Spirit 7

Following Donald Trumps Presidential win in 2016, a friend created a series where the US would no longer be a part of the G7 as it was felt he would alienate too many other countries. This was pre-produced and planned as a pilot (sales tool) to be shown in Cannes in the hopes of a series being greenlit. The creator, Sacha Puysségur, asked me to set up a shoot to bring his creation to life. He sent me the initial outlines which we turned into a script, and we had 4 days of pre-production as he only had two weeks before his trip to Cannes. I am truly blessed to know some very talented actors and we set up a day to film everything. The key to maximizing such a shoot is to not have too much distance between locations, and this was achieved by only using one, a large house in the hills around LA that provided all of the separate locations with the minimum of change. While one scene was being shot, the next was being set up. While we were filming the leaders meeting and the equipment scene, the actors were staging and rehearsing their fights ready to go. Kevin Indio Copeland, (Dwight Campbell) who played in the equipment scene opposite Francis Chen, had been in hospital after an accident that left him with an injured back, but he checked himself out of hospital just to be at the shoot, but naturally he was in no fit state to do the action scenes as was intended, but there was no way I was leaving him out.

The cast included Richard Hench as Aaron Spellman, John Mawson as the British Prime Minister, Ian Lauer as Phillipe Laliberte, Ciera Foster as Carmen Flores, Paul Thomas Arnols as Dieter Opitz, Demi Mann as Victoria Thomson, David Samartin as Fabrice Daziot, Greta Garland as Carla Lourero, Larry L Andrews as the captured terrorist, Ernie Charles as the Canadian Prime Minister and Matthew Mylander as the French Prime Minister. Guy Grundy was an imposing force in the fight scene with Ian Lauer. Matt Holbrook and Jeff Prater played magnificent terrorists, and I did a cameo as the German Prime Minister. The crew was small but functional and that helped speed the process up in a very big way. My son, Tom Davies, was the DIT, responsible for copying the camera cards to multiple hard drives to back them up, and he started editing the scenes while we were shooting allowing me to check what had been shot and ensuring that we had everything we needed.

12 hours later the shoot was in the can and it was time for a fast edit.

In order to speed up the post production process we used music provided by Sacha, one track of which is earning for another composer as it was recognised in Youtube, but worked so well in the scene that it’s used for that we decided to leave it in place.

The VFX were achieved by my guy Felipe Matos in New York who turned them around in the fastest time in order for us to hit the deadline, including the explosion scene, which was basically just a locked off camera as the van drove passed ready for Felipe to create his mayhem. At the end of the day the series wasn't taken up in 2017, and now with President elect Biden its meaning has been a little lost, but it will still be a great action series and I know Sacha is still pushing it. I'm blessed to have been awarded best director for my work, but without the whole team it wouldn't have turned out as well. Team is EVERYTHING!