Eternal Return
London
Mary & George
London, Stirling, Lincolnshire & Norfolk
The End We Start From
London & West Coast Scotland
Who would want to make a film about in a flood in a drought!
The summer of 2022 was a hot one, perhaps the hottest on record with some days touching 40o
We started on location in London, one of the major sets was a London Street with post flood detritus across the whole road across gardens and up the fronts of houses. We had started by scouting for disused residential streets, perhaps ready for demolition or redevelopment. We checked with many city film offices and commissions. I had seen streets like this in Hull previously, whole terraces boarded up ready for demolition but this was in 2013, I checked with the Hull film office but all had since been demolished. We decided to find a willing street in London which we could set dress.
It started with finding an empty house which the owners had just bought but had not started renovations in Hackney. We needed it for about two months to make it look like an everyday home for the early scenes in the film then set dress it to look like a flood had swept through it. We found a suitable house and owner and then started to scout locally for a dead end street with similar architecture. By having a dead end it would be easier to close and block with our flood detritus, the designer wanted overturned cars so we needed a very complicit community for such an undertaking. Surprisingly we quickly found a street nearby and with willing residents.
Each house was contacted and let’s say 50% where up for it. Cars from both sides of the street cleared and for two days we dumped water damaged furniture, waste and upturned cars! During this process some of the house owners dumped their own bulky waste into our street set dressing (as we promised to remove everything for official disposal), water pipes where threaded through make it look like water was still running through and drains blocked to create pools of water.
Throughout the whole shoot the weather peeked at 40o and we constantly carried with us 20’000lts of fresh water as each scene needed rain or wet downs. As it was deemed a drought the water supply company had to get a licence to source and use water like this. This did situation did cause a few complaints from residents as their gardens where dying and we were watering our sets! This was soon remedied with a hose down of parched gardens around the locations from our water bowser.
Enola Holmes 2 / Legendary Pictures
Central London
I had only just watched the first Enola Holmes film on Netflix when I received a call asking if I was available to manage a Victorian set film….. to be called Enola Holmes 2!
I had been in Shropshire for 5 months working on ‘Catherine, Called Birdy’ and was in my wrap week so an offer to start straight away on the second Enola film was an exciting offer. Scouting had been taking place since February of 2021 so coming aboard in early June made me feel I was a bit behind the curve.
In this second story Enola’s investigations take her into the dark world of Victorian London and into the East End where the poor were exploited to line the pockets of the rich. Our difficulty was in constructing Victorian London as much of has been redeveloped or erased and certainly not much of it is left in London.
There are plenty of Victorian buildings still standing but take a good look around the building, can you get a 360-degree world? Encroaching modern office buildings, sandblasted surfaces, modern pavements, street furniture, air-con and heating units all get in the way. Investigations to build our own Victorian London took us around the country; from Manchester, Leeds, Portsmouth, Chatham and finally to Hull.
I have filmed in Hull before, on ‘A Royal Night Out’ using its streets for 1940’s London. On this production we needed Victorian London and Hull High Street is a perfect example of a street from this era. A new city centre was built to the west of the old town leaving a small enclave of Victorian and Georgian streets which are reasonably quiet. We required at least 2 weeks set dress and construction, then a week of filming and finally a week of set de-rig. Hull City Council where up for this and allowed us a four week road closure with managed access so we could put up shop fronts and remove the modernity.
The other streets we needed was fine Georgian Terrace for Baker Street seen in the end scene (pictured above). We considered other towns, but the designer really wanted the tall Georgian town houses you only find in London. To film a street like this in central London takes lots of time and dedication from the locations team which they pulled off with excellent results, as you can see.
