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F INDEPENDENCE
OF INDEPENDENCE
Such altruism seems a rare thing in an industry so often run by blinkered and selfish individuals. But one senses that Jones is a team player, someone with a passionate love of film and very definite views on what kind of movies should and should not be made. This does not mean he is blind to commercial considerations, as Urban Ghost Story - which he co-wrote with Jolliffe, who directed while he produced - proves, being a subtly manipulative genre film that was made for the mass audience.
“It actually began life as a more overt horror movie,” he adds, “but we realised that if we want- ed to compete with Hollywood - with the blue
lights, the gateways to Hell and zombies coming out of the ground - then our ridiculously measly budget wouldn’t give us 20 seconds of screen time of the kind people are accustomed to seeing.
“So we had to ditch that and take it the other way. The more we researched, the more we discovered that the more you understate what’s happening, the more frightening it becomes. That became really important to us, to keep that chilling reality to it. In essence that is one of the strengths of the film. People are sur- prised by it when they see it, because it isn’t on the whole what they expect.”
Urban Ghost Story is clearly the source of much satisfaction for Jones who feels that past lessons were put into practice during an unchar- acteristically trouble free shoot.
“We’re all still friends, which is a rare thing after you’ve made a low budget film together,” he laughs. “I think the most important thing we learned was getting organised and knowing what we wanted, so that there was no extraneous dis- cussion on the day. That kind of thing always leads to disaster, because the moment your cast start sensing you don’t know what you’re doing, they start losing confidence. The same goes for the crew.
“You start losing time, you go behind sched- ule, you drop scenes, then you get in the cutting room and you realise that you have to go back and fix X, Y and Z. That was one of the major lessons
we learned on our first film - which helped us to fin- ish Urban Ghost Story on budget and on sched- ule.”
The future would seem to hold great promise for these two enthusiastic and talented filmmak- ers, who in the next twelve months anticipate directing a movie each and continuing the work they have begun so promisingly. “We’ve basically spent the last ten years learning our craft,” Jones adds, “and now we’re just putting into practice what we’ve learnt. We feel we’re growing quite steadily, but our plans aren’t just for now they’re for the future as well.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Urban Ghost Story, White Angel and The Runner were all originated
Photo top left: Director Chris Jones directs Jason Connery and the rest of his cast in Urban Ghost Story.