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IN MEMORY OF WATER
How they filmed On A Clear Day, a poignant tale of the life aquatic on location in Scotland and the Isle of Man
T hose lists of ‘Thanks’ at the foot of the credits often
tend to be revealing and never more so than in the dying seconds of On A Clear Day. On this particular occasion they range from
ship-builders to swimwear, from a Glasgow bus company to the Channel Swimming & Piloting Federation. Some much briefer ‘Special thanks’ are then shared out between eight rather more anonymous names.
One of them is “Raf’ who actually turns out to be 12-year-old Rafael, the middle of three sons belonging to the film’s director Gaby Dellal who has very good reason to acknowledge the contri- bution of her offspring (by a former marriage to Working Title’s Eric Fellner).
On A Clear Day tells, on the surface at least, the funny and often touching story of a middle-aged Glasgow shipyard worker (Peter Mullan) who after suddenly being made redundant decides to try and swim the Channel.
To add extra grit to this watery tale, it turns out that Frank is still haunted by the memory of the death in a drowning accident of a young son years earlier. This, is turn, has cast a pall over the relationship with his surviving son (Jamie Sives).
Oh yes, the bus company... That refers to Frank’s wife Joan (Brenda Blethyn) who is as secretively, albeit haltingly, attempting to acquire a new driving qualification as her husband is as covertly planning his marathon swim.
Back to Raf. Dellal, for her first released feature (following an abortive effort some years back) after a series of acclaimed shorts, needed to film some moving flashback footage of a child drowning.
She explains: “Raf’s actually been in all my films and I said that I thought I should use him here too. I have to drown a child and the idea of getting someone else’s and having that responsibility with chaperones telling me what I could and couldn’t do was
not on. I was not being nepotistic just very practical.
“There was this funny moment in the beach at Ramsey on the Isle of Man. Brenda and Peter were both sit- ting on director’s chairs watching me shove my son in the Irish Sea saying, ‘you can’t come out yet!’ They joked that they were going to call up and complain to the NSPCC. I think Raf had a good time,” laughs Dellal.
An actress for many years before she switched successfully to the other side of the camera, Dellal admits she wasn’t exactly bowled over when her agent first told her of a script about a man who swims the Channel.
“I thought, ‘Yup! Pass! Next!’ But he insisted and I lay in bed one night read- ing it and by the end, I was in tears. It was a beautiful story and I fell in love with it. That’s great credit to the first- time writer, Alex Rose. It contained all the sorts of things people can click with including father-and-son relationships.”
The original script was set around Yorkshire and the steel mills. “When
I read it,” Dellal recalls, “I said that I’d like Peter Mullan to do it but that I didn’t want him to put on an accent so then we came up with the idea of making him a shipbuilder.
“We managed to get Peter on board quite quickly. I went to Glasgow and spent the day with him and
I thought, ‘Now, I don’t even want to put him in Newcastle... we’re going to do it on the Clyde’. I reccied a lot there and a couple of the shipyards proved very friendly and helpful.
As a result of this, we also came up
with the notion of opening the film on a rather grand cinematic scale with a ship launch.”
Mind you, it was nearly the epic that never was. “I was actually told to cut the ship launch out of the film before we started because we would never be able to afford it, either using CGIorstagingourown.Butinfact,we managed to find an actual ship launch that was scheduled before we began filming so we set up a pre-shoot.”
It was then a question of negotiat- ing how many cameras they could bring in because of the tight security and, after much to-ing and fro-ing,
they finally settled on five. Then, as suddenly, the film collapsed altogether last year because of the tax change with Section 48.
Says Dellal: “So we took a big gamble and said, ‘Let’s do it anyway’ even though we were going to have to postpone shooting of the film itself. Andwediditwithatinycrew basically comprising myself, the DP David Johnson BSC [also Dellal’s life partner], two camera operators and some assistants. We went and cov- ered it for a small amount of money still with the hope we would get to shoot the actual film.
Photo main: Director Gaby Dellal and Peter Mullan above l-r: Shooting On A Clear Day and its star Peter Mullan in and out of the water; DP David Johnson BSC and Director Gaby Dellal; ...and action! 30 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture