Mes amies de FRENCH FILM:
We just wanted to send you a brief note on behalf of all the producers, and all of us here at slingshot to say how excited we are on this weekend before the beginning of the FRENCH FILM shoot….
For those of us who have been working on the movie for more than a year, since a first happy meeting in a court-yard here at Ealing with Ash, this is a really proud moment.
Proud in a deep, personal, touchy kind of way, because this is a film, more than any other, we needed as well as wanted to make. It was a film that seemed to be about us, about our lives, about pain and joy that seemed so close to life, that it was scary as well as funny.
(Which probably says something about our own messy relationships, but hopefully more about Ash’s remarkable script and about Jackie’s extraordinarily precise and beautiful vision of how to tell that story.)
We know you all feel the same about it, which is why you’ve accepted the pitifully small slingshot coin, and come on board to help make the movie a reality, and for that, you have our gratitude always.
Because like all slingshot projects, FRENCH FILM has had to be fuelled by faith & enthusiasm - because they ain’t that much else to fuel it with… not a lot of money, not a lot of time: not a whole lot of croissants….
But fuel it you have. You’ve made the prep period a well oiled joy (it might not always have felt that way from the inside, but it is true none-the-less) and we go into the shoot with the benefit of good preparation, and I want to pay particular tribute to Stew, Cindy and their production team, Benji and his AD team, and Paul and his locations team for getting us to the starting line in such good shape.
None of which is to suggest that the weeks ahead are going to be easy.
Oh no.
We are going to need all the aforementioned faith, all the god-damn je ne sais qua we can summon up to get through the next 5 weeks, in which days will seem too short, takes too long, sunshine too bright, airplanes too loud, money too little and when every bike gets stolen and every car gets clamped. We are going to need to dig deep and remember the faith that brought us here in the first place and the tingling in our spines when we read the script first and went ‘yes: that’s it, that’s true, I recognise that’
But we will remember, and we will triumph. Cause as well as the faith, we will have savoir faire; and le petit mort, and other inappropriate French phrases. But most of all we have the knowledge that if we do our jobs right, then at the end we will have created something that allows thousands, maybe millions of others to feel that thing we felt when we read this script; to be reminded that: yes, its possible, its really possible to feel this way, to feel happiness, even if happiness is only a myth.
And when even that runs out, remember that we still have the King:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlm9MRVER3E
Rest well this weekend mes amies, on Monday we take France.
ref: slingshot studios