Bordello Death Tales Revisited

This week has been largely taken up with delivering final materials for the Bordello Death Tales DVD. The release date should be forthcoming very soon indeed, and you'll know as soon as I do. Well, that's not strictly true, I suppose. You'll know as soon as I do unless the distributors say to me 'and keep quiet about the release date for now', in which case you'll know as soon as I'm allowed to tell you.

Bordello Death Tales came about at the suggestion of Jim Eaves. He'd kindly invited me to the cast and crew screening of his great sci-fi horror flick Bane (which is itself heading for a UK DVD release on 18th July so be sure to check that one out). After the screening, we had a couple of beers and Jim mentioned that he rather fancied shooting an old-school anthology flick; a throwback to the 70s Amicus movies, or even Creepshow et al from the 80s.

I flat-out loved the idea straight away. I couldn't help feeling that an awful lot of anthologies from the 90s and 00s had been, at best, disappointments and, at worst, a dumping ground for unsold, unconnected shorts. I loved the idea of a proper anthology flick, with interconnected tissue but a separate vision behind each section. And that, pretty much, was that. I managed to coax Al Ronald on board with a trail of brightly coloured breadcrumbs, and suddenly we had our three directors. A brief meeting a couple of weeks later gave us an umbrella title of Bordello Death Tales and even some idea of a likely shooting window. Before you knew it, all three of us had scripts ready(ish) to go, (except my fledgling draft of Vice Day was actually called Wanking the Id at that point), and somehow we were actually shooting a couple of months later.

I've really never known a project come together quite so painlessly, to be honest. Maybe it was the fact that all three of us were used to helming full-length features rather than anything shorter, maybe it was because all three of us had amazing regular producers (thankyou Debbie, Laura and Pip) who were able to get the three stories off the ground with absolutely no mucking about. Well, at least in terms of getting them shot, anyway.. Somehow we pissed away over 18 months in post-production, meaning that the flick didn't actually show on a screen anywhere until its festival run last year.

Last week we reunited to do the commentary, which was a triumph of technology over location. Because getting all three of yus in the same room at the same time is notoriously difficult (and has only happened once since mid-2008) we opted to conduct the commentary as three separate local recording which would be mixed together, with us listening to each other via Skype headsets. Ridiculous, really, but apparently the end result sounds good. Elsewhere on the disc should hopefully be the notorious fake trailers that we played before the premiere, plus various other stuff that we've shot in the way of interviews, etc.

Hope you guys enjoy the disc when it turns up.. It was a really great experience to shoot and put together.