Everyone knows what 10x10 is don’t they? Its one of the few funded areas left for short film in Britain, run once a year and screened on BBC2. I’d made short arty docus (one on chips and chipshops!) and plenty of promos before and just completed a 35mm 2 minute short called BANG!. BANG! became one of our applications, an extended version using the two minutes we had already completed. But because we thought the idea a little down beat though funny (it’s about a failed suicide attempt that ends with the death of someone else) we decided to also put in another idea. This was Diary of a Madman.

Diary of a Madman is based on the classic Russian short story by Gogol written more than 150 years ago. We chose the Gogol short story because we were looking for something both dark and funny. For us the darker it gets the funnier. There’s always humour in someone else’s tragedies. We didn’t want anything gratuitous; pure shock or pulp fiction, and both myself and the writer Marcus Preece really liked the idea of doing a Russian tale. It appealed again to our sense of humour and irony, deadpan and straight. Gogol’s style fits exactly for us and we did look at The Nose as a possible short but Diary by its very nature lent itself more to a short for us. Visually the story is dark and tragic in feel, we are witnessing the disintegration of a no-one. In the story we see everything through his diary entries, his delusions, loves and wants and finally madness. The lead’s (Nick, after Nikolai Gogol) looks ‘to camera’ are there because its his diary we are witnessing, he talks to camera only from his space, the room. This room is where we see the dates of the diary (that get progressively weirder) . The dates compress time for us, vital in a short. It also made the room central, allowing more ‘lyrical’ takes on his life outside where we could show a ‘hyper reality’. The hyper reality is why we switch between film speeds and why these sequences burst in against the static of his room (which is always real time film).

So it was obviously not going to be a kitchen sink drama nor was it going to be a classic costume adaptation we were to make.

Marcus, a writer I’ve been working with for ages, and I, put together a very fast draft (about 2/3 days) to go in as our second application and then waited.

The year before Jeremy Howe (10x10 Series Producer) had sent back our unsuccessful application with a note saying he liked it but...I reminded him of this in our new applications and about six weeks from going in I had an interview at the BAFTA building in London about the 10x10 film. Because we put in 2 applications I didn’t know which one to pitch so I waited. It was Diary they were interested in and the idea of doing a classic adaptation in my style was the pull for them (I never saw that as our angle until after). It was just needed to leave them in confidence; that we could do the job. This was helped by my professional work as a promo director where the principal crew would be working on this short. That meant a Producer I’d worked with for 3 1/2 years before (Maggie Swinfen) and the DOP (Steve Tickner) who has lit virtually all of my promos. It was a good ‘professional’ team that odds on would deliver and this was a main selling point. The promo reel with my other ‘films’ also looked pretty good, showing high quality film work and a commercial environment that means you deliver, a distinctive style that crossed all of the work, and luckily it was a style that they liked.

SCRIPT
So now we were into the last 15 or 16 scripts out of over 700 applicants. These were to be whittled down over the coming months through various drafts down to the 10 the BBC needed. Before shooting we did 7 drafts of our script of which the BBC saw 5. We even did a script with 3 different endings (we went for the shock not the slick ending). By October we were about the last to be commissioned. The funding amounted to around £30,000 (BBC2 £15,000, Arts Council £10,000, West Midlands Arts £5,000) which gave us a December 4 day shoot, 3 days location and 1 day studio. The final draft of the script was approved about 3 weeks before the shoot started (along with approved story boards). The script by this stage was very tight, fast and dysfunctional at the ready stage for our stylised take on things. The film was never a calling card for a feature, this was a short film not a mini feature and we treated it as such, taking influence from Tex Avery as much as directors like Polanski and Godard. We had 36 scenes and 8 1/2 minutes screen time so this was definitely not a feature calling card, it was a short film trying to be different (just trying to get its own life, man). The subject matter allowed us great scope and liberties with the narrative and style. It’s led a few people to now say ‘great film, whats is it about?’ and all I can say is the clue’s in the title (it’s the diary of a madman, an unhinged perspective, what else could a diary of a madman be?). Jeremy Howe to his credit pushed us along this path when he could have easily stopped us. Everyone on the crew had a script but no-one knew what it would look like (even down to Jeremy throwing his one wobbler when he ‘freaked’ when he was given the rushes, he didn’t know what he had then until the rough cuts started coming in, after which he accepted what we had done and how we had done it - in his defence the footage was odd as virtually every shot is dutched, moving or steadi-cam or all 3, but it was exactly as story boarded). So just the cast and we’re ready to shoot our stylised short film drama.

CAST
The cast proved to be a hard one in the end. The BBC wanted some names (which helps your film afterwards).We had Keith Allen in mind for the lead and he’d shown an interest early on, enough for us to pursue him until about 3 weeks to shoot. It didn’t work out so we were looking for a lead. Being a 10x10 film helped agents take us seriously though I know we pissed at least one agent off because he heard we were asking others too (it’s true, just to find out availibility with the shoot only days away). We were getting along way from our wish list of names when we realised we knew someone who could more than handle the role, Steve Evets who played the lead in BANG! for us. So we asked, he said yes and became Nick, our lead in the film.

LOCATION ...
DAY ONE...
STUDIO...
POST PRODUCTION...
NOW WHAT?...

Full article published in Filmwaves - Issue 4, Spring 1998. Subscribe now!