On the Rocks

NEON magazine, november 1998

article by akin ojumu

It's amazing how little you get for £1.5 million these days: 15 seconds of Tom Cruise or a couple of explosive set-pieces in a Michael Bay film. So spare a thought for first-time director Simon Hunter. That's all he's got to make what he calls "Dead Calm in a lighthouse".

Lighthouse is the claustrophobic tale of a group of prisoners shipwrecked on their way to a penal island. They find sanctuary in a deserted lighthouse, but their relief is short-lived when they discover an escaped serial killer is also on the premises... and on the rampage.

Since so many British thrillers fall foul of the Trades Descriptions Act, this isn't a wholly promising scenario. Hunter, unsurprisingly, disagrees. "It's unlike a typical British film - it's visually driven," he argues. "There's not a word spoken in the first ten minutes, and throughout the film, images not dialogue are used to build up the suspense."

Filmed entirely in the East End's Three Mills Studios, the final product will, Hunter hopes, have a noirish quality similar to shadowy classic The Third Man. Unfortunately, his budget would barely cover Orson Welles' grocery bill. Instead Rachel Shelley (Photographing Faries) and James Purefoy (Feast of July) play the heroic doctor and wrongly convicted felon trying to outwit the deranged murderer.

Their names are unlikely to cause a box-office stampede, but Hunter claims that will be an advantage. "I could have cast better known actors," he says, "the sort of people you always spot on the credits of the dodgy titles in your video shop. Going with unknowns means the audience doesn't have any negative expectations."

Working on a small budget also calls for boy-scout-style improvisation from visual effects veteran Roy Field, the man who made Christopher Reeve's Superman fly. "It's very low budget," he observes, "but that makes it more interesting. With a big budget, only a portion of what you spend gets on the screen, but with something on this scale 100 per cent is up there."

The production team were only able to afford a minimum of expensive CGI effects, so Field reverted to more traditional methods of optical trickery and models. Which he came to prefer - his experiences with the computer wizards having left him feeling distinctly underwhelmed. "They have so little knowledge about actual filmmaking," Field sighs. "I have to explain everything to them. I really don't know how they get it done."