So, that was Cannes, in all its carefully-marshalled
insanity. Five days of meetings, trains, hasty sandwiches and
biblically bad weather. A plastering of Rutger Hauer and Christian Slater
movie posters, where every trip along the Croisette could be delayed by
a crowd gathering around Alec Baldwin, Coldplay or just a man that wears live
cats on his head. It was 24/7 game-face from the Charmed massive, an umbrella,
DVD and business card always to hand.
And I loved every minute of it.
I really did – I genuinely loved it. I can’t think of five
more enjoyable days over the course of the whole Zombie Resurrection production. It’s like an interactive movie
Glastonbury, but one where you get to hang out backstage and help pick the
bands.
OK – let’s get the housekeeping out of the way first.
Mission number one was to sort out our UK distribution and get sales agent
representation for the movie, with a bunch of meetings that Jake and I arranged ahead of time. And while no one was going to commit to buying the movie based
only on a six-minute DVD, it’s safe to say that we now have a clear contender for both
roles. When the finished screener is ready, we know exactly who to send them
to. Mission accomplished.
Well, when I say that no one was going to commit to buying
the movie based on the six-minute cut, that isn’t strictly true. We received an
offer for the German distribution rights, based on a scan of the poster and around
45 seconds of the trailer that they watched on my phone.
Seriously. And it wasn’t even a bad offer.
It seems that this isn’t that uncommon. We heard of at least
two zombie movies that were picked up for frankly ridiculous amounts of cash
based on the poster and title alone. It seems we may have spent too much time trying
to make a watchable film when a weekend course in Photoshop would have been
enough.
So, we turned it down. There is nothing quite like passing
up the promise of cold hard cash to make you feel like a player.
Which moves us onto mission number two – festivals.
This was quite a strange one actually, as through luck
rather than judgement we ended up meeting a bucket-load of people intimately plugged into the horror festival world: FrightFest, Fantastic,
Fantasia, Lund, Leeds. And nobody went home empty handed. It was an eight-sided pincer
assault on the festival world with the movie that they’re going to be referring
to as 'that one with the zombie Jesus'.
I love horror people. It’s a side of the industry that seems
to be run exclusively by fans. No egos, no bullshit, and a sincere respect for
the enormous number of genre enthusiasts there are out there. And we saw plenty
of people that fall into the other camp. Fittingly, the French have an
expression for it: 'péter plus haut que son cul' - literally 'to fart higher
than ones arsehole'. Unsurprisingly, Cannes is a magnet for high-farters.
I digress.
And this is even before I start on the Champions’ League
Final, or getting the seal of approval for our poster art and copy from the artist whose
zombie DVD covers we originally set out to emulate (and how bizarre is it that
we ended up sat around the same table with this guy anyway?) It was my very first and
wholly ironic Royal with Cheese, punctuated with the inevitable internal GPS fails that saw us
wandering around Nice completely lost at 5 AM, or walking up an emergency pavement on the side of a motorway the day afterwards. There were the early
screenings of Cockneys vs. Zombies
and Storage 24, and I could go on. I’ll pop
some photos up in the next few days, or better still take Jake and me out for a
couple of beers and we’ll tell you all about it.
So, it’s a much more formal thank-you to the lovely
Amanda-in-Nice for putting us up (and up with us) for the duration. She was
such an unfailingly good host that she even managed to procure a yacht-mattress
for the occasion formerly slept on by Marlon Brando. I should stress that this
was from anecdotal information and not because there was a Marlon-shaped dent
visible in the over-stressed springs.
Just the kind of night’s sleep you need before someone makes
you an offer you can’t refuse. Tangoed.
No comments:
Post a Comment