Day 10: Verna Fields' Swimming Pool

There are compromises on every film shoot, but once in a while a director may decide to go all out and accept that their own backyard will do for various shots, and we did exactly that today.


When Spielberg was editing Jaws with Verna Fields, he decided there should be one more scare in the film, so went out to the editor's swimming pool, poured milk in it and stuck a dummy head in a fake boat hull and got the scariest moment in the whole film.

Today, slightly exhausted by the prospect of filming on location, and realising that every alley looks pretty much like the next, we decided to film a sequence in the most verstile alley I've ever used, the one behind my house. We've used it for BandWagons, Zomblog and now CrimeFighters, and it meant we could work from home for once. That evening we shot in an alley next the theatre we've been using for rehearsals and kit storage, and with a carefully placed smoke machine and some fake rain (kudos to Tom for holding the hose up for about three hours) we got a key scene from the film.

Made the whole day more bearable, especially since we wrapped at 2am to start filming at 6am the next day... but in a very special location...