Charlie Productions : How We Made Anything Goes

After abstaining from short films for the best part of a year we were falling off the wagon...

Following the mess of the 2003 London Sci-Fi Festival and a bizarrely misnamed incident known amongst the gossips of the hopeless movie scene as the "Arse Text Incident", in which Chris left a message on Oddball's phone calling him a twat, all of us who had been involved with the first 48hr Film Challenge had fallen out with Johnnie. As a result when he announced the 2nd 48hr Film Challenge, which this time would be run across the whole of the UK, we weren't interested.

We also had other priorities. The 2003 Challenge clashed with the Edinburgh Film Festival and since, thanks to our place on the Digital Shorts scheme, Screen East were paying for our travel we were keen to be at the festival and make the most of our supposed status as officially backed bright young things. As it turned out Johnnie was also basking in the warm glow of Film Council admiration, he was at the festival with his new best friend Paul Trijbits (Head of the New Development Fund) who we'd see constantly wandering around the delegate centre in a 48hr Film Challenge T-Shirt. For a brief moment the 48hr Film Challenge was an event of National Filmmaking Significance - and we had missed it.

We were emotionally reunited with Johnnie in front of his then ever-present documentary camera crew at a party for some awful American teen-film where the cast had to sing and dance for us like a troupe of performing monkeys. With the "Arse Text Incident" put behind us we all congratulated ourselves on being picked up by the powers that be. Of course within a few months we had left the Digital Shorts Scheme under dark clouds and not long after Johnnie sealed the Film Council's decision not to run another 48hr Film Challenge with an argument in which he called Paul something along the lines of "talentless little fuck".

Eitherway, by 2004 the landscape had significantly changed for all of us and so when Johnnie started talking of going to Berlin and running a 48hr Challenge as part of the Britspotting Film Festival we were all pretty keen to take part.

PREPRODUCTION.
Obviously with the Challenge taking place in Berlin things were going to have to be different this time. On "Juice" we had been able to keep a very large possible cast and crew on call, ready to use if we needed them. Equally we were able to draw on large resources for equipment, props, costumes and facilities. This time round we would only be able to work with those who came with us and for the large part, the stuff that they brought with them. The other problem was of course the cost of getting to Berlin. With "Juice" all we were asking of our cast and crew was that they gave up a part of their weekend for free, now we needed them to pay for the privilidge.

Emily and Jonny had become an item sometime in the year before, following one of the astonishingly good parties that Chris used to have in Brixton. They were both as keen as we were to take part in another Challenge. For Alex the first Challenge had been something of a turning point, or if nothing else it was the start of a chain events that lead to him leaving his job and travelling Europe. Consequently he too was adamant that he wanted to part of the Berlin team.

Like Jonny, sound recordist Gabriel Scott was a regular from both the Cruet company and Chris' parties. Not only is he a great sound recordist but he's also an astonishingly good trumpet player and his inclusion in the team made us start to wonder if everyone could bring their own musical instruments and we could score the film live. Gabes, like Alex, Emily and us was also a veteran of Rob Kluger's film "French Fries On The Golden Front". Anyone who survived that week in Blackpool was more than capable of coping with two sleepless days in Berlin.

Actually it is easy to exaggerate the difficulties of "French Fries", in truth it had been a lot of fun and two other Blackpool survivors, our friends Sandra Schmuli and Katie were keen to come to Berlin. Schmu was happy to reprise her role as production assistant and all round genius, something which, when making a film in 48hrs, you can never get enough of. Katie however, was keen to make the move from assistant to actress and this film seemed like the perfect opportunity to cast her in something and see how it went, especially as during her time at University she had performed in an improvised sketch show.

We also knew that, like Schmu, if needed, Katie would make a wonderful prop to the production team. However we were also keen to find ourselves a straight actor to make sure we had all we needed in front of the camera - for preference a male lead to play against Emily. However Carl was too busy and Damien was too skint and we rapidly ran out of actors we felt we could ask to pay a couple of hundred quid to make a film.

Then Katie decided that, since she was skint and her finals started the week after the shoot she couldn't really afford either the time or the money. With gender less of an issue than finding another genuine actor to support Emily, we turned to Keely Beresford. Keely was delighted to be asked, excited by the mystery of the project and happy to do anything "except singing".

With Emily's friend Alia? making eight we packed our bags and headed for the airport.

PRODUCTION.
We arrived on April 30th and found that, as usual, Emily had done fantastically well with the accommodation. Sure it was just a youth hostel but it was comfortable, friendly, had it's own club and, best of all, the staff were pretty easy going. We were a short walk from the ramshackle venue of the Britspotting Festival in the eastern part of Berlin. The sun was hot, the mood was good and we spent the first day wandering around the city looking for good locations and good places to buy stuff that we might need.

We also got drunk. Not suddenly paralytic but gently, delightfully, comfortably pissed. It was a state that we were to keep close by us at all times until we left the country. Not that we spent the whole shoot drunk, far from it, after all, we woke up sober; but as directors we were both going through one of our invincible phases in which we believe nothing is beyond us and an above average consumption of alcohol is vital to keep this feeling ticking over. We were also both eating too much. Rather like the character of Chris Blaine that Chris had played in "Making Juice" we were both bizarrely enamoured of our ability to eat and spectacular displays of conspicuous over consumption were treated as some sort of crazy in-joke.

The reasons for this shared hunger were doubtlessly multifaceted. Chris had recently ended his five year relationship with Alex Turner and doubtlessly a lot of his drinking stemmed from this. Ben, on the other hand, was still constantly astonished at his good fortune to once again be in a relationship with Katie, and was very happy. Possibly the key factor however was simply the change in our fortunes. 2003 had been a year of hard work with very little obvious return. By the time we were in Berlin we had shot 'Free Speech', optioned 'Helicopter Land' to Mike Kelk and he was talking about taking us to Cannes. Finally things seemed to be moving for us and and finally people were starting to treat us with respect, which is always nice. If our eating and drinking to excess was a sign of anything other than us being a pair of greedy drunkards then it was that the world was opening up to us and we wanted to swallow it whole.

Another symptom of this lust was an inability to go to bed, especially on Chris' part. So, feeling a little worse for wear we assembled for the draw. Berlin is full of dogs and tall ragged looking men who may, or may not own them. The venue for the Britspotting festival had a similar down at heel feel. A small block of flats looking into a sandy courtyard it was hard to tell if the building was half finished or half derelict. Dogs and Germans hung about on benches and in doorways looking for all the world like extras in an episode of Blakes 7 and the whole place had the disconcerting feel of featuring in adult's idea of what teenagers find cool. Then again most of continental Europe is like this so it's not such a surprise.

After climbing various stair cases and going through various heavy fire doors we eventually came upon the man himself. Like Kurtz in a Sci-Fi version of Apocalypse Now (for children's TV) Johnnie Oddball was waiting for us by the doors to his inner sanctum with Kasia. He hugged us and thanked us for coming, which made it seem all the more like he was an evil genius and we just had fallen into his trap.

Behind the doors was a small cinema in which Johnnie would later start the proceedings, however, as the cinema was small and the event was well attended, most of us went and waited out doors with the dogs, leaving Emily behind the make the all in important draw to see what our Title and Genre would be.

It's about now that things start to go wrong.

After what felt like an age Emily returned, this time she had drawn the title "Anything Goes" and the genre "Comedy". We were depressed. Feeling suddenly irritated we all drifted across the road into a park where we sat and restlessly tugged the grass up whilst everyone tried to think whether they should say it or not.

Jonny had wanted to shoot something beautiful and moody, Chris had been thinking along the lines of black and white and German expressionism and Ben had been thinking about Funeral in Berlin. All of these ideas had been further fuelled by the Berliner's May Day preparations. The Police were expecting a repeat of the previous years Anti-Capitalist protests and the city was also hosting a party to celebrate the entrance of 12 new countries into the European Union. Fearing attack by terrorist or anarchist groups, the night before the city had been effectively locked up, streets were lined with blank faced armed Police and roads were sealed with lines of tanks. It was a blistering hot and historically significant day in a city that has seen more than it's fair share of international drama.

None of these things sat easily with the comedy "Anything Goes".

Besides, comedy was in many ways our bread and butter. We are both naturally silly people and our first instincts always tend to be comic. There is also something that works nicely about a comic short film and most of our shorts have either been broadly or gently funny. When we decided that we wanted to take part in the 48hr Challenge again part of the reasoning was that, perhaps, this time, we'd have to be something other than funny. The 'have to be' is also important, it is the restrictions of the competitions that usually give rise to the most creative impulses. The title "Anything Goes" was frankly terrifying because it gave so little restriction. With the clock ticking the very last thing you want is creative freedom.

Since the park left us scratchy and irritable we walked back to the hostel and had lunch at a cafe across the road. We started drinking again, the food took ages to arrive and we started to bat about bad ideas. Mostly they seemed to feature death, twisting the title to mean anything dies. In one instance "Anything Goes" was the slogan of a assassination agency. Since we were keen to give Jonny something to really explore we quite liked the idea of Keely wanting to die and so employing Alex to kill her, but then Emily, thinking Keely was just being attacked would try and stop him with "hilarious results". This would start with some beautiful stuff of Keely saying goodbye to the world before the jokes kicked in...

It was now about two or three in the afternoon and since there were no better ideas around there was pressure on us to start moving. However by the time we dispersed to start preparations the idea had somehow evolved to be focused around Alex as a cack-handed assassin who would try to kill Keely with a series of unlikely implements with "hilarious results". Wandering the streets looking for good locations we ended up slumped and grumpy in a sand pit watching kids play basket ball. Chris was hungover and dehydrated and Ben, not a natural solarist, was suffering in the blazing sunshine. Neither of us wanted to make this film and neither of us saw the point of working on something that focused so heavily on a non-professional actor like Alex when we had two superb actresses in Keely and Emily.

After kicking sand around for a bit we found that weren't actually arguing with each other at all and resolved to bite the bullet and return to the others and insist on a different approach. However Emily rather took the wind from our sails by insisting on exactly the same thing before we could open our mouths. She too had serious misgivings about the project and had also found out that along with the ranks of riot Police and the slumbering rows of tanks that had sprung up in the city to greet the expected May Day protestors, Berliners celebrated the first of May by closing all their shops. As a consequence all of the props we had hoped to buy were behind lock and key and not releasable until well after we would have caught our return flights.

Despondent the group of us again gathered, this time in one of our communal bedrooms, and began to look for a new idea. This was a painful and fruitless search. None of us wanted to make a comedy and there is nothing more instantly depressing than trying to be funny. The title gave us little to go on and constantly brought us back to the fact that actually, no, anything would not go since most things were closed for the weekend. Again and again we came back to the idea of finding comedy in seeing if anything goes, the idea of pushing the boundaries of a relationship or social situation... but not only were these ideas not funny they were all too close to "Free Speech" which we had only wrapped on a few weeks earlier.

With the mood sinking further we dispersed the rest of the team and just kept our two actresses Emily and Keely. Attempting to relieve the pressure of having to find an idea (especially one that needed to be increasingly quick to shoot) we decided to just try and improvise some characters, to try and develop something from their performances rather than just pluck something from the air. After forty minutes or so of quite enjoyable but utterly pointless improvising we turned at last, in desperation, to bare facts. Forget what we were supposed to do - what did we want to do?

For Ben it had been quite simple. As a life-long fan of John Le Carre a trip to Berlin had meant one thing and one thing only - SPY'S. That's what we wanted to do, something moody, something genre based, something with a sense of suspense, something that Jonny could go to town with. How did spy's fit into "Anything Goes", we wondered,starting to think it out out-loud, well, a spy musical would be funny. The whole point of spy films is that everyone has a subplot that they keep to themselves, the whole point of musicals is that everyone has a subplot that they sing out loud, and usually dance about to...Within the space of a few minutes we were dancing around the room singing such immortal lines as "I am the Russian waiting for my drop-off, my name is Nicolai Alexander Kockov!"

It had everything, drama, suspense, comedy, good camera work and a tenuous relationship to the title we had to use. It was ludicrous, impossibly difficult to achieve, mind numbingly bizarre and rather wasteful of the talents we had on board, especially Keely who took the prospect of singing unaccompanied in the streets with a fortitude and good grace that belied her deep apprehension.

We pitched the idea to the others and whilst they didn't exactly punch the air and whoop, they did at least recognise the only horse in town when they saw it and dutifully set about trying to achieve something very very silly.

With time now a very precious commodity we had to start shooting straight away. Deciding that the film would be split into two parts, a serious spy chase sequence and a sing-a-long version which would climax with a fight somewhere impressive, we began by filming the serious, or at least, cod-serious opening with Emily racing down the stairs of our hostel.

With this done we decided to press on and tackle a sequence which would act as a sort of interlude in which the two spy chicks would end up in a bar and meet Alex who would then rap. Very badly. We shot this sequence in the bar of our hostel, the staff of whom were very accommodating. Johnnie and Kasia came down with their documentary team and filmed us filming Alex's performance which is quite special. Filming this sequence ran on into the small hours and included all the problems of shooting a large and strangely shaped room with a crowd that would rapidly diminish due to lack of sleep. With this done and a long day ahead of us we got drunk and went to bed.

The first part of Sunday was very good. We started by filming the climax of the film, in which Emily is revealed as a traitor and Ben and Gabes are revealed as lovers, at the impressive Brandenburg Gate. The square around the gate was a mess of red and yellow confetti from the previous nights EU party and the Gate cast an imposing silhouette against the slate grey sky. The tense heat of the previous day had broken into storm clouds and a reviving freshness . The only thing that marred the impressively moody picture was the fat old woman in a bright yellow polka dot dress who insisted upon playing a very loud and rather jaunty tune on a barrel organ. This did make singing rather difficult. As did the rain which came down torrentially.

Thankfully the rain washed the fat woman and her organ under cover, doubtlessly in some shop that sold large pies, and we were able to shoot the scene in peace. We then made our way back from the Gate to our hostel, shooting the rest of the singing sections of the film on the way - some on a bridge, some a tram, much on the street outside the hostel. Then, with the bulk of the film in the can, Ben went indoors to start editing whilst the others continued to roam the streets to shoot the rest of the initial chase sequence.

POST PRODUCTION.
The edit was not that difficult since the film had been pretty much pre-cut in the writing and all the pieces roughly fell into place as planned. The one problem was that before Chris had even started to add in the fuller chase sequence for the start the film was already over the 3 minute maximum length that Johnnie had set for this competition.

We had known from the outset that 3 minutes was our limit though, unable to quite believe that Johnnie was serious about this ridiculous stipulation, none of us quite believed it. Throughout the first two days of the trip we'd ask Emily from time to time, "Is it really 3 minutes" and she'd shrug and say "Yes, I think so, that's what it says..." and we all shook our heads, safe in the knowledge that Johnnie would be unlikely to complain if we ran over a little bit. Whilst we were kicking ideas around the 3 minute stipulation was always present in our thoughts but only in a vague way, often used only as a polite way of dismissing overly complex ideas without deriding them as rubbish. As the competition wore on we talked to Johnnie and he seemed quite adamant that he wanted all the films to be three minutes long and we talked to Kasia and she was quite clear - the films had to be a maximum of three minutes, anything longer would be automatically disqualified.

And so it was that the nagging doubt about our running length that had walked behind us whilst we were shooting turned into a fat spoilt child of a real problem. Our film was odd. Very very odd. For it to work dramatically it needed to fool the audience first into thinking it was semi-serious, then it needed to grab them with a rolling sense of insane momentum and deposit them happily at the end. To do all of this it needed space, it needed time. By the time we had added in a few glimpses of the chase sequence at the start we had been forced to cut a great deal out of the end. All of the stuff in the bar had gone, including Alex's superb rap about the West German economy. A great deal of the waiting and tension building went the same way. In the end we were left with a film in which suddenly the cast start singing and then thankfully it all stops. Too short to actually give the audience time to start laughing "Anything Goes" was just plain bizarre, the sort of film that leaves you with a slight ache behind the eyes and a panic about your own sanity. It is like no other film ever. Except perhaps the Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Which is not necessarily a good thing

Still, at that point in time this was less of a concern. We had about ten hours left to us in which to compose a musical score, rerecord all of the vocal performances, grade, soundmix and hand in our three minute film. The music was simple since we had only one option, Gabriel's horn. The rerecording of the vocals was a far harder task.

Our plan had to been to record plenty of wild tracks and then re-record all the singing cleanly, back at the hostel. The problem was that we had nothing like a sound proof room in which to record the vocals cleanly. We tried building a booth out of mattresses from the beds but this achieved very little. We tried our method from "OId Man Dies" or recording outside to get a natural sounding open air sound quality that would match with the scenery in the film, however even on a bank holiday Sunday Berlin was far too noisy for this to work. In the end the best sound proofing we could achieve was to leave the beds on the floor and slide ourselves underneath them.

This worked remarkably well, with one drawback - in order to lip-sync with our performances in the film we needed to see the clips played out on the laptop, which involved lying our sides - a position far from conducive to a good vocal performance. The difficulties were added to by the fact that the tunes had all been largely ad-libbed and were often not that easy to recreate and the final edit was often a mix of various different live performances - usually meaning that whilst the first part of a sequence would sync perfectly, the rest didn't. Finally, with the night dragging on and the general sense of manic exhaustion increasing we were all struggling to actually sing. Having spent the day running through Berlin and singing , both Emily and Keely were losing their voices. It was also at this point, as he tried to coach the rest of us to find the right note, that we discovered that Jonny Tyson has perfect pitch. Tragically there was no time to recast the film and Ben and Chris had already sung their parts.

Johnnie and Kasia came round, laughed, took photographs and again insisted that the maximum length was three minutes. Singing unaccompanied is about the most emotionally vulnerable thing you can do without being actually naked and despite our efforts at good humour by the time we'd got all we needed everyone was feeling pretty wretched. However, most of the work that was left to do was just for Ben and Chris and so everyone else could at least pack up and slide down stairs into the bar to finally boil our exhaustion in vodka, beer and whiskey.

Whilst the others danced and went to bed we took the post-production in shifts, whilst Ben gave the piece a final edit and did some track laying Chris was downstairs drinking and this was done we swapped over and Chris would grade and tighten up the lip sync whilst Ben would drink.

By six in the morning the film was pretty much finished, Chris, who hadn't slept at all was pretty strung out and crazy but, with the ordeal over, everyone was pretty cheery. Watching the final film back on the laptop in the lobby of the hostel we all nodded to ourselves and tried to sound up beat. It looked good. Chris' performance as the foot stamping Russian was his usual piece of show stealing bravado and it was, if not exactly funny ha ha then definitely it was funny peculiar.

We handed it in, got onto a plane and went home. Even this wasn't easy. Chris is naturally quite a good flyer however he'd not really slept for three days and had kept himself awake only with the invigorating power of alcohol. Consequently the prospect of a long flight filled with him dread. Alex had had more sleep but is like Mr.T in both his abilities as a rapper and his horror of being in the air. Shortly after the cabin crew had handed out nasty sandwiches filled with an especially rubbery German cheese an announcement came over the pa in German which seemed to cause most of the passengers some concern. Translated into English there was something about a window being broken and having to turn back to make an emergency landing. Everyone went pale, Chris emitted a low moan and everyone fell into a worried silence. Except for Ben who asked Alex if he could have his sandwich.

Much later that scheduled we arrived home and fell asleep.

Some four or five months later "Anything Goes" was screened at the Goethe Institute along with all the winning films. We were only the top thirty however Johnnie obviously wanted to screen us as the only British Entrants. Frankly it was rather embarrassing. The German films were easily amongst the best 48hr films every produced, witty, intelligent, resourceful, charming and on the whole both well devised and well executed. "Anything Goes" stuck out like a sore thumb and we left feeling, if not exactly humbled, then definitely angry that such a good opportunity had really gone to waste.

Despite being the weakest film we have made for some time we are still keen to get some mileage from the project however. Free from the three minute constraint we have finally recut the film to its more natural length and we are currently getting it re-scored by three different composers. Our plan is offer the film in a series of different versions with different musicians re-interpreting it, after all, anything goes. And yes that is a very cheesy thing to say, it is rather fitting though. Sorry.

Anything Goes was made in 48hrs between the 1st and 2nd of May 2004 in Berlin, Germany. It cost x.

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.
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