School's cool

Today Jake and I have been musing over the possibilities that naturally arise when answering the question 'what happens if we don’t meet our investment targets?'

Contingency planning. Risk management. Call it what you will, but in essence we need to know what our bottom line is. This is not about figuring out the smallest amount of money required to make the film we want to make, this is the dividing line between 'a film' and 'no film'. A cruel and premature act of pessimism given that the taste of envelopes from letters to potential investors is still fresh on my tongue, but something we certainly should be considering.

And the first thing we need to look at is the location.

Oh marvellous, Phelps. You’re on about the location again. Just when I thought I’d been spared from any more Lost Jonny.

But, the location is where the money creeps in. Beautiful though it is, the hospital is based in faraway Essex, meaning that we have to billet around about 35 people in the environs. And because the place has no electricity or running water, we need to sort out toilets and a generator. And because the local pikeys are picking the place to pieces wing by wing, we will need additional security. All of this is in the budget.

Paying for a location? Johannes says 'no', and who are we to argue.

So, let’s pull this back to basics. What if we found a freebie broken psychiatric hospital in South Hampshire, with its own working toilets and electricity, and we were able to put some of the crew up ourselves?

Wow. Big savings.

OK. Then given that there isn’t a freebie broken psychiatric hospital in South Hampshire, what other buildings would work from a practical and a thematic perspective? It isn’t enough that there’s lots of space to get lost in and plenty of nooks and crannies, but it also has to look like the kind of place within which you’d find a mysterious zombie with the power to raise the undead back to life.

Er… how about a school?

Interesting. Shooting at night in a school. OK. We could make that work.

And then it hit us: if we do this we are going to need to film in the summer holidays. These coming summer holidays. It means pulling the shoot forward by six weeks. If we push this button we need to make sure we are ready to roll out, and roll out quickly.

Nothing like looking at a panic-button to coax out the voices of sweet rationality. And so it was just about now that we did something really stupid.

You need to understand that there are two primary constituents that underpin the entire Resurrection enterprise. The first is a particular brand of Earl Grey tea, and the other is our perennial quest for new and interesting ways to ingest chillies.

Today we hit a new low. Worse than the phalls and the shot-glass snifters of neat Encona, today we brewed up some chilli coffee.

A scoop and a half of Peruvian Java plus two finely diced Scotch Bonnets. Absolutely disgusting. I predict a diet of Gaviscon and stomach cramps for the foreseeable future. Gullible.