Xander Phillips
How we made The Granary.
"Strength does not come from winning, your struggles develop your strengths".- Arnold Schwarzenegger.
My father used to say “you’ve got to lose to win”. it was his way of
saying “You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs”
(Incredibly cheesy I know).
The reason I bring this up is because The Granary was not our plan A,
It wasn't even our plan B it was plan D!
It came completely out of past failures, but if we never had these
failures we never would have eventually got “the win”.
Due to unforeseen circumstances there were three failures, three
failures costing more and more money and breaking more and more
morale each time.
Maybe i'll expand on these failures in the future but for now
i'll start from what happened on The Granary.
I was originally on the set as a runner for the previous films and I was recording sound. By the time we'd got to our third failure the crew had dwindled to only a few of us were left.
When you're starting out the best you can do is rely on the blind faith and good will of others, its risky but you have to work with what you've got.
Ghost organised the use of The Granary from a friend of his who said he could use it until it was knocked down but with every failure it only brought us closer to the deadline.
We’d wasted so much time on the previous films we only had a few months to spare, we needed something easy and “foolproof”. To make it foolproof we said we’d have every crew member playing a role. It would be us who wanted to make a film doing just that, using our past experiences as practice working together and using all the resources we had.
They say “write about what you know” and ghost did just that. He rustled up a semi biographical story of a mental illness he battled. We recycled props due to the dwindled budget we had and we just went for it. I ended up playing the character of “Jimmy” the best friend of the protagonist.
To some extent the previous failures were the best things that could have happened to us. The failed films were our "Filmschool" and we had more practical experience and fun because we were all learning together. It also served as a great warm up for The Bastard Sword.