ianboldsworth

Some Thoughts On The Deleted Witch Scene

Added 2021-12-02 11:01:01 +0000 UTC

Hello there

Here I am with my promised deconstruction of the scene from yesterday, so we can pop all the confusion about it away safely.

You’ll know that for the finished film this scene makes no sense whatsoever. If there was ever an extended Director’s Cut of The ParaPod AVBGH, which there definitely won’t be, there would still be nowhere for this scene to be re-inserted. In fact, if memory serves, it was never in a proper cut of the film. Everything got thrown off.

The purpose of the scene was to add a bit of weariness into the “story”. This was back when I had a vague plot structure that I thought I’d be able to direct us through. So, originally, Barry was going to take us to the Edinburgh vaults to have me cursed and then return us to the woods in Pluckley to see if the curse worked in bringing spirits towards me. It admittedly didn’t make an awful lot of sense, but something not making sense within The ParaPod is hardly turning everything on its head. With a bit more time to redo the curse, he was able to get an actual spell from an actual witch, rather than something he’d just hastily searched for on the internet. The beginning of the deleted scene is him on the phone to that witch at the services, which I actually filmed secretly. You can see I am hiding behind the car to film him.

As we know, the movie took a tangent after visiting the vaults, but we still had a couple of location days left where we had the whole kit, so we spent a day filming some pick-ups and travelling shots, and I tried to work out how we were going to get the missing scene.

I developed an obsession over this scene in production. We first started filming it during a second location pick-up night shoot at the woods in Pluckley. I think we got about two minutes of footage before the cameras began to fail. Nothing spooky, they’d just run out of charge after filming all day. Although, if you were to tell me I had to choose one scene that was cursed in production, it would have been this one. I can remember production runners legging it back through the woods to the car, to get more kit, and lots of standing around freezing in the middle of the night. It was miserable and exhausting, and eventually I had no choice but to call abandonment on it.

If I’d have been able to have a minute, and step back and actually think about it, I’d have quickly worked out that we no longer needed that scene. Everything was so hectic though, and on such a tight time schedule, that all I was thinking was that we needed to get everything that had been originally planned. I was organising on the hoof. In an ideal world, I’d have been watching stuff back after filming, before filming the next day, but there was so much shooting through the nights, and grabbing literally two hours in a hotel (if we weren’t having to sleep at the locations themselves), before driving a few more hundred miles, that there wasn’t any downtime to do it. It really was an insane journey taken. I’m not really sure how we managed to do it. The stamina alone is way beyond anything I currently possess. Probably because of doing it then actually.

After we were forced to abandon filming it in the Pluckley woods, I adamantly didn’t want to get back with stuff missing. That was the point that it somehow gained huge importance that we get that scene. In the whole first block of filming, it was the only thing we hadn’t got, until the very end of the last day. It was one of those odd times where it kept being pushed out of the way for something else to be filmed, with a weird assumption that it would just get done somehow, and we eventually got to the eleventh hour.

So we are in a position where an already cynical scene, is piling on more cynicism by the moment. We had left Pluckley, with no time to return, and I was thinking we could just film it in any woods. Which is sort of true, but I think you can tell from the trees alone that the scene is in an entirely different place.

We were using my house as a base (and did it ever get trashed), and I eventually said “let’s just go and find a wood…let’s get in the cars now, and the first wood we see, we will film in it. Then we are done for the first block of filming”. The wood in that scene is a mile from my house. It’s not even a wood.

Cynicism, meet bare-face lying and manipulation.

If it had ever gotten to the point where that scene would actually have been in the film, I’m sure that between myself and Simon and Danny (on the sound front), we’d have tarted it up enough that it wasn’t jarring. The copy you saw though, is the raw bare bones. Edited of course, but that’s all. The scene you saw has so many things wrong with it, and for good reason.

Firstly, we literally stopped by the side of the road and ventured through some trees hoping to find something. To this day, I could take you straight to the exact place, and to this day I’m not sure if it’s private property. Every time I drive past it I try to decipher what it actually is. I can tell you that on the early evening we filmed there, it was sodden. We stepped over a log on the way in and each one of us ended up ankle deep (literally) as we sank straight into the ground. We were also carrying thousands of pounds worth of kit. Some of which had already broken earlier in the day (the radio mics – and we got charged for them, but we absolutely didn’t break them…that’s why we switched kit suppliers half-way through the film…absolute con-job).

So here’s the issues we had before I even called “action”. We were in the woods/somebody’s garden, right next to a main road at rush hour. We had no radio mics so Danny was having to record with a boom pole (which does make a couple of little nudged in appearances). We were sinking. We weren’t actually in the place we were pretending we were. The film had already taken it’s tangent, the director just hadn’t realised yet.

Every last one of us was justifiably miserable, and it was like pulling teeth. I think we shot that same scene about twenty times. By the end of it, it was just a script (although myself and Barry did keep chucking bits in), and that’s certainly obvious. I’ve no idea what takes have been used in the scene I showed you, but I’m confident they will have been the best of many different efforts. I know I say in another part of the film that Dodds isn’t “that good an actor”, but this little deleted effort may call that into question. He comes out of it very authentic I feel. On the other hand, this may be because he wasn’t entirely sure what was going on anyway, and didn’t learn, however many times we repeated it.

We would film a few moments, and then a car would go past, so we would have to pause until there was nothing left of the car sound in the distance. Over and over again this happened (don’t forget, rush hour). Then we had lighting issues, and went down to one light, so we had to re-film all the stuff we had already got with just one light because otherwise it wouldn’t match up. How we filmed that scene, was pretty much how I record Rocky Robot. One line at a time, and then try to piece it together afterwards. At least I am in the warm though.

When we finally finished and had it in the can, I declared that we had wrapped on the first block of filming for The ParaPod Movie. Usually on a set, there’d be a team round of applause at that point. That didn’t happen. We just all stood around looking at each other. In fairness most of us had stuff in our hands or were just trying to keep our balance.

Fast forward a few months and I’m making the decision that it’s not going in the film at all. Dodds’ experience in the vaults had sent him into a bit of freefall, and there was a different thread to tug at now. Whilst it was a relief to see it go, it was also niggling at me that it had been so difficult to get in the first place. I really resented that such a dreary experience had been all for nothing. You can make friends with a difficult shoot day if you have something great as a result, but it’s really demoralising to try so hard, under such awful potentially-cursed conditions, and get nowt out the other end.

Then we fast forward maybe a year. If memory serves, I wasn’t watching the scene, but listening through some audio from it, re-living the nightmare. Simon and I were hammering out the final cut for the Pluckley woods section, and I felt we needed something linking. I heard the bit where Barry said “could I be more simple?” (which was a genuine comment he made, rather than the cynical script bit), and thought what a shame it was that it wasn’t available for the film. Then I thought…we could cheat it.

We had a shot of the tent, and I put it to Simon that we could overdub this shot, as if we were inside it talking, using the audio from the crooked scene. All the stuff about me asking Barry why we were in those woods, and him giving an awful explanation about ‘screaming ghosts’. Simon did one pass at it, and when I got it back I realised another problem. The dialogue was really aggressive on my side, and sounded even worse when it was isolated.

I couldn’t tell you for definite whether I was just pitching it wrong and thought it was right, or whether I was just genuinely annoyed and frustrated so this came out in performance. I actually suspect the latter. I certainly wasn’t annoyed or frustrated with Barry when we were filming, but I sound genuinely at the end of my tether with him.

I’d already decided to commit to the trickery, so there was no harm in chucking a bit more in. I re-recorded my dialogue in a far more gentle/amused way. We didn’t have a studio to do this all important ADR, so it was recorded at Simon’s house, with my head under a duvet. Which is known technically in films as “JGIDAHFTB” (just get it done and hope for the best). Actually that might just be in my films (film).

So the scene did enable us to pull some salvage, but – more importantly – it really did serve a purpose in the process. Binning that scene was the moment where I decided that any manipulation in the story would be an absolute minimum and only if there was no choice. Other than that, the film was going to be the truth. Not a load of staged trickery. The fact that the scene just didn’t sell, made me sure that I wasn’t up to it, and it would be foolish to keep trying in that direction.

Admittedly, there have been enough annoying reviews declaring it a “mockumentary” to suggest that the reality is equally unbelievable, but from our side we know that we didn’t just set the whole thing up. Of course there’s shots here and there that were cheated, and a couple of scenes out of sequence/reappropriated/re-taken, but on the whole it is how it happened.

To be honest, the bit I mourn the most is the bit where Barry declares he lit the candle himself and does a weird little thing with his tongue, like a four year old would. I will rarely declare Barry to be adorable, but in that moment he won the cup. Also the only other word I’d use to describe it is probably offensive nowadays.