| DIRECTOR MARC EVANS TALKS ABOUT WHAT LURED HIM TO DIRECTING TELEVISION DRAMA AGAIN.
What attracted me to directing Collision was the scale and scope of the writing over five hours. It matched the ambition of anything you try to do on a feature film. This script struck me immediately as being about more than just about a car crash. It had a poetic idea at its core which made the whole thing a complete piece of work. It speaks eloquently, but simply, about how fragile our lives are. Anthony Horowitz has tapped into the modern psyche, explored a universal contemporary fear. A car crash is something most people know about. I loved the challenge of how to make a piece feel real, when it relies so much on coincidence. The storylines are so interesting and connected. When you pass an accident on a road you do wonder what the story behind it is, what the individual stories involved might be. A car crash provides a rich basis for creating a modern epic tale. Driving up a road is second nature to most of us and we have a feeling of immortality when we are behind the wheel, enclosed in glass and metal, radio on. When you pass an accident, or hear an ambulance passing at speed, sirens blaring, you do tend to think, “there but for the grace of god go I” – it catches you short. You can be travelling along a road and a small twist of fate can lead to death or injury. We tried to tell the story from the point of view of the victims and protagonists so the audience feel the impact of the crash as much as the characters do in the drama. We are with them, not passing observers. I was attracted by the technical challenge of how do we create the crash; how do we create the bits of the crash that are particular to each part of the story. We couldn’t crash five cars for real, on a real road. And we couldn’t close a real road for the length of time we needed to create the crash scene. So we had to build a dual carriage way on disused land, complete with a central reservation, grass verges and a crash barrier. We couldn’t create a stunt with five cars as it would happen for real, so we shot each collision separately. We had to carefully plan the sequence of events in which the cars collide. It was a real team effort. We shot the main bulk of the crash scenes over two days. For the crash aftermath scenes we got all the actors, paramedics and vehicles back, and shot it much in the same way as a documentary team would shoot it. Using the two filming techniques were appropriate for the scenario. I felt it my responsibility to keep the philosophical idea of the piece alive, which is why for example we played the Chopin over the action in Episode 1. It was about more making the crash an impressive spectacle. I also wanted to create a drama which was thought-provoking about how fragile our daily lives are. Hopefully the audience will not be thinking about how we achieved the crash, because it is about the character’s storylines and how their lives collide. Shooting the crash sequences were a real wake up call to us all when you see the ferocity and scale of what happens when two pieces of metal collide. We all drove home much safer after the shoot. This drama was a fantastic chance for me. I was able to work with the cream of British acting talent. I had worked with Anthony Horowitz on a children’s thriller The Gift, so it was great to be working with him again. Marc has just finished shooting a feature film with the working title of Patagonia, which is due for release in early 2010. |