Saturday 27 July 2013

Letters from an Ordinary World

Has it really been that long?

Once upon a time you couldn’t shut him up, and then suddenly... nothing. Not a word since April. He doesn’t write, he doesn’t call, he’s just vanished into the blogosphere. Filmmakers, eh?

And so we start with an apology. Sorry. It’s been way too long.

Part of the extended radio-silence is down to the fact that Jake and I aren’t actually doing anything on the movie anymore. Once we had dropped off a hard disk with a (greatly pared-down) collection of finished stuff for our Sales Agents at the end of May, our work here was pretty much done. Rest easy, son – the experts are on the case.

But mostly it's because this bit doesn’t feel like part of the same adventure anymore. If this was a movie, it would have faded out on the applause at the end of the cast-and-crew screening. This bit actually feels like the first act of the next movie, where we see our heroes go about their daily lives in their Ordinary Worlds, just waiting for an inciting incident to come along. Since the screening, we have both had to find day-jobs, while Jake is also busy planning a wedding and finding a place to move into. I've wound up with employers who routinely insist on shipping me out to the far-flung corners of the planet, and when you’re on corporate expenses time you never find yourself sober for long enough to throw a coherent five hundred words together. Oh, gidday from Melbourne, by the way.

But, behind the scenes, stuff has been going on. Not at a rate that demands frequent blogging, but important stuff. And rather than apologise to every member of the cast and crew individually when they text me for an update, here’s where we are at.

First up, we have now sold the Japanese distribution rights. I say ‘we’, but actually Moviehouse Entertainment did all the heavy lifting at Cannes. The first territory to fall marks a profound moment in the lives of independent movie producers  it’s the difference between being a ‘filmmaker’ and a ‘distributed filmmaker’. Semantics to some, but absolutely crucial to the people that dole out UK and European film money. That's in the unlikely event that Jake and I ever manage to write a screenplay that crosses the necessary thresholds for art and decency.

Being honest, I am more than a little surprised that the Japanese were the first to bite. 76 minutes of hostile, sweary nonsense for a more polite society. Presumably somewhere in Tokyo, an English language scholar is going to be given our dialogue sheet to translate, and will no doubt reflect for a moment on where their years of study and experience have brought them. If anyone knows the Kanji character for ‘idiot gentleman’, please let me know. I have a feeling it’s going to appear fairly frequently in the subtitle track.

And it looks like we may have sorted out a festival premiere. Nothing confirmed yet, but anybody that’s going to be in Chicago at the end of September and fancies meeting Robert Englund and watching Zombie Resurrection lose its festival virginity should make themselves known now. As much as anything else, I’m looking forward to seeing whether the jokes that we wrote in autumn 2010 are actually going to get a laugh.

Chicago? There must be some kind of work-related meeting or something that’ll warrant me being flown out to the Windy City that week, surely? Conniving.