Welcome to West London Film Office’s latest Reel Life. We begin with the news that if you are Ian McEwan, which is unlikely, you will have a 50% chance of having someone try and turn your novels into films. Congratulations. According to Wikipedia not even Stephen King has such an impressive adaptation ratio.
On Chesil Beach is the latest of Mr McEwan’s novels to start filming and a particular house in Mount Park Road W5 was one of the locations chosen.
Brad Pitt must have tipped them off on that one after he filmed in the same place for World War Z. Perhaps he could make a go of being a film location manager.
Idris Elba projects arrive Five by Five
Can Idris Elba do no wrong? The worst thing I’ve seen him do was kick a door down in Luther, which was in character, so it doesn’t count.
His latest project, Five By Five, collaborates with the BBC to give new writers and actors a chance to work with established names on and off screen and is further evidence of his stature as a diamond geezer. The films will be all about chance encounters and questions of identity.
Five By Five will be on internet-only BBC3 so found mainly on computers and other things that tend to have quite small screens. There’s probably a way to connect it to the TV, though.
Idris Elba himself (our picture is courtesy of DFID UK Department for International Development, via Wikimedia Commons) will appear in the five episodes and was down in Church Road on the South Acton Estate last November to film one of them.
Kisses all over Ealing
Kiss Me First has been all over Ealing since autumn last year and is almost finished location shooting as this goes live. Based on Lottie Moggach’s best-selling novel of the same name, the story follows Leila, a lonely 17-year old addicted to online gaming who gets drawn into a virtual world to track down her friend’s disappearance.
The production used Greenford Community Centre (massive thanks to Age UK Ealing there), Big Bites Café, Green Man Lane Estate and even the Mayor’s Parlour which doubled as a psychiatrist’s office.
Watch out for it on E4 and Netflix in a few months…
A third helping of Catastrophe…
Sharon Horgan has been creating some of the funniest comedy around recently, having written for the newly-commissioned-for-a-full-series Motherland and Catastrophe, now into its third run.
Catastrophe filmed on Carlton Road W5 for a previous series and came back to the same location while shooting on the third one at the end of last year.
Horgan and her co-star Rob Delaney consistently provide the laughs but it will be bittersweet viewing for many a film fan with Carrie Fisher playing Rob’s mum (mom) in her very last appearance on screen. Judging by her performances in earlier episodes the force is definitely still with her, though more in the form of a hilariously outrageous b***h.
