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On a baking hot day, twenty-something Angela has told Harry she's leaving him for another man. As Angela folds into a suitcase the one thing she's taking from the shipwreck of their relationship - the wedding dress she never got to wear - Harry appears obsessed by just one point: the name of her new lover. While Harry probes and goads her, the flow of the narrative is interrupted by disturbing fractured images of blood gushing from a slashed throat. Finally Angela snaps. She flings a bottle of beer at Harry, missing him and smashing a full-length mirror on the wall. They watch in awe as their reflected image shatters into dozens of jagged, murderous shards... The drama has just begun.

Director's Notes

This film was written by David Ward, a conspicuous and active member of OTT who has sadly since died. I was very pleased when David asked me to direct his script because it seemed to pack a lot of punch for a simple story involving three people in a single location. However, right from the start there were as many detractors as admirers and no doubt the film I’ve made out of it will similarly divide the critics.

Production planning was smoothed to some extent by having the location - my flat! - available from the start. However, challenges abounded, notably suffering an eleventh-hour change of DOP and lead actress. Chris Patterson did an excellent job as DOP stand-in and was a joy to work with but suffered from the handicap of never having handled a Panasonic HVX200 till the day of the shoot. We chose this camera largely because I wanted to do some slow motion shots and this is one of the few video cameras you can overcrank. But it's a complicated and somewhat temperamental bit of kit, especially when recording directly onto disc drive, and I’m having something of a headache in post.

This was meant to be a three-day shoot but it quickly became apparent that, even with 1st AD KC cracking the whip, I’d been hopelessly over-optimistic about what we could achieve in the time available. It didn’t help that Maeve, playing the role of Angela, had to leave at 5pm each day in order to be on stage at the other end of town at 7. An extra day’s shoot was hastily organised and I was fortunate that almost everyone was able to make it.

Part of the problem was that I had envisaged shooting the film guerrilla-style in natural light. With simpler staging this might have been feasible. But the fact that I wanted to establish a mirror early on and get some cool reflections in it effectively obliged us to do a lot of shooting towards the windows, which forced Chris to really power up the lights to prevent the actors from turning into silhouettes. As the shoot went on one roller blind after another came down till by the end we were shooting almost entirely with artificial lights.

One of the highlights of the shoot was Heather's special effects make-up for the Big Guy. She made a silicon prosthetic without meeting the actor but it looked like it was made for him. The skin colour was a close match and the end result was scarily real. We used a lot of fake blood and for quite a while afterwards I kept finding splashes of gore that had been overlooked during the clean-up.

Another big moment was when we smashed the mirror. The idea is that after Angela throws the bottle and we see Harry duck, we cut to a shot of him rising from the ground with Angela standing behind and then the image shatters before our eyes. We got Damien, the production manager, to strike the mirror out of frame with a hammer while his assistant Lizzie dropped a jar full of bottle fragments. No one had any idea of how the effect would work. I thought there was a fair chance that the mirror wouldn't even fall out of its frame. Actually it worked rather well though not exactly how I'd imagined it.

A friend leant me a sporty little 1960s Volvo for the car scenes. I'd forgotten what a wreck it was: when we opened the door all inside lining came unglued! When I saw the rushes one of the first things I noticed was the gaffer tape we put on to secure some trim that was hanging into a previous shot. Still, having a vintage car gave these scenes an interesting look and rounded out the Big Guy’s character in an interesting way.

This was my first directing gig and it was a big learning experience for me. There are certain things I wouldn't do again, like using unproven cutting edge technology or trying to cram in so many set-ups, but it was a pleasure working with my OTT team and my commitment to filmmaking has been strengthened by this experience.