Skip to main content

Prairie Rascals - the Shoot

I’ve been spending the summer in the Wild West, which Sarah Reeve and I have very convincingly recreated in a field near our house. Unfortunately it hasn't been very Wild West weather, but occasionally the sun shines, and we've made the most of it.
Prairie Rascals, our new Bonehill Films production, is a Western, in which Dartmoor gets to stand in for the prairies and pinewoods of Arkansas while a cast of top Devonian and Cornish actors put on their best American accents. When her no-good homesteader husband is murdered by outlaws hunting for the the gold he stole during the Civil War, Annie Harper sets off to find the treasure for herself. Annie's played by Rosanna Lambert, a local actress who appeared briefly in our film Gwenevere as a mystical maiden. She’s great, and it’s been good to give her more to do in this one.
Also returning is our Gwenevere title star, actress and artist Laura Frances Martin. Gwenevere was rather a serious role, but Laura’s a tremendously funny person, so we’ve tried to use a bit more of her range in Prairie Rascals, where she plays ruthless desperado Cat Hannigan, thoroughly enjoying her life of crime.
 

Arran Hawkins, our Lancelot in Gwenevere, is very funny as the cowardly sheriff Annie turns to for help before deciding to go it alone.

Amanda Lindseth (below, left) is another local, but also an actual American. She played a stunning villain in our local panto last year, so we’ve roped her in as Cat’s even more dangerous sister Belle. (She’s also been helping us find horses, costumes, and locations.)

Mylo Sermon plays an earnest young New Englander who is busy exploring the natural wonders of the West when his holiday is rudely interrupted by a run-in with the Hannigan sisters...
...and Nicholas de Jasay is his untrustworthy guide, Muldoon (so untrustworthy that he's nicked his master's clothes by the point in the film that these stills come from.)
By happy coincidence Nick is also a carpenter, and put together the homestead set in the first picture in about a day. (It’s built around an old field shelter, and would have been way beyond my DIY skills.)

Torquay-based actor Louis John Brzozka plays Annie’s shifty husband Frank. As soon as I saw his photo online I knew he was the man for the part, and he works wonders with it.

In a sort of epilogue, Annie finds herself back east, as the guest of a fancy New England couple. Her hostess, Kitty van Leuwen, is played by Xanthe Baylis, who’s starting a drama degree next month and likely to do very well at it, judging by the performance she gave us.

Last but very much not least is writer and musician Nick Riddle, an old friend from my college days who has moved to the area recently. Nick has been invaluable as a sound recordist, and I asked him to step in as Kitty’s husband for the epilogue - a good move, since I’d been planning to play that part myself and he was much better than I could have been.

And, of course, none of it would have been possible without our endlessly patient and helpful crew, including Isabel and Marika Keen, Lucy Treacher, Sam Reeve, and Sarah McIntyre. We have a couple of scenes left to shoot, then a few B-roll shots of landscapes, sunsets etc, and then we’ll be editing, editing, editing.


Photo by Nick Riddle (I think...)


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So  Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury,  after a painti
6 comments
Read more

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin
5 comments
Read more

Railhead A-Z

In order to save my website it became necessary to destroy it. Before I pulled the plug I rescued the longest post on my old blog. Here it is, like the lone survivor of a shipwreck: my A-Z guide to the ideas behind my novel Railhead. At the time it was written, Railhead had just been published. I'll be putting up some posts about the sequels, Black Light Express and Station Zero , in the coming days. Railhead cover art by Ian McQue A  is for Alternative Forms of Transport ‘What I need,’ I thought, when I’d been struggling on and off for a few years with my space epic (working title, ‘Space Epic’) ‘is an alternative to spaceships…’ I’ve always enjoyed space stories. I first started reading science fiction back in 1977, when the original Star Wars film made me realise that outer space could be just as good a backdrop for fantasy as Tolkien-esque worlds of myth and legend. (Actually, I didn’t see Star Wars until 1978, but its bow-wave of publicity hit these shores the p
1 comment
Read more