It's been an eventful 12 months, and yet it feels like it's flown by. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was wishing everyone a happy new year just prior to the start of filming on Doomsday. Now I'm wishing everyone another happy new year just prior to completing the final touches.
Along the way I've moved down to London (and I know I swore I never would but circumstances change, life goes on, and I needed to be here all year working on the film, so hey, sue me!) and most importantly, I got married! On Halloween! But anyone who's visited this site before will already know this by now. On the whole, London is ludicrously expensive (no surprises there!), the Tube is a nightmare (no surprises there either!), Axelle is beautiful and amazing (certainly no surprises there!), and married life is brilliant! I love it!
January-May – Living and working in South Africa:
Shooting Doomsday in Cape Town was an adventure in an amazing landscape. We shot for 66 days all around the Cape. The crew were awesome. The locations were spectacular. The weather was incredible. And the food… Oh my God!! I really fell in love with the place. It's also cheap as chips, so if you haven't been there, I highly recommend it, for filming, or eating, or whatever….
One of the things I was adamant about doing with Doomsday was going back to a kind of gritty stunt/action movie that doesn't get made anymore. Real people, in a real world, doing really REALLY dangerous stuff! No green screen, no wires, just crazy stunties standing on, jumping into, and hanging out of cars travelling at 80mph and smashing into each other! Stunts SA I salute you! When I wanted to crash and roll a 10 ton armoured transport (one of two we designed and built especially for the movie), they hadn't done anything like that before, but were perfectly happy to give it a try, and it worked spectacularly!
We exploded countless pyro's in the centre of Cape Town, in the middle of the night. We closed down the city centre (to stage a frantic foot/bus/motorbike chase) on a Saturday afternoon! We took over a major theme park, dressed it as the villains lair (playing host to a twisted Moulin Rouge-style stage show and a spot of brutal human sacrifice!) and filled it with a thousand screaming extras, waving baseball bats, hanging from the rafters and generally baying for blood. They had a lot of fun that night, and so did we. What I thought was going to be the most difficult sequence to shoot turned out to be relatively easy. Also, Axelle makes the first of her two cameo appearances in the movie in this sequence, dressed as one of the punk marauders. She also plays an infected plague victim later in the movie.
We commandeered a Russian freighter in dry dock to film the opening shoot-out, a steam train for an escape sequence, and a derelict slaughterhouse to stage an elaborate 10 min action sequence that'll leave you breathless and shell shocked, and we did it all for real.
The cast had a ball in Cape Town too. I had such a great time working with some of the Dog Soldiers team again – Sean, Darren, Les, Chris, Craig and Emma – along with two of the Descent girls – Myanna, Nora-Jane – as well as some new recruits to the family, Adrian Lester, Rick Warden, Alex Siddig, David O'Hara, Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell, amongst others.
The last 3 weeks we spent entirely on the massive car chase that comes near the end of the movie. I've never had so long to film one sequence, but we needed the time. Every day featured at least one or two complicated and highly dangerous stunts or pyro effects. It was a blast, tearing along on the tracking vehicle with our fleet of specially 'mutilated' vehicles hot on our tail. Each day threw new challenges and new risks our way. We had a few extremely close calls, but luckily nobody got injured.
In May we flew back to the UK for the last week of filming in Glasgow and the highlands, where most of the story is actually set. The main bulk of that involved a savage trial by combat scene in the courtyard of Blackness Castle. The finale of this sequence involves an explosion ripping through the castle, and I remember our Irish FX supervisor had a very charming and cool way about him. Rather be all gung-ho and cue the explosion with a loud "Green for go!" or "Hit it!", he simply and calmly spoke to the man with his finger on the button and said "Blow up the castle." It was the perfect way to end the shoot. We wrapped right on schedule and under budget.
May-November – Living in London, working in Soho:
Since then I've been dug in at the cutting room, putting the pieces together in the leanest and most concise manner, to make the movie as good as it can be. While that's been going on the sound designers have been slogging their guts out and the composer, Tyler Bates has been working on the score from his studio in LA. Everyone has been racing to the finish line – the end in sight! Only in the last few weeks have we started mixing these separate elements together to make a whole. We finally locked picture at the start of December and have been working primarily on the sound and music since then.
Testing the movie, and beyond...
One of the weirdest parts of the process so far has been testing the film in the US. The whole test screening process is something I have very mixed feelings about. For a start, we've only tested this movie with US audiences, which, to all intents and purposes, is an audience I know very little about – that is to say I haven't spent any time at all sitting amongst them watching movies, and surely that's the best way to get to know your audience. Not having had that opportunity, I don't fully understand what makes them tick, what they laugh at, what they scream at. Obviously, on a broad scale we all generally laugh and scream at the same sort of stuff, but the difference is in the smallest details – the timing of a joke, the tone of a scene, that kind of thing. Sometimes the void between British sensibilities and American sensibilities is non-existant, other times it seems vast! It's both fascinating and terrifying – trusting the fate of your movie to total strangers. I'm sure every director feels the same way, but unless you're Steven Spielberg (who doesn't test his movies), the chances are you're just going to have to deal with it.
One aspect of modern test screenings that everyone has to deal with, including the studio, is that once the movie has been seen, it's open season, particularly on the internet. Audiences are so much more cine-savvy than ever before and everyone seems to want their opinions to be heard, good and bad. The internet is their open forum, and as long as the studios continue doing test screenings, there's nothing anyone can do to prevent it.
So far, the response to Doomsday as been great, bearing in mind that nobody has yet seen the completed film. (We only ever screened an ungraded hi-def tape with temp score and several temp vfx shots.) Certainly, nobody ever commented that they were bored by it! Two of the main responses that came about from the test screenings stem from the fact that this film is an unknown quantity. With no prior marketing to go on, some audience members went in expecting a horror movie (based on my track record).
Well, just to clarify, Doomsday is NOT a horror film. Yes, it's dark. Yes, it's brutal and violent. (Hey, it's me !) And yes, it 's even a little scary at times. But a horror film it is not. The mistake, and this seems to be based on contemporary cinema lore, which states that virus = zombies. With the likes of everything from 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil, and most recently in I Am Legend, it seems that any film dealing with a virus automatically has to have some variation of the living dead running around devouring people. Well, our virus is back to basics. The real deal. It kills people. Pure and simple. As lethal and effective as a virus really is. Okay, so it rots you from the outside in, covering the victim with weeping soars and dripping pustules and liquefies the internal organs, but the end result is….you die. And you don't come back. That said, Doomsday is not primarily a virus movie either. The 'Reaper' virus acts as a catalyst for the action, it's responsible for creating the world of the story, but doesn't drive the narrative.
Of course, some of the comments you get back after test screenings are just hilarious, from the more obvious "It rocks!" or "That babe was hot! She kicks ass!", to remarks like the guy who said the only reason he didn't rate the movie as excellent was because he "didn't like the temp score". Go figure. See how the fate of a film can hang by a slender thread! Luckily, the majority of the comments we got back were positive and smart and actually served to reinforce our own feelings about the movie, and you can't ask for much more than that.
The only problem I had with this process (aside from what it does to my nerves) was with the Aint It Cool News website for posting a review after the first test screening. It wasn't that the review was negative that bothered me, as a filmmaker that's a fact of life, I have to take the rough with the smooth and Doomsday, because of its intense action and extreme nature, isn't going to appeal to everybody. So, I'm cool with that. No, what bothered me was them allowing this 'critic' to include a detailed synopsis of the entire movie as part of his so-called review – and not just a rough storyline, but every scene, every incident, every character beat, every death! Basically, just about the biggest spoiler you can imagine. I don't know what this is called, but it's definitely not a movie review.
Personally, I can tell you that I was present at each of the screenings, listening to the vibe of the audience, hearing the gasps, the screams, the laughs and the cheers, and generally soaking up the distinct murmur of excitement throughout the movie. There was an audible and palpable buzz in the air! I for one am incredibly happy with the movie and eager to see what the world will make of it.
So there you go. That brings us pretty much up to date. I'll post another blog when I hear any news about release dates, trailers, festivals etc. Next year is going to be an interesting one. I'm proud that my next movie will be coming out in the same year as Indy 4, The Dark Night and the new Bond, to name a few. That's what I call good company!
