Page 23 - Fujifilm Exposure_8 Wildlife John Downer_ok

Photos: Crew and cast of Brothers on location in Greece
in production
One echo of past adventures came when everyone was packing up, as Dunkerton bumped into an old Greek woman who had been landlady for him and his mates.
“We couldn’t stay where I wanted the charac- ters to stay,” he recalls, “because this wonderful old Greek woman had moved out to Athens. But on the last day of filming, I was packing my bag on the coach, I turned around and there she was. She said: ‘ah, boys, boys, boys!’. She’d literally come back that day, that was real synchronicity. It was almost like a confirmation that what we’d done was really good.”
One of the good things that Brothers achieved on location was good community relations. Indeed in her official capacity Garvin seems to have shown admirable diplomacy, roping the deputy mayor in for a cameo role and obtaining all the rel- evant permits and permissions as required. She admits that the locals could not have been more friendly or helpful.
“We had some great contacts in Greece,” she explains. “Our production manager lived in Athens and kept on going to the island and would go backwards and forwards there, prepar- ing everything beforehand for us. That helped enormously. Even at the end, when we needed a crane for a shot, we could get it from Athens rather than going to the expense of bringing one in from England.
“They’d do things for us like shut the whole of the street off in August, which is prime holiday season, just so we could set up. We were allowed to use locations all over the island, and we were given specific parking places in areas that were normally pedestrianised.”
Exemplary behaviour off screen is contrasted with some typical male naughtiness on. The rite- of-passage experienced by these seven men of varying ages and backgrounds seems a ripely commercial subject, so much so that you wonder why no filmmaker has tapped into it before.
“We’re just immortalising on film what so many people get up to at some point in their lives,” Dunkerton adds. “And it’s a universal thing. Almost everyone has been on an adventure like this, whether they’re European, Australian, American, Japanese. We all go on holiday and experience something at least similar to what the characters experience in the film. And if you’re European, somehow the melting pot of all those different nationalities is Greece.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Brothers, photographed by Richard Terry, was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative