MAKING WAVES IN LONDON

EXPOSURE magazine, article by Quentin Falk

Imagine if you can a precocious seven year old boy racing around the woods near his Dumfrieshire home, super-8 camera in hand as he persuades family and friends to act their socks off in overly-ambitious home made movies with titles like The Spaceman and, with due apologies to 007, the aptly named Woodraker.

Now cut to more than 20 years later as Simon Hunter, 29, supervises action across three studio stages and 17 sets on his first feature, a £1.5 million suspense thriller called Lighthouse. In front of the camera are experienced actors like Rachel Shelley, Don Warrington and James Purefoy while hovering at his side are veteran technicians such as DP Tony Imi and Oscar-winning visual effects wiz Roy Field (Superman).

The film follows the fortunes of the survivors of the prison ship Hyperion after crashing into rocks which surround the menacing island of Gehenna, named after the mythical location for eternal torment. In the fog, swirling rain and storm-lashed beaches, the doctor (Shelley) and a convicted prisoner (Purefoy) must join forces against the darkest of enemies.

If this seems like a spectacular transition for the boy who regularly played truant from the school where his father was headmaster in order to shoot his youthful epics - 'he was half mad at me, half encouraging', Hunter recalls - then the debutant director doesn't seem to be showing any signs of first night nerves.

Confidence oozes from Hunter who claims he learned how not to waste film from an early age in between regular visits to the local cinema. 'The first film I saw was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but the first film to make a real impact on me was Star Wars. I was fantastically influenced by it and by the Bond films too. All my reports would say "if only he put as much effort into his work as he puts into his super-8 films then he might pass his exams."

'As a kid I was imitating everything I saw on screen. You can see that clearly in my early work when I was trying, but mostly failing, to recreate technique. During my teenage years I moved on to documentaries and when I was 18, I went to Zaire and made a film about a boat that plies its trade up and down the river. I did it entirely off my own bat after working at a pub in the evenings to earn enough for the trip. It was just me and a super-8 camera. Looking at the film now, you can see that although it was a documentary, I was trying to be David Lean rather than Robert Flaherty.'

Eventually Hunter won a place at West Surrey College of Art and Design¹s film school where, over the duration of a three year degree course, he got back to more obviously dramatic subject matter like a short called Click about someone who gets their hand stuck down a waste disposal unit.

Lighthouse started life as an even lower-budgeted, one location concept after Hunter spotted a piece about a lighthouse in a Sunday supplement. 'I thought it would be such a great place to set a film because, in a way, it deals with everything that cinema is - light, dark, etc.'

A little over two years ago, Hunter and his producer partners Mark Leake and Tim Dennison managed to find a private investor and were firmly into pre-production when the money evaporated.

'After the collapse,' says Dennison, Œwe dusted ourselves off and decided to punt the script round the industry. Someone suggested we send it to British Screen but we didn't for a minute think they'd go with this kind of project. A couple of months later we got a call from Simon Perry asking us to go in and see him. He liked the script and wanted to get involved.'

To secure their backing, British Screen insisted that Hunter direct a short that was in 'the thriller vein' to see if he had the right stuff for the genre.

The film makers were given some money which they then matched, and with further support from equipment and facility companies including Fuji, they made Wired. It proved a successful calling card and with international sales agents Winchester Films (Shooting Fish) on board, not to mention cash from the National Lottery, Lighthouse was, to coin a phrase, greenlighted.

After touring Britain, France and Ireland, Hunter and his team decided that no lighthouse fitted his exact requirements. 'There was nearly always something wrong with them. They were mostly too new. I wanted to have a Dickensian, almost workhouse type feel - rotting, old and low-tech where nothing really works.'

The decision was made to recreate everything for the film - beach, ocean, rocks and lighthouse - at the increasingly in demand Three Mills Island studio at Bromley-by-Bow, a former distillery by the river Lea where Carlton shoots its London Bridge soap.

To build a rusting Victorian lighthouse and surrounding island along with all the films visual effects they called up Roy Field who, using traditional methods, first constructed an 18-foot scale model of the eponymous building, to house a tiny but powerful 1k light at the top.

The beach set features an enormous valley complete with large rock pools and cliff faces along with optical mist and beam effects. Large sections of the lighthouse have been built full scale, including nearly 40 feet of exterior wall, an entire lamp room and balcony. There's also a huge interior staircase consisting of matte painting with added elements such as dripping rain and lighting.

On yet another stage there¹s been a huge blue screen where the actors have hung forty feet in the air. After principal photography was completed, Field oversaw an intricate model shoot at Pinewood. The plan is to premiere the finished film at Cannes 99.

Says Hunter, 'We were originally going to do the film for £300,000. Having the delay was, in the long term, a blessing in disguise though it didn't feel it at the time when, for the next two years, one stared at the fax machine and had to scrape money just to keep life and soul together.

'If at the end of the day we can get across 80 per cent of what's in the original script then we'll be doing very well. The whole experience has been thrilling and gives one a real buzz. Yes, it would be nice to have huge waves crashing but the film certainly won't look cheap. An intimate epic? Yes, that's exactly what it is.'