Location, location, location

Jake and I do fret so.

Nothing unusual in that, I suppose. What does make it strange, through, is that we find ourselves fixating on completely different things.

Jake’s main concern boils down to whether we are going to be able to convince anyone to invest money to make the movie. We get the project to the insert-cash-here point, and then no one will. This seems a completely rational anxiety to have, but it turns out that I have a (wholly unjustifiable) belief that we’re going to be able to talk investors round when the time comes.

No, my main concern is the location. And in this regard, Jake thinks I’m mad.

The movie was written to be a low-budget production, and accepted wisdom has it that a good way to keep the costs low is to limit your locations. So, Resurrection was conceived from the outset to be shot in only two places: some random woodland (21 minutes), and a derelict psychiatric hospital (66 minutes).

Yeah – we are asking our audience to spend over an hour in a single building. It seems to me that if we don’t get this right, we are totally boned. And I’ve just made myself nervous again.

So, this morning we drew up a list of location must-haves: absolute silence, plenty of dilapidated corridors, a large hall, and a relaxed attitude to everything being covering in gore. Everything else we can write or shoot around.

Because today we went to see our first prospective venue.

Checking through the myriad of film location services on the internet, we had dug out the Old Hospital in St Albans. It was my fondest hope that this would tick all four of these must-have boxes, and I could save myself from August's stomach ulcer.

And it came close. Irritatingly close.

We thought we were onto a winner when the owner said that he was planning on eventually pulling the building down, and we could basically destroy it from the inside out during the shoot if we wanted to. Gore, blood up the walls, graffiti – he even suggested lighting indoor fires if we needed them. Check 1.

Dilapidated corridors? Check 2.

So far, so good. But sadly, that was as far down the list as we got. Everywhere we went you could hear what GoogleMaps has since identified as the M25, and it just didn’t have that 'hero' room.

So the hunt continues. There are other places to check out, each one of which gives me its own flavour of pre-emptive disquiet, and I’ll keep you posted. I may even chuck up some of the video we shot today.

But until we find the right place, I know I’ll find myself coming back to these photos for a quiet mull, wondering how we could possibly work around the problems. It did come irritatingly close *sigh*. Hankering.