Shona Heath and James Price

Anyone who came on board would say, Oh, we should have more money, more time! We’d be like, Well, that’s what we’ve got. We’re going to make this film with or without you and you can either get on board with it or not. Up to you guys.

We kind of knew it could be special but we also knew that it was going to be horrendously hard to do. So it was a bit like, Was the horrendously hard worth the effort in the end? I think ultimately it was.

AS: For sure. I heard most of your crew was from Budapest. Had you worked with any of them before?
JP: No. Except Lili [Lea Abraham, Assistant Art Director] and Jonas [Bethge, concept artist] and Antonio [Niculae, concept artist] came with us. Lili’s been with me personally since a trainee and she was Hungarian which was really useful because she was able to be a conduit. Even Adam [A. Makin] our supervising art director hadn’t worked with either of us before, so it was a lot of new faces.

AS: Had you mostly shot in England up until then?
JP: For me, yeah. I’ve got a young family so I didn’t really ever want to go away. I wasn’t even keen to go away for six months to do this. We knew that it could be a special film but it was still a very hard thing to decide. In fact, my reluctancy to go away probably has held me back from doing bigger jobs sooner. I wasn’t going to leave London because I wanted to be around my family. And Shona, I think we at one point decided we were going to say we didn’t get on, to get out of it, weren’t we?

SH: “This is going to be an absolute nightmare, we can’t do this, what can we say? Pretend we don’t like each other!” Which actually shows how much we do, because you wouldn’t say that, you wouldn’t pretend if you didn’t.

JP: We knew they’d never believe us!

AS: It must have been hard to find back-to-back crews there to keep the work going 24 hours a day.
JP: Well, the thing I’ve learned is that you get a service company. I learned a bit of that helping with The Boy Called Christmas, I’d set them up in Prague. If you go to a country and you get the best service company, they have the relationships. They set you up with a good supervisor or a good lead person there and then they advise you who are the best people for each role. Géza [Kerti], our lead art director over there, he really thought about which art directors would suit which sets. For the Lisbon set we had Renátó [Cseh] as our lead art director and he was a designer in his own right. We were lucky that Géza had enough knowledge of everybody that works in Hungary, to pick the right people.

We interviewed quite a few local set decorators. We could have taken more people from the UK but they just didn’t want to go. We were still in COVID and you couldn’t just get into Budapest. It was a hard sell to say to someone, Can you come for six months to Budapest? Even though we knew it was going to be a special film. Luckily Adam Makin’s partner Nicki [Nichola Kerr] was the film’s financial controller so eventually we persuaded him to go, but that took three or four attempts! We couldn’t get a set decorator from the UK and then we started looking locally and interviewed a few and they all said, This is crazy! You’re never going to do this in the time or the money. Everyone that was our core, myself and Adam and Shona, we all have a background in very low budget films so we understood where you could nip and tuck.