Straightblog

is there going to be a premiere?

Well the short answer is "I don't know". There may not be a premiere - Julia at Verve Pictures is doing the math, as they say, and working out whether she can pull it all together. It's a little more complicated, apparently, than it may seem, and of course someone has to organize it and pay for it etc... From the distributors' point of view, understandabely on a low-budget production like this, a premiere is not an automatic thing. Although it would be nice to mark the launch of the movie in some way, it's all down to Julia and I have to respect her judgment on this. So we'll just wait and see...
I know that's unhelpful to those of you planning a trip to the UK for the opening weekend. Sorry I can't give you more of a lead, but it's genuinely up in the air at the moment and depends on a number of things coming together. BUT if there is a premiere of some kind, it'll be towards the beginning of the week before release i.e. around 17th April. Once again, it's quite likely there won't be a premiere at all if all the pieces don't fit together for Verve Pictures. Best I can do right now, sorry.

G AND D INTERVIEWS PART 1

So these are the first couple of clips of the interviews I recorded with Gillian and Danny on my little stills camera at the end of our last press day at a London hotel.

The other film Danny mentions is Nick Love's "Outlaw" - released in UK in March.

official webpage

Just a quick one as I'm on my toes at the moment, but you ought to know (if you haven't discovered it already) that there's now an official Straightheads website at www.straightheads.com. Not a whole lot there that dedicated readers of this blog haven't seen before but there should be
a couple of clips from the film on there before too long.

A couple of people I know have mentioned that their friends have seen trailers or posters at cinemas in and around London. I don't know why but that suddenly made the impending release very real for me... and yes I am nervous. Wouldn't you be??

More and more cinemas now want to take the film, and I know that Verve Pictures are aiming for something between 200 and 250 screens throughout the UK, which sounds like a really good number to me.

By the way a BIG THANKS to all of you who have set up Straightheads pages of your own, and who are helping to spread the word about this movie on the web - many small grains of sand add up to big heap, and every extra person who goes to see the movie in the opening week pushes us a millimetre closer to making Straightheads the worldwide cult hit it severely needs to be.

And thanks A.G. for turning your back on any skanky pirate copies that might pop up out there in Rostov, maximum respect for your ethical position. Wish there were more like you out there.

I'll be back soon with those some of those clips I promised... they're being digitized somewhere else so I'm waiting to get 'em back in my hot hands.

hold on now...

Well Gillian and Danny and I did a press day at a London hotel on Tuesday, which was a lot of fun, and I recorded my own little chats with G and D for this blog so I'll be posting those soon.... We're busy editing the TV spots and setting up the official website, which goes live next week. Lots of stuff happening but as it hasn't quite happened yet I've been loth to post, mea maxima culpa. There will be more plentifulness soon. Also I had the madre of all 'flus. I mean the mutter. Three days in bed, pole-axed. Feeling a whole lot better now, hamdulillah and slava bogu.

Straightheads poster art

SEVEN weeks to go till S-day! Gillian, Danny and I are doing press this week and next week, and I'm looking forward to haveing a chance to talk about the film. GA and I had lunch last week to catch up on various things, our first meeting since she, Danny and I recorded the DVD commentary back in December. We're both really buzzing about the forthcoming release: a year and a half ago we were stumbling around in a freezing cold forest in the middle of the night shooting these strange scenes, and now...  Straightheads is about to be disgorged on an unsuspecting public, on a couple of hundred screens here in the UK! Hope you like the final artwork by the way... Oh, and some of you have been asking about a premiere: there's no news on this, I know Verve Pictures are considering what to do, as a lot of people are expecting one. It's really in their hands... I'll let you know as soon as I have any info, OK?

more clippage from the second coldest night of the shoot

In quite random order, here are some more clips from the behind-the-scenes people. They're not edited together or anything, and I was wondering whether to ask Alistair or Verve to stitch them together, but then decided that might take a while and you'd probably rather just have the raw footage. I'll see if Verve Pictures can dig out some more later. They've got the poster up and framed in their office right now, and I think they're planning a larger version (is that an 8-sheet?) for the Tube (the underground railway / London metro). Gillian and Danny have kicked off their publicity schedule so there should be some stuff coming out in print in the UK and online, watch out for it. Just 7 weeks to go!

By the way for all of you out there, especially in the Americas, who have been wondering whether Straightheads will be released in their country, here's your answer, as far as I understand: all of Latin America has been sold to Sony Pics, excluding Brazil and Mexico, which were already sold when the Sony deal was done.

The one big thing we all have to keep in mind is that both Sony Pictures and the national distributors around the world will be watching very closely to see how Straightheads performs at the box-office here in the UK on 27-29 April. If crowds of people go to see it here on the opening weekend, the chances of it playing in your local picturehouse in, say, Santiago, will be a lot higher...

GA EPK clip

Verve Pictures have thrown my way a couple of clips of Gillian and Danny interview recorded during the Straightheads shoot, and some behind-the-scene footage, which I'll be posting this week. On most feature film shoots there's something called an EPK (Electronic Press Kit) crew going around shooting bits and pieces behind the scenes and looking for a chance to interview the actors in between setups.  Here's one of the clips of Gillian, recorded in one of the fantastically ornate and sumptuous drawing-rooms during a very cold night shoot at Mawley Hall in November 2005. The spontaneity she talks about, the little tingle of risk when the scene you're shooting isn't over-rehearsed yet, you haven't chewed it to death and the actor's responses are still fresh and "live" - that's one of the real pleasures of shooting with Gillian, especially for a film-maker like myself with a doc background ...