On set report: Best Laid Plans

December 2010

STEPHEN Graham is laying in bed with his eyes closed while a dozen members of the film crew fuss around him.

The actor, last in Nottingham to star in Shane Meadows’ This Is England as the terrifying racist skinhead Combo, looks like he’s catching up on a bit of sleep. He may be thinking about the scene. It‘s hard to tell.

First assistant director Amanda Neal, stood at the end of the bed, shouts “turn over”. Behind me someone responds “turning” and everyone falls silent.

Graham shuffles in the bed then opens his eyes, as if waking from a restless sleep. The whole scene, number 472, lasts 45 seconds.

They do it half a dozen more times until director David Blair seems happy and they move.

Scene 142 finds Graham shouting at a lighting stand. “If you do that again, you’ll be in real trouble,” he barks.

He’s supposed to be bawling at co-star Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje but he’s off set today so he has to make do with a piece of camera equipment.

He tries it three more times then we’re done. It’s time for lunch.

I’ve been here for two hours and witnessed what will likely be a minute of the finished film.

We’re two floors above the Tesco Metro in Station Street. The rooms in this sparse and dusty Victorian building have been the HQ for the cast and crew of Best Laid Plans for the past five weeks.

It’s also the setting for the flat shared by lifelong friends Danny (Graham) and Joseph (Akinnuoye-Agbaje).

Danny owes money to a crime boss and he enrolls Joseph to engage in a bare-knuckle fighting tournament in order to win the money to pay him off. But Joseph has a mental age of a seven-year-old and doesn’t understand why his friend is making him do this. 

“It’s a love story,” says Graham, after lunch, with a hot menthol drink under his nose to stave off the effects of a cold.

“It’s a film about two friends.”

And how does Danny’s character compare to Combo?

“They’re miles apart. Danny’s one of these poor people who keeps getting everything wrong. He’s got great intentions but he’s a bit of a fantasist.”

Combo reappeared in This Is England 86 but only very briefly. Why was that?

“I was a bit apprehensive about doing the TV show at first,” says Graham.

“But Shane explained how we could flip it round and show a completely different side to his character. Show the humanity. That was the idea.”

The shoot over the past five weeks has included the streets of Carlton and Sneinton, by the river near Trent Bridge and at Nottingham Contemporary.

Most of the interiors have been shot in Station Street. As well as the bedroom there’s a set for the kitchen/lounge and a bathroom with a grubby lemon suite and porn magazines, with titles such as Naughty Brits, strewn across the floor.

“I don’t mind,” smirks Graham of the unglamorous setting.

“We’ve had no caravans, no Winnebagos or anything like that but the budget’s not there.”

No one is able to tell me exactly what the budget is but it’s likely to be a modest few million.

“With the Film Council closing it’s not easy to get films made in England,” says Graham, his accent as Scouse as can be.

“You take the rough with the smooth,” he adds.

“A few months ago I was in Hawaii, sitting on a beach with me missus and kids. I was going to work for a few hours then coming back for a swim in the sea.”

He was there to film Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, with Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz.

“They’re fantastic to work with. I worked with Johnny before on Public Enemies. I’d consider him a friend. I think it was him who threw my name in the hat for Pirates.

“And Penelope, she’s lovely as well. I’ve been very blessed. I’ve worked with some great people, Leo DiCaprio, Michael Sheen...”

The latter was for The Damned United, in which he played Billy Bremner. Next year, he’ll be seen on the big screen alongside Avatar star Sam Worthington in The Fields and Colin Firth in a remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The 37-year-old has come a long way from the bit parts in Coronation Street, Heartbeat and The Bill, before his big break in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch a decade ago.

A year later he was in Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers then Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, with Leonardo DiCaprio. This year the director called him back for the big budget US drama Boardwalk Empire to play Al Capone.

His co-stars in Best Laid Plans are BAFTA winner Maxine Peake (Shameless, Red Riding, Early Doors), David O’Hara (The Departed) and Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who has appeared in GI Joe, The Mummy Returns and The Bourne Identity but is probably best known for playing Mr Eko in Lost. 

Peake and O’Hara had already finished their part and Akinnuoye-Agbaje isn’t around today, having to fly to Berlin at the last minute to attend to his sick father.

I’m told that he’s been staying in character while on set. It’s a method thing. Which is interesting, considering the 6’2 43-year-old is playing a man with the mind of a seven-year-old.

Writer Chris Green is here, though. The former medical insurance salesman based the story, his debut script, loosely on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men.

“I read the book and saw the parallels between 1920s depression hit America and where I’m from in Salford,” he says.

“It’s always been depression there since the docks closed down in the seventies,” he laughs.

“I just thought it’d be interesting to drop those two characters in to a city like Manchester or Nottingham to see how they’d survive.”

It’s dark but still comical, he says.

“I was influenced by Boys From The Blackstuff, that sort of dark humour. So Danny and Joseph do still have fun, despite the dire circumstances they find themselves in.”

With him is his teenage daughter, who won’t be able to see the finished film as it’ll likely get an 18 certificate because of the violence and strong language.

He was around for the fight scenes filmed last week in the basement of an unfinished office block in Brook Street in the city centre.

“Seeing Adewale as Joseph being beaten up in the cage, looking lost and forlorn and desperate was quite upsetting,” he admits.

It was only this year that he finally quit his job to write full time. All five of his scripts have been picked up to be turned in to feature films.

“I can’t wait to roll up in Leicester Square for the premiere,” he beams.

Director David Blair says the violence is necessary to tell the story but doesn’t think it’s what the film will be known for.

“I don’t want people to be too preoccupied by the fighting,” he says.

“It’s not Sam Peckinpah. At the heart of it are the relationships between Stephen and Adewale and between Stephen and Maxine.

“I don’t want it to be seen as a gangster film. Although, one of my sons asked me, when I told him what the film was about, asked me if Danny Dyer was in it,” he laughs.

He’s not.

The Scottish director was shown the script for Best Laid Plans by Stephen Graham, who he’d worked with on BBC1’s The Street. He also directed Maxine Peake in Jimmy McGovern’s series of dramas, for which he won a BAFTA.

“They’re not necessarily easy to work with,” he admits.

“But all that matters is that they’re good.”

The decision to film in Nottingham was a financial one, thanks to co-funding by Nottingham-based screen commission EM Media. But with schedules running from 9am to 7pm each day, Blair hasn’t had much of a chance to take in the city. Although he did catch up with an old friend, Nottingham writer Stephen Lowe, for a drink.

“It was first time I’d seen him in 13 years, when we were working on something together. We may well revive it, in fact.”

He adds: “An average for any film is 60 to 70 hours a week. Unfortunately the European labour laws don’t apply to us.”

Best Laid Plans is scheduled for release in June.

Film: Unmade Beds

December 2009



When Axl gets drunk he wakes up in strange bedrooms across London with no knowledge of how he got there.
So much so that he begins to count the ‘unmade beds’ he leaves behind.
The Spanish student is in the capital looking for his long lost father but instead spends much of the time getting drunk and watching bands with the bohemian couple Mike and Hannah.
With a mix of Belgian, Dutch, Spanish, French and Danish cast and crew, the second film by Argentinean director Alexis Dos Santos, based on his experiences as a film student, feels like a celebration of multicultural London.
“I wanted to represent the way that when you are a foreigner in London, you form these close communities with others like you,” says the director.
But it was largely shot in Nottingham last year.
That was due to the Nottingham based production company Wellington Films, who co-produced Unmade Beds.
“We persuaded Sol Gatti-Pascual at The Bureau in London, who initiated the film, that Nottingham was a good place to shoot the film,” says Al Clark from Wellington Films, behind the award-winning London To Brighton.
“We persuaded EM Media to part-finance the film if we shot it in Nottingham and used local crew,” he says of the screen agency, whose previous hits include This Is England and Control.
Its budget was £1.2m.
“If you are paying 50 people for six weeks on the shoot, plus sic months in post-production, then that kind of money soon goes.”
Familiar locations include Seven in Canning Circus, The Maze venue in Mansfield Road and the Forest Recreation Ground.
“There are a few key scenes shot in London but most of the exteriors and interiors are in the Lace Market, Sneinton, The Loggerheads pub, an Asian supermarket in Hyson Green and various places,” says Clark.
Adds the director: “The warehouse that we found for the squat I think would have been impossible to find in London. Any warehouse like that in London would have been converted a long time ago. Nottingham has the architecture and the right scale for what I was trying to make.”
Many scenes are filmed in the street at night, which must be interesting.
“There are always problems filming in the street, especially at night,” says Clark.
“The trick is to keep it fairly low key. You get one or two people shouting ‘is this the news?’ They usually think you’re filming for East Midlands Today. No, that’s why we’ve got 30 people, standing around.”
It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
“It’s a fair while but it’s not unusual. You have to have a decent festival life for a film. And it’s no good releasing it in the summer where it will be up against the blockbusters. It’s not that kind of film. It’s a film that students need to be around for.”

Unmade Beds is showing at Broadway until December 24

Bunny & The Bull

November 2009


Although most of what you’ll see on screen was filmed here, unlike Control or any of Shane Meadows’ offerings, Bunny And The Bull won’t be a much of a game for those who enjoy spotting familiar locations.
Last year, director Paul King and his film crew decamped to the University of Nottingham’s studios (formerly Carlton TV) for five weeks -- and for six days of each didn’t see a great deal of daylight.
“We really didn’t move that much from the studio,” he laughs.
“But we had some good times in Nottingham. We were in the Playhouse bar every night.”
He adds: “We didn’t go out that much. The only time we really went out was when Noel came up. He’s such an extraordinary force of nature. His character’s like this drunk matador and he’s supposed to get a bit drunker as the film goes on. And he got in to character by not going to bed. He was up for just a couple of days but didn’t get any sleep. I don’t know how he does that.
“The Playhouse bar shut around 1am and we wanted to be in bed before then anyway. But Noel he took Simon (Farnaby, who plays Bunny) out and found some bloke to open up his pub especially for them.”
He adds: “So he was really good fun to have up.”

The film also features the other half of the Boosh frontmen, Julian Barratt but it’s not The Mighty Boosh on the big screen.
“I don’t want people going thinking that and going ‘oh, they were only in it for ten minutes’. I don’t want anyone to feel ripped off. Like going to a Steven Seagal movie when he dies in the first three minutes.”
King, who met Fielding and Barratt as a driver, didn’t write Bunny And The Bull for his leading men but suggested they may want to make a brief appearance.
“They knew I’d been writing it and I said, ‘there’s a little part for you if you fancy doing it’. I sent them the script and it was terrifying. Like your mum watching you in the school play. These guys are top notch comedy writers and this was my first effort. But they were so supportive.
“We are a bit like a happy family on the Boosh.”
Bunny And The Bull is the story of Stephen (Edward Hogg), a shy geek recalling a disastrous trek around Europe with his best friend Bunny.
The inspiration for King was partly the grim travels with his parents as a child and an interrailing journey through Europe.
“I did it a bit late in life,” he admits.
“I was 30 and not 17, which is when you should do it. I wanted the life-changing experience but didn’t get it. It’s like you have an idea of what Poland may be like but you get there and it’s a bit like a car park.
“I liked the idea of setting a road movie where it’s all a bit skewed. Because memories tend to be distorted and exaggerated. I thought it would be good that the way it looked reflected the character’s psychological state. So it starts with simple late seventies Paddington Bear-style animation and gets progressively weirder.”

The IT Crowd’s Richard Ayoade also appears, an old college buddy of King’s, whose first job was driving comedians to gigs.
“That’s how I met Noel and Julian.”
His next project is a world away from Boosh or Bunny territory.
“I’m writing a script for Paddington Bear: The Movie, which is a potentially bigger project, if it happens. In case it doesn’t I’m also writing a film about a tramp who exists in multiple dimensions. Which is a bit more up my street. The next smash flop. Seen by up to 12 people worldwide.”
Bunny And The Bull was filmed here thanks to the financial input and support in terms of crew and location, of Nottingham’s EM Media.
“They were great. I sound like Lewis Hamilton bigging up my sponsor,” he laughs.
“But they helped get a lot of local art and film students who did loads of stuff on the film, like model making, for free. So much was done on good will. I’d say half the people involved weren’t paid.
“30 or so volunteers would come down every day and work ridiculous hours. They were getting RSI from folding tiny bits of newspaper... and we didn’t even give them lunch. Which was awful.
“But the film couldn’t afford it.”
The budget for The Bunny And The Bull was £1m.
“It’s a lot if you’re buying a house but not if you are making a film.”
Boosh fans will recognise the visual surrealism. Is this what he does? Is this his schtick?
“Well, I hope not. If someone gives me 100 million dollars I’ll try and give you something that looks a bit less homemade.
“And we’ll pay the people from Nottingham’s art school,” he laughs.
“Well, maybe we’ll get them a sandwich.”

Film interview: Better Things

February 2009

One of the lead actors is now dead, some of the cast are former drug users and many had no acting experience. SIMON WILSON spoke to Duane Hopkins, writer and director of Nottingham-produced feature film Better Things...



LIAM McIlfatrick had been clean of heroin for two years when filmmaker Duane Hopkins came knocking.
Hopkins had written a script about life in a rural community, where drug use was prevalent. And he wanted real people, not actors, to star in it. People who knew about drug use.
For McIlfatrick , who played Rob in Better Things, the experience was life-changing. But tragically, after starting to get his life back on track, he died last year from pneumonia.
"When I first met him he was homeless," says Hopkins, who started work on the script for his feature-length debut in 2002.
"He was 22 when we made the film and it was the first time since he was 14 that he'd really had a proper stable environment. He got himself a flat and started going out with a girl who is also in the film. He was truly getting his life back on track.
"And he was interested in going on and doing acting as a career. But he contracted pneumonia and died.
"He never went back on heroin," he insists.
"He remained totally clean but you can be susceptible to pneumonia if you've had a heroin career, so to speak. Also he'd not had proper shelter since he was 14 and had never really had a regular diet."
Better Things was part-funding by EM Media and produced by Nottingham's Wellington Films, their first feature since the award-winning London To Brighton.
Despite the tragedy there have been positives since the film was completed two years ago, with some cast members going on to study drama and continue acting.
"There is something nice about giving someone an experience which they might not have normally had," he says.
Better Things isn't Trainspotting in the country. Don't expect a gratuitous display of drug use and violence. It's more about relationships -- and the role of drugs in those relationships.
The rural setting appealed to him from a personal perspective.
"I got tired of seeing drugs represented in urban settings. It didn't match with what I'd seen growing up."
That was in Chipping Campden , a village in the Cotswolds where Better Things is set.
"When I was 16 through to 20, the big drugs were pills, MDMA, speed, acid, that kind of thing. Then when I came back from university I'd see my friends in the pub and say 'where's so and so?' And they'd say 'we don't see him anymore because he's on heroin now.'
"Then kids started to die.
"I saw the heaviness of it. The atmosphere of it and this is something I wanted to put on film. I was interested in seeing it in a rural context, which is something I hadn't seen in film before."
Rather than audition in drama schools for his leads, Hopkins went in search of real characters with the sort of life experience he was trying to portray.
"I went to one school that was known for taking in problem kids. And there were these three boys who knew of each other but didn't hang around together. But there was a dynamic between them. One was a natural manipulator, another was trying to impress the other two and the third was trying to impress just one of the kids. And I thought, if I can film this, then I've got something very interesting."
Not that he taught them to act.
"One of them would become nervous if I had the camera close to him but would look more relaxed if it was further back. So I knew how to get him to react the way I wanted.
"And there was another shot where I wanted him to looked guilty. So I put a small cross of tape on the floor and told him to stare at it, knowing he wouldn't be able to do this. So his head starts to move, he becomes uncomfortable and on camera looks guilty."
One would expect troubled youths who had never been on a film set before would be a problem, not turning up on time and having difficulty taking instruction.
"They responded very well," he says. "I think it was the first time they'd been given a high level of responsibility and given feedback."

Better Things opened at Broadway today. On Wednesday, Duane Hopkins will introduce it and take part in a Q&A session with the producers. For details call 0115 952 6611