"Do you think that factory looks industrial enough? It needs to look more industrial. There isn't any smoke coming out of the top".
Welcome to the world of corporate films, where the obligation to cover everything you do in under two minutes leads you inevitably in the direction of shameless cliché.
This particular shameless cliché was damp and cold. I mean, really, truly, eyewateringly cold. We'd planned to go to Marseilles and shoot a few grim industrial scenes in bright sunshine for a nice gritty contrast, until we realised it would double the budget. So here we were on a freezing February afternoon in Le Havre- me, the producer, the runner and the cameraman. We had two days to film a factory, some container ships, a wind farm, some "happy colleagues having lunch", a petrol station, someone receiving a text message while walking down a beach - as you do in your average lunch hour- and a toy shop. (We'd wanted a child, but it was too expensive to hire one, so we'd settled for a text message picture of the producer's child and a teddy bear bought in the shop.)
To add insult to budget injury, the whole thing had to be "generically European" as my boss had vetoed anything French, so we'd already spent several miserable hours arguing with car hire companies to give us anything other than a Renault, and avoiding the hundreds of boulangeries and signs plastered in French, including one particularly tricky Total petrol station that greeted us with a cheerful "bonjour" in giant neon letters above the pumps. We had finished the previous day's filming at 1am.
This being a "subjective view" film, the cameraman was also the actor, wearing a suit, and a strange contraption involving a film camera strapped to a motorcycle helmet with thick black sticky tape. This being the provinces, everyone wanted to know what we were doing.
"Why is he wearing that weird hat?
-We're making a film.
-Right. He looks weird. Are you from Paris?"
We were at the final scene of the two days, where the main character is on his way home with the teddy bear he's bought for the child, and "drives past a factory belching out smoke". Unfortunately, the factory, which had been obligingly polluting the sky with toxic fumes when we'd driven past it in the morning was now the smug embodiment of corporate citizenship, with not a wisp emerging from the chimney.
"Could we maybe change the scene? Like, thanks to your company, the factory doesn't belch out smoke any more?
-That kind of changes the concept of the film. Can't you add in some smoke in post-production?"
-Couldn't we do a nuclear power station instead?
-They look too clean. It needs to look dirty."
And just at that moment, against the dark grey sky, with a small slat of sunlight shooting a ray of winter warmth on the steel of the factory, a miracle happened. Smoke started to curl from the top of the chimney.
