I'm Not Like This (2)

We shot my final PhD film, I’m Not Like This, over four days last week, and it was generally unproblematic, leaving aside the problems customarily associated with shooting outdoors (e.g. families coming out of the houses to wonder that the hell we were doing, Roath Park rangers asking if we had permission). We were blessed with an excellent cast and a small but highly co-operative crew headed by producer/cameraman/production-manager Simeon. He showed me a rough cut yesterday, and I was cautiously impressed – it is redolent of a low-budget student video, but then that’s what it is, so I can’t really complain. The final version just might be an effective piece of work. I can’t say it shows me off as a director with any sense of visual style, but that’s not the point – it’s about Route One storytelling. With several thousand more £££, who knows what we might achieve?

Re filmmakers with some money to play with, I caught Spike Lee’s Inside Man at the weekend, having realised in horror that I’d never before seen one of his works on the big screen, despite having devoted a good portion of my Masters thesis to it. A very impressive Hollywood heist thriller, with the usual flashy Spike touches (although his trademark “person on a dolly” shot doesn’t quite come off this time, making it look as though Denzel Washington is hurtling down the street on an office swivel-chair). Some of the critics have suggested that the piece, not based on an original Lee script, is not a political one – however, a high(ish)-budget Hollywood movie with an African-American director, and juicy non-gangsta roles for two excellent Black actors (Denzel and Britains’s own Chiwetel Ejiofor, whom I saw in Blue/Orange in the West End several years ago) cannot be anything else. Plus, of course, it ultimately deals with one of the most fundamentally political themes of all, i.e. how rich people get to be rich in the first place.