In Love With Hellbride Again

Funny old business, creating stuff.

In order to get something from the starting point to the finish line, you've got to stick with it through the good times and the bad. This is something that I've seen an awful lot of folks fail at; they have a brilliant idea, they start to make it and then when things hit a difficult stretch, (and they will... Of course they will), they abandon it. They never say they're abandoning it, it's just that they've been so busy lately and there just hasn't been time and so on and so on.

Of course, if they were still in that first flush of love for the project they'd make time, but once that's gone you don't often get it back again. And sometimes the bad times can suck, and to stick at it takes real determination. Which is all a way of saying that Hellbride and I have recently found our way out of a really big rocky patch.

Looking back through this blog, I realise that I've sometimes been guilty of treating Hellbride as a bit of an also-ran to KillerKiller. Considering that the two movies were shot back-to-back, it was KillerKiller that got the expensive location. It was KillerKiller that got edited and premiered first, despite being shot second. And KK has probably been the one I've pushed hardest in terms of publicity.

HellBride has always been a bit more fiddly, a bit more awkward, needing a bit more love. KK edited together like a dream, but Hellbride has needed massaging to get it into fighting shape. We've had reshoots, additional scenes added, more special effects. We were due to be at final cut this very week, (sorry for those waiting for screeners), but we're only at mid-cut. Another month of extremely hard work, I reckon.

But here's the thing. I sat an watched the mid-cut through for the first time yesterday and I fucking love it. I haven't felt this 'up' about the flick since we were shooting, and on that run of insanely good luck that we had for the first half of the shoot. It's actually working, and somehow the movie seems more personal to me than KK. I'm not sure why, exactly; maybe because it's got a soft heart where KK's got a little dark lump of coal. It just feels more 'me' somehow.

God knows how that will translate commercially; I always figured that KK was a fearsomely commercial proposition, and didn't really realise how wordy it was until people started pointing it out in reviews. I always thought that Hellbride would be the less commercial of the two, but looking at them both now I'm really not sure.

Sod it, I love 'em both. And I still love that weird older sibling that is TrashHouse, too.

I enjoy doing this job more than anything else I've ever done. All I want to do is tell stories and get them out there, and have some folks love them and some folks hate them. Because it's the folks that hate them that make you appreciate the ones on your wavelength all the more.

Right now, I want to keep doing this until they put me in the ground.

Peace n love,
Pat