Tim here.
I thought I'd jot down a couple of things that I've learnt along the way and direct you toward some entertainment...
1. Thank the Gods for DVD commentaries.
Ridley Scott once stated that he was jealous of the actors that he works with, in the sense that they can finish one project and move onto the next. They can, in effect, get four or five projects done in a year, whereas the producer and director stay with one project from beginning to end. Depending on the project, this could be between one and five years.
I'm quite impatient when it comes to getting on with our other scripts, but I know that if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing with 100% of all efforts. Therefore, nothing on Selective Listening will be rushed and, in the meantime, future projects keep percolating, maturing and improving.
Fortunately, when the day's edit work is complete and I can look at design work that allows one to listen to music or speech, I am regularly entertained by Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, John McTiernan and others thanks to the marvellous invention of DVD commentaries.
Who came up with this idea?! It's brilliant and so lucky that it caught on! (Yes, I'm a movie nerd – Get Over It!) While I am in script-writing, development, pre-production, production or post-production stages, I can always get reminded that the great directors have to have the same patience.
This is why it's so important to choose the right pictures to work on and, with every day spent editing, I'm very happy that we chose Selective Listening to be our first feature!
2. Don't store your stuff in damp and leaky sheds.
When moving home, one thing that is surprising is how your possessions appear to multiply as soon as you unpack and the amount of things (such as books) that are taking up space, that you haven't used in over 15 years and will probably never look at again but you keep them due to sentimentality or because they look nice.
When preparing the flat for the film, I was determined that half of the stuff I was putting in storage, wouldn't be reappearing. And a good job, really.
As the plan was to complete a rough edit in order to know that we could reset the location and let some of the props go with no qualms, and because the journey to begin the editing process was a lengthy one, certain items have been stored in a shed since sunnier times.
To quote those who hire out the shed, "If it leaked, we wouldn't hire it out."
Not the case. And we kind of suspected that we shouldn't take their word for it when we first opened the shed, due to the mould and mildew on every visible surface. Our first task, then, after clearing a couple of decades-worth of cobwebs, was to cover the floor and walls in plastic sheeting, after which it resembled a Dexter Morgan ritual murder scene. BUT, it was reasonably thrifty compared to other storage options and so we went with it.
Five months later and the shed is nearly empty again. Although we have had to say goodbye to a bookcase, a desk and a couple of smaller items of wood-based furniture.
All books have needed to sit atop a warm radiator and consequently get flattened to reduce concertina-like shapes. But, as part of the cleansing experience, yesterday we made a quick trip to the Cancer Research shop with two suitcases full of books to donate and they seemed very happy to get them!
