The Last Week — Gareth Higgins

First Day of Shooting Above: We're Nearly There...

And so...it begins...Week Five of shooting. By Friday evening, we'll be done, the actors can come out of character, the director can have a gin & tonic, the director of photography can confirm if what he calls 'all the information' has been collected, and the writer can sit back with a sense of satisfaction at seeing a story that began with chance encounters on the streets of Ponsonby almost twenty years ago turned into the raw material for a film that, we hope, will entertain, inspire, question, and move audiences when the images and sounds that have been crafted here over the past month are shaped by editing and repeatedly finely tuned into something we call 'The Insatiable Moon'.

But before Friday we'll visit several locations, costumes will be changed, makeup will be made, coffee will be slurped, and traffic noise will be contended with. (On that note can I respectfully ask those delightful Auckland drivers who insist on honking their horns when they see us shooting on location to PLEASE STOP DOING THAT. We know you're excited to see a real live movie, but we're trying to work. Thank you.) At this point, with 80% of the film shot, it's easy for folk to feel tired; little tensions rise and fall; and sometimes we must ask if this thing is ever going to be finished. I'm sure it's like this on every film set. The endeavour of making a movie is a crazy thing - gathering a group of people, some of whom are strangers, some of whom are married, to take moving photographs and record sounds of other strangers pretending to be someone else; to create a story by recording these images and sounds in the wrong order; to rely on the skies to rain when you want them to and to shine when you need it; to hope that the heartbeat that began with an idea in a solitary writer's head might find the flesh of actors growing around it, connect through the sinews of cinematography, be encased in the delicate-boned structure of editing, colour-grading, dance to the elegant soundscape that musicians are composing as we speak, and then be set free to make its case in a multiplex marketplace which, we aspire, is ripe for this moon. Like I said, making a film is a crazy thing.

But we've reached the last week, and the finish line is in sight. With that in mind, I thought I'd look for films with the word 'last' in the title that might evoke some of what we're trying to do here in New Zealand. Any more lasts? Feel free to comment below...