Station Zero

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 fu...

I’ve been at work on editing our Arthurian movie Gwenevere since the beginning of the year, and it’s very nearly finished now. The last thing we needed to get was some flashbacks to Gwenevere’s love affair with Lancelot, which will crop up as brief montages at a couple of points in the story. We didn’t have time to shoot these in our main blocks of filming back in the autumn, so it seemed to make sense to leave them till spring - they’re meant to be taking place in a different time to the rest of the film.  We also needed a different setting - the film is about Gwenevere’s journey through the wilds, and it’s all shot on Dartmoor. So we thought a beach would make a nice change of scene, and since Laura Frances Martin , who plays Gwenevere, comes from north Cornwall we decided to find somewhere near her to film. That’s how we ended up in Bude, just down the coast from Tintagel. There are some lovely beaches there, and there’s also a handy castle called The Castle . It isn’t an actua...