The Da Vinci Chewed

Since the shoot wrapped, Jake and I have had a number of conversations with old cast and crew members about how much they were missing it all.

It’s either them getting suddenly dumped back into a world where all their family and friends have just lived one of their standard months and can’t mentally appreciate the behemoth that has been the focus of the last four weeks. Or it’s classic Stockholm syndrome.

Or they’re just being polite. Actually, that might be more likely.

In any case, it has been difficult to empathise at times, not least because our standard months now involve us spending more time with everybody in the edit. When you start missing those moments on set, you’re only 45 seconds away from a delicious delivery of a line, or beautifully understated glance, or a carefully placed shard of light gracefully dancing across someone’s face.

But we’ve reached that time in the edit – that time when we start killing our cast members off. And a little piece of my heart breaks each time one leaves us.

I don’t think this counts as a spoiler (this is a zombie movie after all). But to have to say goodbye to Jim and Simon, and now Joe and Jade, over the course of only a few days, well, it’s brought it all to the surface. So long, guys. I’m missing you already.

On the other hand, it has meant that we have just passed my favourite shot from the whole shoot.

It was on our mega-horde day. Everything was stacked against us on this one: hoping that fifty people turned up at the allotted time; trusting that our temporarily expanded make-up and wardrobe teams could process everybody in good time; worrying about whether there was enough lighting to illuminate a large sports hall from the outside and still look like moonlight; and this was all at the end of the first week when sleep deprivation and night-shoot jet-lag were raging loudest. And in the midst of this we still had about 25 shots to make, one overly-complicated blood gag, and then had to leave the hall in an acceptable state afterwards for a pre-teen dance workshop that kicked off at ten in the morning.

Sod it – let’s throw a hero-shot in there as well for good measure. It’s not like we’ve got anything else to worry about.

It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Our core audience of stoned fifteen-year-olds won’t notice it. In fact, anybody not paying complete attention at that point probably won’t notice it either. But there will be someone that catches it, and for them at least it’ll be one of those 'now, that is cool' moments. It was a one-take deal. If it didn’t work, we had to move on.

It was a recreation of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. With zombies and entrails. And with my Mum acting as the table.

Ah, sweet, sweet schadenfreude. Stop me from going to Glastonbury the week after my bike crash, would you? What did you think was going to happen? Avenged.