Post by Jillian on Nov 20, 2009 23:37:55 GMT
I just found this article -- And I realised I got too carried away with all the i's and t's in the thread title! Sorry for the spelling mistake!
Film: Debbie Isitt on Nativity
The director is following in Richard Curtis’s footsteps with a film on the anarchy of nativity plays. There were plenty of on-set calamities tooKevin Maher
How do you get an unsuspecting ten-year-old boy to descend from the 29ft spire of Coventry Cathedral, in front of onlookers, actors, extras and movie cameras? Well, says the film-maker Debbie Isitt, you ask him. The 43-year-old Birmingham-born director remembers the day last September when she shot the final scene of her improvised Christmas children’s movie Nativity.
The film, which describes the Sturm und Drang surrounding the production of a primary school Nativity, stars Martin Freeman (The Office) and Ashley Jensen (Extras), and climaxes at Coventry Cathedral with a glitzy musical version of the play, the highlight of which is the slow descent of a pre-teen Angel Gabriel from the top of the mighty spire.
“I said, ‘Bernard, you know that it’s high, don’t you?’” Isitt says. “And he said, ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ So I said, ‘How do you fancy flying down from there on the ole wire, then?’”
The production began as a rebound movie in August 2007 when Isitt’s follow-up to her 2006 wedding comedy hit Confetti was “stolen” by another film-maker. “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” she says. “But I had invested a lot of time, and to have it stolen was such a bad experience that I needed to find something else that I could do, and quickly, for my own sanity.”
Inspiration came from contemplation of her nine-year-old daughter’s Nativity plays. “The teachers are always stressed, the parents are always complaining, and the children are either being hilariously bad or brilliantly good. I thought, ‘It’s weird that nobody has made a movie about this’.”
Isitt, a fan of improvisation, approached BBC Films, which had backed Confetti, with a 16-line treatment. “They were like, ‘Oh, here she is again, with her paragraph. We’re not going to fall for that one again.’” They did, however, promise to “earmark” funds, which were liberated (the final budget was £2 million) when Isitt shot a 20-minute promo featuring the auditions of local Coventry children, plus the comic actor Marc Wootton.
Typically, the casting was far from smooth, especially when Freeman discovered that his co-star was Wootton. The two had worked on Confetti, and the relationship had not been easy — Wootton, Isitt says, is a natural anarchist, while Freeman is a serious actor. This resulted in many last-minute peace negotiations. The Nativity children themselves, 24 central players, aged from 6 to 10, were remarkably straightforward. “Because of The X Factor, they’ve seen people fail and be rubbish on TV, so they’re happy to give it a go.”
She describes the shoot in generally calamitous terms: Freeman losing control of his noisy students; local council- employed chaperones refusing to allow the children to work for longer than 45 minutes every three hours; Wootton suffering a hernia after excessive horseplay; and a pig biting the actress Pam Ferris on the leg.
“When the children auditioned, at least 75 per cent of them sang songs from High School Musical,” she says. “So it became clear that they were enraptured by that kind of music.” Isitt and her partner Nicky Ager, a musician, composed four tap-a-long songs that would define the movie’s upbeat finale, and appear on the soundtrack album, alongside tracks from Ronan Keating and Hayley Westenra.
In January this year Isitt and Ager began editing the movie. It took nine months to get 140 hours of footage down to a 100-minute running time. The film that emerged, perhaps surprising to fans of the genital gags and expletive-filled exchanges in Confetti, is defiantly family friendly.
Isitt says that despite the chaos surrounding Nativity, she relished every moment of the production. “When I was 9, I went to see The Wizard of Oz 36 nights in a row at the Birmingham Rep. I learnt the lines, wrote them down, cast my friends and convinced my school teachers to allow me to stage an adaptation for the parents. I haven’t stopped doing that since. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Nativity opens nationwide, Nov 27
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6923822.ece
Film: Debbie Isitt on Nativity
The director is following in Richard Curtis’s footsteps with a film on the anarchy of nativity plays. There were plenty of on-set calamities tooKevin Maher
How do you get an unsuspecting ten-year-old boy to descend from the 29ft spire of Coventry Cathedral, in front of onlookers, actors, extras and movie cameras? Well, says the film-maker Debbie Isitt, you ask him. The 43-year-old Birmingham-born director remembers the day last September when she shot the final scene of her improvised Christmas children’s movie Nativity.
The film, which describes the Sturm und Drang surrounding the production of a primary school Nativity, stars Martin Freeman (The Office) and Ashley Jensen (Extras), and climaxes at Coventry Cathedral with a glitzy musical version of the play, the highlight of which is the slow descent of a pre-teen Angel Gabriel from the top of the mighty spire.
“I said, ‘Bernard, you know that it’s high, don’t you?’” Isitt says. “And he said, ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ So I said, ‘How do you fancy flying down from there on the ole wire, then?’”
The production began as a rebound movie in August 2007 when Isitt’s follow-up to her 2006 wedding comedy hit Confetti was “stolen” by another film-maker. “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” she says. “But I had invested a lot of time, and to have it stolen was such a bad experience that I needed to find something else that I could do, and quickly, for my own sanity.”
Inspiration came from contemplation of her nine-year-old daughter’s Nativity plays. “The teachers are always stressed, the parents are always complaining, and the children are either being hilariously bad or brilliantly good. I thought, ‘It’s weird that nobody has made a movie about this’.”
Isitt, a fan of improvisation, approached BBC Films, which had backed Confetti, with a 16-line treatment. “They were like, ‘Oh, here she is again, with her paragraph. We’re not going to fall for that one again.’” They did, however, promise to “earmark” funds, which were liberated (the final budget was £2 million) when Isitt shot a 20-minute promo featuring the auditions of local Coventry children, plus the comic actor Marc Wootton.
Typically, the casting was far from smooth, especially when Freeman discovered that his co-star was Wootton. The two had worked on Confetti, and the relationship had not been easy — Wootton, Isitt says, is a natural anarchist, while Freeman is a serious actor. This resulted in many last-minute peace negotiations. The Nativity children themselves, 24 central players, aged from 6 to 10, were remarkably straightforward. “Because of The X Factor, they’ve seen people fail and be rubbish on TV, so they’re happy to give it a go.”
She describes the shoot in generally calamitous terms: Freeman losing control of his noisy students; local council- employed chaperones refusing to allow the children to work for longer than 45 minutes every three hours; Wootton suffering a hernia after excessive horseplay; and a pig biting the actress Pam Ferris on the leg.
“When the children auditioned, at least 75 per cent of them sang songs from High School Musical,” she says. “So it became clear that they were enraptured by that kind of music.” Isitt and her partner Nicky Ager, a musician, composed four tap-a-long songs that would define the movie’s upbeat finale, and appear on the soundtrack album, alongside tracks from Ronan Keating and Hayley Westenra.
In January this year Isitt and Ager began editing the movie. It took nine months to get 140 hours of footage down to a 100-minute running time. The film that emerged, perhaps surprising to fans of the genital gags and expletive-filled exchanges in Confetti, is defiantly family friendly.
Isitt says that despite the chaos surrounding Nativity, she relished every moment of the production. “When I was 9, I went to see The Wizard of Oz 36 nights in a row at the Birmingham Rep. I learnt the lines, wrote them down, cast my friends and convinced my school teachers to allow me to stage an adaptation for the parents. I haven’t stopped doing that since. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Nativity opens nationwide, Nov 27
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6923822.ece
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