My Feature Film Directing Hell: Act 2
A series about how I ended up co-directing a disastrous feature film
To read the series from the start, please see 👇
Welcome back, dear reader, to this feature film journey of misfortune. In this part, we shall focus on the crew’s journey to France and my doomed ‘clear the air’ conversation with Cacia.
The Journey to France
The busy prep weeks ended, the casting was complete, the crew confirmed, and the spirits were high. There was just one thing really… A ‘minor’ detail which was the first harbinger of things to come. We found out that the main producer, the one who was running the show, would not be coming to France.
Say what?
Well, she was running this film school, you see, and she could apparently do everything remotely. She had crewed up other producers and would be in touch. OK, then… This was rather weird, but we shrugged it off.
Me, Medium (First AD), the DOP and Cacia had our Eurostar the next day for several days of recce (where we go to all locations). Production design would also be there but they didn’t speak a word of French and needed to source everything locally—In this small French village where no one spoke English...
What gave us a bit of hope is that they had this local French fixer to help. She was running a film festival and had helped them on their previous short. She had cast the entire film, a casting that was more than impressive—the only thing that was ever impressive with that film, really. She was to sort everything out, to be a super production manager who spoke French.
We had no actual sense of the level of experience and professionalism of the English production team—at least I didn’t, as I had little contact with them at that point. I’m guessing that Medium and the DOP already had their doubts, as they spoke to them daily, but if they did, they showed nothing to me. Bless them, they probably knew this would be a shit-show and didn’t want to worry me.
So we set off for our small village. Aboard the train I kept grappling with this brick of nonsense that was the shooting script, my notes filling every white space about what I would change and needed to discuss with Cacia during the recce.
Once there, for five days, we were driven around by our French pm—let’s call her Nadine—in what turned into a pretty tense huis clos. The good news was that Nadine was great fun and had as much energy as a space rocket. The bad news, however, was that my hopes of rewriting that film shattered on a massive and never-ending rock called Cacia’s ego.
The tension between us went crescendo, along with my frustration at her passive-aggressive communication style. I would spend so much energy explaining, convincing, showing and reasoning, to no results whatsoever. Nothing was ever clear with Cacia. She constantly pouted and sulked and turned white and pretended to listen. The surrounding crew acted more and more like they were walking on eggs. Worried to side with either of us, in fear of the other.
At the end of the five days recce, I felt drained and ahead of me were 26 days, including a week of night shoot, with Cacia in every. Single. Shot.
I knew things would be bad if we didn’t connect before principal photography, so I decided to have a clear-the-air convo with her one-on-one. Maybe in front of other people, it just cornered her? Maybe she would listen better in private? We booked lunch on the next and final day before the shoot.
But first, we had to receive the crew, the actors—and face up to the first real disaster of the shoot.
The Worst Possible Start
The crew had the daunting task of driving the kit all the way from London—a nine-hour drive.
There was just no way around this; we were transporting a plethora of equipment, including vehicles, a dolly, and even a power generator.
The long evening stretched into the night and slowly people started arriving. Everyone was on the phone with them, trying to guide them. It was like being at the bivouac of the Paris-Dakar rally race.
At some point, Cacia approached me, Medium, and the DOP, pale as a ghost.
She whispered that a car accident had occurred: the 4x4 that was towing the generator.
What!?
The worst nightmare. I’d been to film school in the UK, we had to fill risk assessments for someone standing up on chairs. They’d had someone ending up paralyzed from a shoot after falling from a set—health and safety on film is no joke. Should be no joke.
Every year film crew die because filmmakers are either utterly stupid, reckless or both.
The horror was compounded because the driver of that 4x4, was a behind the scenes still photographer, that I had sourced for the film. The nicest guy… I was mortified and eaten by sheer anxiety. We looked at this production team in a different light suddenly. A bunch of kids in their early twenties—petrified, pretending that all was fine in front of the rest of the team. You could read the fear of prison on all their faces, and the exec was in fucking London.
To make everything worse, Cacia, in her great wisdom ordered in our aparté that we should keep the accident a secret—Because otherwise… it would spoil the momentum of the film!
I will always remember the expression on my DOP’s face in that precise moment.
It was as if someone had just thrown a scorpion onto his lap. He just stared in total disgust. It was one of those instances that you replay in your head and you wish you had said something different, smarter. It was insane. It was also futile. As if the crew was a bunch of kids that needed to be shielded from the truth…
Eventually, she relented, and we made production announce the news. A deep silence fell. But also anger. For a start, this guy had no reasons to be driving one of the cars, let alone a 4x4 towing a trailer with a 500 kg generator sitting on it.
Somehow, they had convinced him... But the worst part… Because prod wanted to save some money, they had refused to pay highway tolls! This had forced this entire bunch of left driving Brits onto small, sinuous local roads, with no lights, some fog, no GPS… Nobody had roaming, so they had printed out some shoddy A4 paper maps for them… There was enough budget for the cast and Cacia to be in a different, more luxurious hotel, kilometres away, while everyone else shared rooms, but not for highway tolls.
Eventually, good news trickled in. The driver was okay, albeit with a broken arm. He was receiving care at the hospital. The car and generator were smashed. Out of sheer luck, our gaffer and his boys had stumbled upon the crash site. I recall him describing us the scene… In the darkness and fog he first saw debris, and then the remains of our generator scattered all over the road… Before finding the car itself with a PA waving in panic, trying to speak French to them. None of the crew had met, so she didn’t realise who he was, and despite him speaking English back to her, she kept trying to explain in French what had happened. That must have felt like a nightmare.
Thankfully that guy had a lot of experience, he took charge and got them the help they needed, cleared out the guy etc…
Reflecting on that incident, we were so dumb to not all drop out. But I’ll tell you the craziest thing of all… That still photographer eventually turned up at the hotel, broken arm in a cast, scratches and bandages over his face, and declared… That he wanted to do the film. He was adamant: he was not going back to the UK, he was fine.
This became a recurrent theme on that shoot: amazing, passionate people, always ready to help, utterly exploited by some egotistical individuals.
That gaffer by the way, the man who found the car accident and sorted it out; he never got paid on that miserable film. I’m still seething.
But anyway, at that point, with the crash victim insisting on continuing, we stayed. Of course, we should have left… I think the isolation contributed to this. You have to visualize a village in the middle of nowhere in France to understand this shoot. Isolation does something to people. It was very disorientating for everyone, especially the Brits, and this sense of being in the back of beyond contributed significantly to people staying until the bitter end.
That film would have collapsed within a week in London.
The Confrontation
The following day, we woke up with a big hangover as we all drank too much that night. But my headache was to be something rather special: it was time to speak to Cacia.
I opened my heart to her, explaining how I would much rather have her speak frankly than undermine me in front of the crew, that I wasn’t trying to steal her ideas. Honest, I said everything, said that it was time we made peace and worked together and so on—especially with all that happened the day before.
Pretty reasonable stuff. She let me talk for a while, not uttering a word, just staring at me. Eventually, I finished and she remained silent for a while. Then her eyes moistened, she looked away and muttered to herself for long seconds, ‘This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening’.
You see, this wasn’t in her dreamt scenario. In her head, everything would happen a certain way, everything was lined up perfectly, the film, the discrete co-director, Cannes... A car crash, for instance, sucked, because it was spoiling the momentum of the love project… As a co-director, she only wanted me to roll the camera and make her face pretty.
I can’t remember what was said, but nothing good came off it. It was as if it had only calcified that me and her would barely see eye to eye for the rest of the shoot.
Co-directing is the worst idea in the world to start with… But co-directing with someone who is in such disagreement with you about everything… This woman was full of contradiction. She resented the fact that I knew more than she did about directing, but she still needed me to make the dream cut.
I think maybe my pride did me a disservice back then. A part of me just refused to flee or back down to Cacia. It became personal somehow. I had never had such a negative experience before and everyone loved working with me—I think I was determined to turn it around, still.
Next
In the next part, you’ll discover the unfolding drama of the shoot itself. The fights with Cacia. Rage and frustrations, talks of killing rats, dead foxes, actors not knowing their lines and stuntmen almost killing themselves!
Egad. I can't be the only one who can imagine this developed into a screenplay for a movie about how not to make a movie . . .
Oh boy! 😬 Thank you Remy, I really enjoy your writing about your experience in the film and television industry. It’s very enlightening from your point of you