being in a lock in with the first lady, Kobayashi and Angelo Dundee (ok, not the real ones, but still...), sitting 6 feet away from a wall being blown up and a swat team storming in (again, not real, but still pretty impressive...Being at a press day where some mild contreversy was stirred up by the pro-Bush Ron Silver...and seeing the paparrazi in all its "glory" as these photos were taken...

It's been great to be reunited with the Indian crew again. Things are a lot less chaotic this time round, not least due to the fact that there was much more pre-production time and that it's being produced by my dad and Michael Wearing, who were heads of drama at channel four and the BBC when some of the best television this country ever produced was made, and it's being directed by the super-experienced Roy Battersby.

Apparently, I have a job title now too - I'm not the "behind the scenes guy" after all, I'm something called an EPK, which apparently stands for Electronic Press Kit - people kept calling me the EPK and I had no idea what they were talking about, but they all seemed to know so I kept nodding along until I finally asked Michael Wearing, who put me in the picture. Anyway, it apparently means behind the scenes guy anyway, so no real change has taken place...

Tomorrow I'll be seeing Take 3 Girls in it's completed form for the first time. Looking forward to it a lot, especially the three exterior shots of buildings and a plane landing that I directed!

Love and light to all...more soon.