Shaven, not stirred

When you’re staring into the dark chasm and everything looks impenetrable, I recommend getting a Brazilian.

It’s all about Cannes in Charmed Central at the moment: booking meetings with distributors and sales agents, shopping for French SIM cards, and securing the enormous quantity of marmite and decent tea that the lovely Amanda-in-Nice has requested in exchange for the exclusive use of her spare room over the course of the festival.

And key amongst the preparation activities – getting a Cannes Trailer together.

Yeah. Not just any old trailer. This one has special needs with a set of unique demands dictated by the great and the good at the business end of the film industry. Six minutes long, with the whole story played out in a heavily redacted form. No one that buys and sells movies for a living has time to watch them. In fact, accepted wisdom has it that most of them don’t even like movies. Take them a DVD copy of a film and they’ll watch it on fast-forward, pausing every once in a while to check that it’s in focus, and at every super-gory death or moment of cast nudity.

Super-gory deaths we can do. However, the only pair of tits will be the ones offering up the trailer DVD.

OK – so we need a six-minute cut of the film. This should be roughly 8% of the work involved in editing an eighty-minute film, shouldn’t it?

Well, yes and no. But mostly no. Just like the original trailer back in December last year, Jake and I quickly tied ourselves up in all the wrong kinds of knots trying to pull this together. Quickly the trees appeared in front of our respective gazes, when only wood would do.

St Marcelo to the rescue. Again.

Just when he thought he could take some time away from all things undead and concentrate on proper editing gigs, he gets dragged back into our tawdry world. Even while fighting through the back-end of some kind of ‘flu (no doubt brought on by his Brazilian metabolism’s expectations of a spring season when you don’t need to carry on wrapping up warm), the sweet man came though for us again. On Tuesday Jake and I wandered up to London to sit in his flat and finesse the last few details of the trailer with him.

And it looks terrific. It rattles by with the assured grace normally associated with a stampede, levelling all before it. With spaces for some early CGI-enhanced shots from Ads-the-VFX and a schizophrenic soundtrack from Dale-the-tunes, this is going to be one hell of a calling card.

In fact, the only person that might feel slightly aggrieved is Georgia, whose character we have had to excise completely from the trailer to keep the micro-narrative under the six-minute mark. Sorry, Ms Winters. I am aware that apologising to you is becoming a bit of a habit of late.

And I only wish I could let you all see it, but it’s so laden with spoilers that you’ll not want to eat the main course. Strict.