Update on 'Red, White and Blue'

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SimonHeadShot July 7, 2009 by debbiesnax on FlickrIt's not quite three weeks since Jenn and I blogged about our experiences during the Austin filming of the slacker revenge movie Red, White and Blue. In a recent email, writer/director Simon Rumley revealed that he has already edited over half the film. This is pretty amazing considering he'd been too busy shooting while in Austin to get into the editing suite, and needed some time back in London to recuperate from his first film experience in Texas.

Here's more from Simon:

What was it like filming in Texas during the summer?
Before I came to Austin, everyone was saying how hot it was going to be so I was kind of prepared for the heat and I kept asking "Is it going to get hotter!?" and everyone kept saying yes! In the end we shot on one day when the temperature reached 110 and all the crew kept going, "Oh my God, it's so hot!" but actually, it wasn't clammy. It was a dry heat so compared with a sometime London or, say, New York summer, it was a very bearable climate. Added to this that DP (Director of Photography) Milton Kam is originally from the Tropical Suriname and Noah Taylor, the lead actor playing Nate is originally from Australia. The producer Bob although from London (and probably because of this), was very keen on tanning himself semi-naked at any given chance. I think we adapted to the Texan heat much better than the Texans we were working with! That said I did quite often get severely sun-burnt!

Filming with a Texas Crew
Myself, the DP and the Producer had all worked together before and the majority of the crew had also worked with a large proportion of each other too, so a situation of "Us" vs. "Them" could easily have arisen. But it didn't and I have to say everyone was a pleasure to work with.

Given that Milton and myself have worked together a few times before, we both know how the other works. At the beginning of each shoot day we'd spend at least an hour, usually longer, going through the shot-list and making sure we both knew what the other would be talking about. Consequently we're very prepared and work very fast and I think this was, initially, a shock for everyone involved.

I spent the first week or so trying to get the crew to not only think about what it was doing at that particular moment but also what it needed to be doing in 10 minutes time; in the end everyone got into this frame of thinking I think and we had one crew member come back after a few days of working on another shoot saying how slow and boring everything was compared to our shoot!

Drinking in Austin
Assuming I come back to Austin sometime soon for a film festival, I'd like to organize a Red, White and Blue bar crawl of Austin, taking in all the places we shot for this film. That would include Cucarachas (a favourite of mine), Emos (also a favourite), The Horseshoe Bar (actually, they're all favourites), The Broken Spoke, Spiderhouse, The Sheraton Bar (!), the Beauty Bar and a few random others such as the Pearl Lustre (loved the concrete ping pong tables) and Shangri-Las (I remember heading there after a day of shooting for a last drink before it closed and walking down the steps into the main bar where they had Iggy Pop and The Stooges playing "Raw Power" and the whole place feeling very cinematic and cool). I love the visual look of a lot of the stand-alone bars which all seem to have a very Edward Hopper/Nighthawk quality to them; something I think we've re-created in the film.

How's the film editing going?
I've now been back in London for two weeks and have been editing for about 10 of those days with Rob (Hall). So far everything's looking pretty good and the acting and storyline are both holding up very well. Although we've still got a long way to go, I'm starting to feel very excited about the prospect of showing this film to people and finding out what they make of it; I'm not quite sure anyone will quite know how to react!

On Monday, composer Richard Chester, my collaborator on both The Handyman and The Living And The Dead, is coming around to look at a very loose cut so we can discuss the music and he can start thinking about his contribution to the film, something I'm looking forward to immensely.