FILMING - DAY THREE - WORCESTER

Gabby: I found myself waking up with a feeling in my stomach like I was just about to climb a mountain. I found it hard to be energetic and enthusiastic about the project. My confidence had taken a bit of a battering and as a result I wasn’t particularly a nice person to be around. This is really taking all of my energy to get out of bed. I am tired, stressed feeling shitty. It was never a case of giving up, but a learning curve of how to deal with these intensely stressful situations.

James: This was Ann & Beth’s scenes in the flat at the end of the film. The morale of the crew improves marginally as we tackled the third day although it is another day of frustrating angles and inconsistency by both cast and crew.

Gabby: Yeah, I felt that we really pushed Selina as we tried to get the end argument down, again and again and again. The video output on my camera packs up so we can’t attach it up to the monitor for James to watch. From here on in it was a case of James having complete trust in what I am shooting.

James: I’m really doubting myself at this stage and hoping that I’m projecting an air of confidence! The major factor is that you have no time on this kind of a lo-budget schedule, and everything requires immediacy and urgency. However, the upshot is that it delivers a real sense of rawness to the film; it feels like a series of snatched moments that unfold over a day.

Damien Lloyd joined us to take the press kit shots at this point. I feel unfair to him as we haven’t given him enough time.

Gabby: No, we brought him in at last minute as someone else let us down, but he took some fantastic pictures including the main photo of Jen lying on the bed, that we have used for all the promotion of Peppermint.

James: On a lighter note, we got the flat empty in three hours. As Kamaljit Sharma said when we were filming Nightshift for Channel Four: “We are always chasing the time”. How true those words rang for me now!


Gabby: Yeah it was like a military operation. We had to be out before the next day where the renovators where coming in to strip and redecorate. God knows what they thought about our shoddy paint job! It was very strange to be filming quite intense arguing scenes in one moment and then to be packed up and moving out in the next.


James: Toby got the white van back and loved every minute of being White Van Man for the evening.



Gabby: I remember we had a few bits of furniture left sat on the driveway of the flat that people didn’t want back. We had a friends moment where we sat on a sofa (donated by Bob – thanks Bob) with a table, armchair and sat drinking beers. This was a real moral booster as it felt like something had finally gone to plan and on schedule.



We decide to go out for quick drink, I run to the cashpoint and dislocate my knee ( a reoccurring injury), so I stay in with just me and a bag of peas.

FILMING - DAY TWO - WORCESTER

James: The awkwardness from the first day threatens to destroy the whole of the film. None of Mike and Beth’s scenes are going down well in the flat, and I am incredibly frustrated. I think Gab would agree that she wasn’t getting the best camera performance on this occasion and it was sod’s law that when the acting would go well the camera would be rough, and vice versa.

.
Gabby: This would be fair to say, however we re-shot the scenes between Ann and Mike in the morning and they worked out much better. I found it difficult to keep the camera so that it was reacting to the action rather than predicting it. It was near impossible to hit focus, good composition and read the action well for a flawless take, especially when some of the takes were 7 minutes long. In hindsight even though I wanted they style to be edgy with depth and shifts in focus, I should have shot these scenes with a larger aperture so that the depth of field wasn’t so shallow.

I can remember being frustrated because the sex scenes were not how I had imagined them. This is when I started to realise that because of our limited resources and time anything we made now was actually an adaptation of the script and what we had hoped for. It was difficult for me to get the opportunity to express to James if I had a concern about the way in which something was acted, I felt that if the cast heard comments from me it might confuse them as to who they should take direction from. I also thought that they might think us unprofessional, something that now having Peppermint under my belt, I wouldn’t care as much about.

We film the big scene where Beth and Chris talk about running away, we get a cracking take, but then someone realises the boom is propped against the wall throughout the take, we go again but it is not quite as good. We actually ended up using that first take and nobody so far has spotted it first time, which is to both Jen and Chris’ credit.

James: I’m really shitting bricks at this stage and wonder how we are going to pull this film out of the bag. The frustration eats into your appetite, your sleep, your every move. You can’t stop thinking more and more about how to fix the nightmare. The biggest pressure is that you’ve spent £2000, hired 30 people and put yourself out there. You have this massive want to just do them justice and repay their faith. I’m not using hyperbole when I say that it really gets to everything inside of you. Still – we battled on.

FILMING - DAY ONE - WORCESTER

Sunday 29th May
Filming - Day One – Worcester


James: It is great to get up and running after months of this only existing on paper.

Gabby: Myself, I am so not ready to shoot this film. I had become so consumed with the pre-production, getting the location, fitting it out etc, that I haven’t even really picked up a camera in months. James, Larry and I stayed over in the flat the night before and wake up on the morning of the shoot with this ominous feeling in our stomachs. Much to my annoyance Larry (our soundman) wakes up 15 minutes before we are scheduled to start shooting. The stress begins.

James: We start pretty much in chronological order, so everything that you see at the start of the film was shot mostly on the first day. This means that Selina and Chris’s first scene was a sex scene! I was happy that we would sense awkwardness necessary for the scene. They both wore pyjamas, which I personally think isn’t the slightest bit sexual, so it adds to the problem between their relationship.

Gabby:I believe this was the first sex scene Selina and Chris had acted but it didn’t seem to phase them. It actually struck me how strange it was that they were laughing and chatting happily right up until James called action where they then launched into the scene. It was the first sex scene I had ever shot and it made me glad that I was a camera operator who had a prop to focus on, rather than Toby the poor sound assistant who didn’t quite know where to look.


James:The day goes relatively smoothly until the sequence when Mike is getting ready for work and Ann asks about trying for a baby. We tried and tried that shot for so long, and it just didn’t work.

Gabby: I think it was something about the angles, Ann was meant to be sat down, and Mike perched on the side of the sofa, it became impossible to get an interesting shot with the two of them. As we struggled to work around it, I think this affected the actor’s spark and we then were faced with two aspects of the scene that was not working.

James: We tried injecting a bit of comedy whereby he was wrestling with electrical leads that were all tangled up, but it didn’t come off. In retrospect we were immediately exposing our lack of directorial preparation, as we should have had that all planned. It felt as if we’d damaged morale on day one, and I was annoyed at the time.

Gabby: I think if I am honest this also affected my confidence, which is something I always struggle with on set.

James: Meeting with the actors in the evening it became obvious that they were a bit uncertain about the experience. Gabs and I decided to re-shoot that scene the next morning.

Day one and we fell behind. Ha ha.

Gabby:I didn’t sleep well that night.

MOVING IN - Worcester

James: Armed with a white van and a troop of helpers, we went about dressing the set. It was a crazy experience, just banging on friends' doors and relieving them of their furniture. Once again, I ducked out of the mayhem to meet our actors and get them housed.

Gabby: Yeah the group of helpers were friends from work, friends from the gym, James' students from University, basically anyone who breathed an interest and wasn't strong enough to say no. It was a slow start waiting for the first load to be picked up. As we started filling the flat my worst thoughts were realised, we are going to need more and more stuff just to make it look lived in. We did so many trips picking up lamps, photo frames, mugs, pictures. Watching the end product is actually very surreal for those close to us because you keep on getting constant glimpses of things that are familiar to them.

The easiest room for me in the end, was the very thing that had given me such a bad headache the day before - Beth's bedroom. A few weeks earlier I had asked my boss Steve at DEFRA what sort of nicknacks his 14 year old daughter had in her. He kindly brought me photos the next day. The day after he offered a spare bed, bedside table, lamp...in the end he brought a people carrier full of stuff, including his daughter (also named Beth), who completely constructed the whole room without me even stepping foot in it! It looked great, and we managed to get around the wooden chest problem, just, by covering it with a curtain and making it a sideboard. The single bed only literally squeezed in, and if the cover wasn't in the way you could actually close the door, but that's literally how tight it was!

I brought in my sister to cook Indian for the masses, then I send a group of friends out with money and a shopping list of things to dress the set, and finally after a lot of effort we started to have something that looked like a home.

James: By chance I saw Selina, Chris & Jen and they drove past my house. They were all quite jovial and excited from the looks of things. Larry and I took them shopping to get some food and then we showed them their rooms in student halls. I think it was all quite surreal.


When I took them up to the set they were quite impressed that we had managed to make this home out of nothing. It was certainly an achievement. I think the natural reaction would have been to just film in an already established house, but that flat was their flat. Every piece of furniture that was in their had been put there, saying something about their character. Yoga books beside Ann's bed, childish posters on Beth's wall... all of it was intentional and built around their character.

That night, Gab and I stayed at the location. It felt like the moment of truth. There was nothing we could do at this late stage to stop, it either works tomorrow or it falls on it's ass.

Gabby:It was all very nerve racking and very stressful.

COLLECTING KIT - London

James: Tom Lane and I had driven down to Slough the night before as we had to collect kit really early. He was a star. It's a sad state of affairs that if you want to hire any kit in the UK at an affordable price you have to go to London. Everything stems out of there.

The biggest drama is when I realise I don't have any proof of identity. I was so stressed with all that was going on I had left it in Worcester. I had to get Phil Morris out of his bath in the morning to get him over to my flat just to fax a Council Tax bill and a Water Rate statement. It's moments like this that you really need friends!

Added to this excitement is that none of the camera filters have been placed in the order, so I had an irate Gabby on the phone barking at me to sort some out. I had that classic moment where I gave them my credit card and just prayed the money would go through, and fortunately it did!


Gabby: Meanwhile back in Worcester after work I go back to the flat and am secretly praying for a miracle - that the chest had dissappeared over night. Shit! It was still there. Plan B, I started praying that Will, the friend whose family kindly lent us the flat, would say that we could take an axe to it. That phone call never came. So I did what every other orgainsed, pro-active person would have done. I ignored the chest and carried on cleaning the flat from top to toe.

James pops by about 11.00pm, its late, we are both exhausted and we haven't even started yet.

PAINTING THE SET - Worcester

James: The search for the 'family home location had gone on for ages. We hadn't seen anywhere that was 100% perfect. We either had to compromise on shooting style or story. We settled for a derelict flat that was above a friend's house. It was literally gutted. Perfect for Trainspotting but not for Peppermint.

We could get access to it for about 6 days in total before the decorators came in proper. Until then, it was ours and we could do what we wanted with it, so Gab got in and started painting it.

Gabby: How the hell were we going to fill it and make it look believable? I was really aware of how much work this would take and started enlisting randon people to donate pieces of furniture that they had going spare. I wrote lists, lost them all, so wrote new ones. James got fed up with me constantly writing lists of furniture.

James:I have such guilt about this! I was desperately completing a corporate video project whilst Gab had gathered a group of her work-mates to paint our set. I walked in at the end and they'd done it all. They were great.


Gabby: Yeah, I blagged some friends, Steve, Luke, Phil and Lisa from work to come and have a pizza & painting party, they all seemed up for it. It then turned up and showed them round the flat, and they all looked at me like 'no way in hell will we ever get this done...but we might as well just start painting just to amuse her'. We started moving the furniture out of the rooms and then found that the room we had ear-marked for Beth's room had a rather large antique chest at the bottom that had literally been boxed in, when they put up the fake wall. It was physically immpossible to move it and it took up nearly a third of a very small room! I didn't even think would we could get a bed in there and there was no other room that would be feasable to use as Beth's bedroom. My nervous breakdown started exactly at this point, meanwhile James was editing a video about f***ing boilers!!! I decided to ignore it and carry on, thinking some how we would get round it.

The kitchen was a mess. the walls were bright orange and covered in adhesive where the wood panneling had been ripped off. Myself and Steve managed to cover it by mounting wallpaper lining with spray adhesive on the walls. We then painted it added a border, and hey prestow, you couldn't tell, (well on camera at least).

We got it finished - it is amazing how fast you can paint some walls when you are not bothered about all the finishing touches. James arrived and gave his seal of approval. I felt some what frustrated at the lack of his presence, even though it wasn't particulary his fault.

SCHEDULING - Worcester

James: Gabs and I started scheduling the shooting order. We wanted to keep it as linear as possible, but obviously we couldn't shoot all the film in order. It was a logistical nightmare, but strangely enough, we did it quite well. We stuck pretty much to our filming schedule despite having never done one before. It was our bible though, and a crucial pice of preparation. Who knows where we'd have been without it.

Gabby: We knew that we had 3 days starting from Sunday (that's including pack up time) to film in the flat, so that scheduling fell easily into place. We also knew that we had the school children available to use the weekend after. This meant that we needed Olivia and Zak (Mel & Sean) around for these days. This left us a nice gap in between to shoot the office & Nan scenes. the rest happily fitted around all this.

We checked and double checked that we hadn't left any scenes out of the schedule, and like James said, that schedule then became our primary point of reference.


James: I remember the actors thought we were very organised. I realised that perception is crucial. If we act organised, we are organised, even amongst chaos.

MORE LOCATION HUNTING - Worcester

James: We were turned away on the doorstep of a local old peoples' home as the boss wasn't in. Gabs and I argued under the strain of it all. When I finally got to see it a few days later the placed hummed, both sonically and nasally. We were 'homeless'!

We went and watched 'Star Wars - Return Of The Sith', and remembered why we were bothering in the first place. I still laugh at the scene where Anakin wakes up as Vader and goes 'NNOOOOOOO!'. Star Wars is quoted by Toy Story is quoted by Star Wars. Very funny.

LOCATION HUNTING - Worcester

James: I had a meeting with the Registrar at work to discuss locations. I was working in a university at the time so it was ideal for locations. There were obviously classrooms, office spaces & toilets for various scenes. Another bonus was that actors could stay in halls with en suite bathrooms and stuff. Although it wasn't cheap, it was all quite neatly arranged.

Gabby: We were still at this point short of the main location, which was a house/flat for the main characters. The general trend went as followed; I would express my worry about finding this location, that I thought it was crucial to the whole way in which would would shoot these scenes. James would agree. We talked about it some more. We both did no much about it.

James: It would be fair to say that our producing was taking up more time here than the directing, and Gab would later argue that we didn't spend enough time on preparing the style and look of the piece.

Gabby: Yeah, I argued that then and still do now, however it naturally became a priority to focus on the tasks that would physically get the film made, after all there was no point in talking about the style of a film, if there was nothing or no where to shoot.

READ THROUGH - London

Gabby: This was an interesting process as not only was it the first time that the actors had all met, but from this point on, there was really no going back.

James: I dashed in late to our one and only read through! It was around a big table at the Directors Guild in Charing Cross Road. We had our four main characters; Mike (Chris Tajah), Nan (Phyliss McMahon), Ann (Selina Giles) and Beth (Jennifer Oliver).

It was a bit daunting to be honest. I had never heard it all read out before. I remember thinking we had a lot of work to do when we left.

Gabby: I remember feeling like a bit of a fraud conducting this read through with these four very competent actors, after all we didn't really know what the hell we were doing or what to expect, and these people had made this commitment to give up their time for our project. I definatley felt the pressure was now on.

FIRST CREW MEETING - Worcester

James: We gathered the small crew in the video studio in the Digital Arts Centre. I laugh now because my diary says "I'm not sure if this is a dream team, but it is a team". I'm incredibly fickle. These guys were lifesavers when the shoot began. Most were based in Worcester except Larry Smith, who is an old friend of mine. I felt happier having him there because I knew that if everything went wrong we could get by on Larry, myself and Gab.

Gabby: Hurrah! The team meeting I had been wanting for so long. I was always aware that Peppermint wouldn't be possible without the crew, so to have them all in the same room, and committed was a real step forward. As I handed out the scripts however, I got the distinct impression that no one quiet believed we would actually pull this off.

SCRIPT REVISION

James: I can't remember what draft I was on at this stage. The script was pretty solid already but we were tweaking it some observations that we'd taken into consideration during casting.

I was struggling to take the script beyond the 90 pages, which in hindsight was a bad sign. I was limited by the parameters of the story taking place within one day, so I couldn't see where to go with it. Gab was encouraging me to write a few scenes at the end where we'd see Beth on the streets. I agreed to write them so that they could be added to the shooting schedule, but I really wanted it to end with Beth leaving the house. I have a great respect for Ibsen's 'A Doll's House', where Nora just leaves at the end. I think it is a very powerful statement. It inspired me to have the characters just to walk out after their actions and not be seen again with a reactionary shot.

Gabby: As we worked through the script and plugged slight holes in the characters and plot, we started to base Mike's job on a temp job that I had done a few months before. I got the sack after 3 hours for not working miracles and making people pick up the phone when I called them...it was very cathartic to put this soul destroying experience into the script!

I had an idea to, like James says, shoot an extended end to the film. I was worried that if we didn't hit the tone and pacing correctly we would cross the line from providing a powerful but anticlimatic ending, to just a frustrating let down for the audience. Although I totally understood James' vision, I felt that for the sake of one more shot, we could avoid a potential disaster that we would kick ourselves for later.

GENERAL ELECTION

James: Labour won the General Election for a third time and I got excited about moving to Ireland.

Gabby: Utterly disappointed, but not surprised

CASTING - DAY 3 - London

James: I'm dead on my feet at this stage. I really struggle with casting and it was made unbearable with the sickness. Apologies to anybody who thought I wasn't very pleasant at the sessions!

Gab and I soon noticed our predicament at the end of the final session. We had to create a believeable family! It was the start of a nightmare really as we had so many combinations to consider. We certainly didn't decide it on the day, the decision making rolled on for days afterwards.

I stayed in Slough to recover from my illness whilst Gab went back up to Birmingham to work. We'd neatly fitted in casting on a Bank Holiday weekend!

CASTING - DAY 2 - London

James: The Sunday was the quieter of the the two sessions held at the Strongroom Studios in Shoreditch. The most poignant moment of the day was meeting Marius De Vries outside the studio and asking if he could let us in to use the toilet. Gab & I have such style.

Gabby: To be fair, it was me who treatened to pee on Marius' shoes if he didn't open the door quicker, and James who pointed out to me afterwards just who he was. I wondered why James had looked so horrified at the time!

James: I remember seeing Selina Giles and she hadn't prepared a monologue. She chose instead to give a characterisation of Ann. Although I thought it was cheeky, she was good and she became a strong contender for getting the role.

Gabby: Yeah Selina was the last in for the day. James was being held together by tissues and Lemsips, we were both a bit bedraggle after talking about Peppermint for 2 days solid, but Selina seemed like a breath of fresh air. I knew James was keen for her for the role as Ann, but I had my worries that she looked to young for the part. Either way we both knew it was far more complex than this as it would also be a matter of pairing up a believable mother and daughters.