This brings us to around May 2015, and Nia and I decide to quit work and go to Latin America for funsies. Within days, we would find ourselves in Playa del Carmen, Nia learning Spanish at a local school, and me writing the feature length version of The Helper from the back of a Mexican Starbucks. By mid June 2015 I had a 100+ page feature script written, and Nia had enough Spanish to convince Ecuadorian immigration that she was not Israeli.
Honestly, not much happened with the movie after the initial draft script was complete, until April 2021. We had in the interim extended our family, moved country once, moved house three times - but nothing related to The Hellper movie itself. There were other film projects that were supposed to feed into the production of The Hellper, but I feel these merely served to delay the making of this film.
So, right in the middle of COVID, we started filming, completing five days on location between 10 April 2021 and 20 June 2021. These were the five “easy” days as the location was my home, and easy to set up and pre-light etc., which then gave a false sense of security as to the commitment needed to move forward. It was also at this time that we lost some cast members due to personal reasons, and other cast members became busy with paid work, which created all number of scheduling conflicts. The only thing I could do was to retreat from further shooting, ride out COVID, and grumble about my ridiculous ambition to be a starving artist.
Well, I must have spent some time thinking about how the hell I was going to make the movie, because on 23 August 2022, we resumed filming! You see, the true basis of film-making is just problem solving - as a producer, director, camera crew, actor, you get a load of shit thrown at you, and you have to find a way to get around it. For me, and for this year in hiding, the problem was how am I going to make this movie when no one has time to commit to it, and there’s no money. Looking at this from the time / talent / money triangle, we never had any money, and now we didn’t have time. Talent alone can’t make a movie. So how was I going to make time, find time, create time to do this thing?
Thinking long and hard from my little hole in DB, I realised that the only thing I needed to do was to get the story off the page and into a different medium of presentation, and it didn’t really matter how, or in what format. I could have even made this a radio play if that’s what it came down to! So, I had all this acting talent ready to go, but on a limited time - the problem to solve was how can I shoot as fast as possible, and in as few days as possible? Any experienced film producer (and I feel I can count myself as one) will tell you one of the biggest time vacuums (as well as financial black hole) is location filming. Even if you have to only grab one or two shots in a location, you’ll end up writing off the whole day for transportation, finding somewhere to charge batteries, getting lattes…
So, my solution to this was to film the entire movie in one place. The script for The Hellper demanded a number of locations, schools, playgrounds, bars, etc.. I had to find a way to get all these on screen, and came up with the idea of shooting it all in a green screen studio (like Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City). I didn’t have Miramax / Bruce Willis type money, but it was still a damn sight cheaper for me and John to build a green screen studio from scratch then it was to drag crew and cast all around HK.
The result was compressing 40% of the film into 2 days filming at The Hive in Kennedy Town. The other 10 days were all in and around home in DB. This is one of the reasons the movie looks like it does, including why I decided to finish in black and white.
My grand theory behind it all was that it would be much cheaper to film the cast for fewer days, and to spend longer in post-production - which is only me and my laptop. The second phase of filming was completed in 11 days. The post-production editing took a further 15 months!
