By Paul Williams Photos: Santiago Arribas Peña
I am migrating articles over from The EHP website to this blog. This was originally written in 2009.
Way back in the mists of time, in January 2004, I wrote a script called The Wake. Little did I know back then that it would take over two years of my life and become Evil Hypnotist Productions’ first feature film.
Having completed five shorts, I wanted to move into the area of feature film production. I always found shorts very restrictive. Whereas some people thrive under these constraints, I always seemed to end up trying to compress a feature into a short. I wanted to see if I could tell a story over a broader canvas, explore character development and, most importantly, tell a good story.
The inspiration for The Wake came out of two events that changed my life and affected me deeply. In the space of a year I lost my mum to cancer and a close friend to illness. Before that year I’d never been to a funeral – let alone a funeral of somebody I cared about and loved. After being to two I saw the effect death had on people and on myself. The damage, the scarring – but also the hope. Death makes you seriously look at life. What you are doing? Where you are going? My mum and my friend Phil were both inspirational people and they will forever push me to keep going and stretch myself.
When I sat down to write The Wake I wanted to talk about death, but not in a depressing way. We all know death is painful, but I wanted to explore the other side of the coin. How death can change you in a positive way.
I came up with the idea of the figure of Donald Jacobs, a man who spends his life providing for his family, working every hour to keep his wife and kids in the lifestyle to which they’d grown accustomed. However, by doing so he’d lost contact with his family – alienated himself from them and himself. So, he decides to change his life. Not in a small way, but in a dramatic, mythical way. He tears up his office and makes himself a suit of armour – dressing like his favourite fictional character Sir John Greystone. He then mounts his steed (office chair) and heads out onto the streets of London to perform heroic deeds.
I wanted to explore how his actions affected people even after his death. How, just because somebody has stopped breathing, they don't stop influencing and inspiring people. At his wake the people that seem to know Donald best are not his friends and family, but the people who encountered him in his eventful last few months. They know him as an urban hero, a man of wise words and powerful actions.
When a lonely man, Callum, accidentally stumbles into the wake, he becomes embroiled in the families lives and in particular the life of another lonely woman, Hannah. I wanted the characters of Callum and Hannah to portray the opposite ends of the theme I was exploring in The Wake. In broad terms Callum represented cupid and Hannah represented death. They are the light and dark of the story, but also the grey in-between when we learn that they are very similar to each other. The Wake script told the story of these three characters, intertwined around Donald’s wake.
Once a few drafts had been hammered out, with the help of the editing skills of Paul Terry, the script was ready to be sent out to see if we could drum up enough interest to get it made. I wrote the script knowing we were going to produce the film ourselves, without a big budget – or a budget, so I made sure all the scenes were sent in places I knew we could shoot in. So the huge final shoot out on the International Space Station had to be cut. We secured a great cast and crew who committed themselves on the strength of the script and the story we were trying to tell.
The role of Donald Jacobs was taken by my old lecturer, and supporter of EHP since its formation, Stuart Olesker. The difficult role of Hannah was snapped up by Brigitte Jarvis, who relished the prospect of getting her teeth into such a twisted sister. Callum was harder to cast – we needed someone to carry the film, someone to act as the audience inside the world of the story. Dan Carter-Hope was a friend and actor who physically resembled Callum, but he was more of a comedic actor - Callum was very much the straight man. We considered other actors, but no-one seemed to fit as well as Dan. I gave him a copy of the script and talked him through the character. Dan came onboard with great enthusiasm and didn’t mind playing it straight (only while the cameras were rolling though).
The rest of the cast fell into place thanks mainly to the help of two of the cast members Kathleen Kimi (Miss Musgrove) and EHP regular Chris Courtenay (Dave the dentist).
I sent the script to my friend Johanna Thalmann who, at the time, was in her final year at the European Film College in Denmark. She was looking for projects to work on after she graduated, but I didn’t expect her to pick mine – or to bring three colleges from the film school (Eugen Gritschneder, Liatte Miller and Elina Kokkonen) to help make The Wake.
In an ideal world we would have had a longer pre-production period, but when you have no budget you have to make do. So a month before the August shoot we got the actors together and did script read-throughs and, picking out key scenes, we got certain actors together to develop their onscreen relationships. While this was happening we were finalising locations. In the end we used my dad’s house, offices in the Science Museum (were I worked part-time), Brigitte’s flat, Dave Adeane’s flat, a mini, and a small scout hall in Essex.
I met my crew the day before we started shooting. Not ideal. If you can’t form a good relationship with the crew then the film is doomed – especially one they are doing for the love of the script and coffee and cookies. The good news was that after a awful first day’s shooting (nothing to do with the cast or crew just the heavens above for raining and raining and raining), we all fast became friends and those friendships drove us on to make The Wake the best film we could with all the limits we had.
The very short three week shoot was divided up into three sections. First was Hannah and Dave’s story – which we shot in the first week. At the weekend we started to shoot Callum’s story. The second week was the wake itself. We shot the principal characters and the speeches during the week and then on a crazy Saturday that I will never forget we got in all the extras we could muster and shot with the background action. It had to match in the edit to make the audience believe that it was all shot at the same time, that the hall was always full of people. We had no time to stop and think if it would work, we just had to trust that we had shot it right. During the hall week we also spent two days in a cramped toilet, with two actors, a director of photography, a sound person, a director and a very hot light. The final week was Donald’s story, finishing Callum’s and any pick ups we could do. After a exhausting, inspiring, caffeine driven month principal photography for 'The Wake' was finished.
Everyone went home and the core of EHP (myself, Paul Terry and Scott Charnick) sat down to watch the hours and hours of footage we had to see if we had a film. What we had was a lot of footage. By Christmas 2004 we assembled a rough cut that came in close to two hours and, most frightening of all, had bits missing! The main part that was not in the first cut was the important Donald Jacobs documentary, which would provide this urban hero with a past. All we had filmed during the shoot was the hilarious Dave Adeane playing Terry Adams waxing lyrical about his adventures with Donald. We needed more – more Donald stories and they had to be in colour.
I had decided very early on that The Wake was a black and white film; the main colours of a wake after all are black and white. But I wanted Donald’s story to standout, to slightly jar against the main flow of the story. We achieved this by doing two things – one, we shot it in a documentary style and two, we shot these sequences in colour. This gave Donald’s story a mythical air – the stuff of chatter by the water cooler or coffee machine. What was true and what was over-blown hysteria? The audience would decide.
Over the next few months I gathered together the missing pieces, shooting the documentary segments myself. We had the help of the EHP elite, like Stuart Mangan playing Terry Adams fan Brodie Smith and of course our very own Scott Charnick playing literary agent Alexander Quentin. Also new victims who filled out the roles of D.I. Curtis, Professor Trussell, Tracy and Kylie, and most memorably The Dancer. Another cut was finished by June and the story and film was starting to take shape.
The score was another challenge all together and one faced not by me, but by EHP co-founder Paul Terry. Paul has put music to every film EHP has produced, but he had never composed a feature score before. The Wake had many themes running through it and a tone that shifted from comic to emotional – the score had to tie all these themes together, ride the changing tones – make the film a whole. It was a huge task.
While Paul was holed away in his home studio scoring The Wake, we had a preview screening fast approaching as part of the Portsmouth Film Festival. We continued to hone the edit, but it became clear that the music wasn’t going to be ready for the November preview so we called in the help of another master musician, Hamish McGhie.
Hamish was not only in the film, but EHP had also shot a music video for his band Fourthwall. Hamish and I worked on a preview score for The Wake and ended up with nine songs for the film. These, combined with some old Paul Terry classics, formed the music for the preview copy of The Wake screened in Portsmouth.
When you make a film, or any piece of work to that matter, you become so involved in it, so close to it, that you stop seeing the work as a whole. You only see the parts that make it up. In the films case you only see the edits, the sound pops, the clunky dialogue – you don’t watch the film as a film. The Portsmouth preview screening was an eye opener, the first time we watched the film with an audience. We saw the film in a whole new light and from the reaction of the audience could tell where the film worked and where the pace dropped, where the plot was clear and where it was baffling. After the screening we cut ten minutes out of the film and that was the best edit we had done during the whole year of post-production.
The final, final cut was locked by Christmas 2005 and February 24th 2006 had been booked for the premiere. The heat was well and truly on. Paul was still working hard on the score, that would turn out to be the best work he had done for EHP so far. It was a rollercoaster of a score matching the films emotions punch for punch. It was jazzy, sexy, funny, heart-warming, tragic and epic. Over a year’s work fitted onto the film like a glove and one of the proudest moments of the whole two year production was laying the music onto the finished film. After countless hours of filming, editing, rendering and scoring, it only took us a few hours to marry score and screen.
Two years. One film. A lifetime of memories and firm friends.
My only regret is that my biggest fan and friend never got to see the film. I like to think that somewhere my mum is sitting down with a big tub of sweet popcorn and waiting for the opening credits to roll.
For Susan Williams.
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