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ANDY COLLINS
“Yes it would be nice to put a bit more backlight in there or do something in the background, but that’ll cost you twenty minutes or half an hour, which means you may miss the scene.”
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working on low budget movies.
“You have to be prag- matic about it,” he agrees. “Yes it would be nice to put a bit more backlight in there or do something in the background, but that’ll cost you twenty minutes or half an hour, which means you may miss the scene. I found that partic- ularly on Thunderpants where, because we were working with young chil- dren there was no flexibili- ty at all.
“We ran into trouble
on one scene at the end of
April, we’d only shot half
of it when they had to
stop. So we ended up
shooting the other half at
the start of June. We
rebuilt the set, redressed
it all, got the boys back in
and tried to remember
exactly what we were
doing five weeks before. So that was
He’s very particular about that, and rightly so. We were in a very confined room, everyone was hunched in the corner, and the only way I could watch the scene was to peer out from the side, behind the camera. That was obviously very distracting. There was some very industrial language, at which point I thought this was a bit of a departure from the script before realising that it was all aimed at me.”
A BBC production of David Copperfield earned Collins a BAFTA nomination, and The Lakes proved a ratings winner too. Other recent pro- jects include Purely Belter, for Herman again, Princess of Thieves and a low budget feature called Dream.
A nice varied career that takes him from the sublime to, well, the fart- ing rocket boy in Thunderpants.
It seems to suit Andy Collins’ easygoing nature to mix and match in this fashion, but he remains an enthu- siastic film fan... just an older version of the kid who watched Clapperboard all those years ago. ■ ANWAR BRETT
Thunderpants was originated on
tough on everybody, includ- ing the kids.”
Collins remembers Brassed Off with some plea- sure, despite the rather dour nature of the story. “I’d done commercials, and little TV dramas, but it is quite daunt- ing going into a feature, even a low budget one. It’s a differ- ent world.
“Again we had a tight schedule, so it was a case of shooting it as it was really. When Mark first started writ- ing the script there was a working mine there, but when we came to shoot it it had all shut down. In three years it had gone from being a work- ing village to a ghost town.”
His next film with Herman was Little Voice, starring Jane Horrocks and Michael Caine, an actor for whom Collins has great respect even if he did feel the sharp side of his tongue at one point.
“I got in his eyeline at one point.
Photo inset: Andy Collins and l-r: Michael Caine and Jane Horrocks in Little Voice; Pete Postlethwaite in Brassed Off; David Copperfield; Chris Beattie and Greg McLane in Purely Belter (archive photos courtesy Moviestore Collection and BBC)
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