Bite the film

Still from the making of Bite, the movie

The process began about three or four months ago when I was having lunch with my mate Roger Parsons at the BBC, and he suggested that it might be a good idea to make – a phrase I had barely heard used in cold blood – a viral video. I had a bit of a think, and came up with a fairly daft parody of a 1950s-style telly commercial, plugging Bite as if it were a domestic product that can change the life of bored housewives, like Mr Sheen. It would involve a comic disjunction of word and image, the voice-over evoking ideas of domestic bliss, the image showing a disgruntled mousewife rebelling against her daily grind – smashing the crockery instead of washing it, napalming the shepherd’s pie... that kind of thing. Then she settles down for a nice read of Bite... by the time Hubby comes home from the office and asks ‘What’s for dinner?’, it is clear that he is.

Rubbish, really, but it got me started. The next thing was to face up to the glum fact that, with a maxed-out credit card and an overdraft threatening to go feral, the only way to make this modest film would be to wheedle chums and others into working for love, which is to say, for nothing. I was partly inspired by the example of my colleague in the London Institute of 'Pataphysics, Magnus Irvin, who a couple of years ago managed to shoot an ambitious and oddly beautiful half-hour drama, Prayer Cushions of the Flesh, for roughly eleven thousand quid. Real films, Derek Jarman used to say - RIP, Derek - are not made with money, they are made with brains.

Still from the making of Bite, the movie

The tom-toms pounded and people started to come forward. Colin Minchin, an ace BBC editor with whom I had worked on a few of Roger’s arts documentaries, agreed to write the score as well as cut the piece. (We also started work together on a vampire musical… but that’s another blog.) Magnus would do the sets and generally art direct. Ian Irvine, noted man of letters, offered to cook high quality snacks for the sake of morale. Members of the London Vampyre Group, which I had joined in the course of writing Bite, agreed to show up as supporting cast in costumes and fangs – thereby saving us several hundred quid at a stroke.

Meanwhile I worked at the short script; made it less of a comic squib, more – for want of a better word - poetic. The life transformation idea, nicked from Persil adverts, suggested some more profound forms of life transformation. I started to think about descents to the Underworld, and Cocteau’s Orphee – one of my favourite films of all time, not least because it was made for the price of a few glasses of absinthe but looks quite ravishing. I then became even more pretentious, but that can be another blog too. Maybe.

With only three weeks to go until the proposed shoot date of 19 and 20 September, I still lacked a cameraman and a leading actress. Thanks to my actor pal Toby Beer, who called in some of his friends, I soon had both. Dom Colchester would shoot it; Pamela Banks would star. An envelope full of tenners secured us a large if primitive shooting space in Dalston, and, after a last minute panic about getting Pamela fitted with fangs and sewn into a djellaba, the game was afoot.

Still from the making of Bite, the movie

For three nights before shooting, I was rigid with anxiety, but virtually the second we started a kind of cheerful magic descended. Thanks to Dom and his mentor Mike, who generously came along to light, we sped through the shots with amazing ease; the BBC types and other industry veterans on set were awed by how swift and professional these chaps were. And Pamela…

Well, it was almost embarrassing to see how she took my flimsy conceits and gave human depth and intensity to them. Embarrassing, but thrilling. She is also – is one allowed to say such things these days?; oh the hell with it – awe-inspiringly beautiful on camera. She has displaced Anna Karina from top spot in my pantheon of spiritually radiant screen goddesses. If she does not become a major star in the next two to three years, the world is even sicker than I thought.

We wrapped half an hour early on the Saturday, two and a half hours early on the Sunday. I went home knackered, but so fizzing with adrenalin and pleasure that I still could not sleep. Colin worked while I idled, and had a complete rough cut ready by Weds. What did it look like? That’s for others to say; it should be up on YouTube and elsewhere in the next couple of days (details to follow). All I will say for now is that it looks pretty much on screen as it did in my brain, and that I ache to do it all again. The next part of the Bite film odyssey is a music video for a song from the Minchin/Jackson musical; we hope to shoot that one in late October, with a little help from our new vampire friends, and especially from Darren Jack Powell, who played the dashing vampire king and executed a most creditable waltz. Watch this space, or, better still, offer to produce it for me. Used tenners are fine.

Excelsior!