Randy Paunch continues to teach. GooTube really does reach beyond the grave.

So, in the world of web 2.0 the most exciting thing to happen in the first ten days of shooting TORMENTED was my post about Alex Pettyfer and his (alleged) penchant for taking off items of clothing (see below if you missed the controversy, which brought home forcibly to me the difference between real life and web social mores, as brilliantly illustrated by this sketch from The Wall)

In life 1.0, the shoot is going well. Cast and crew have gelled and 10 days in begun to settle into that reassuring pattern that signifies a healthy shoot. Each morning starts relaxed, each day ends in a mad frenzy. Or as Jon Wright - puts it “in the morning we are shooting THE GODFATHER, by the evening its NEIGHBOURS”

The results, so far, thankfully resemble the care and craft of the former rather more than the latter. Albeit the GODFATHER, with rather more hot teenagers and zombie demons.
Today we embark upon our first big stunt sequence and we have been joined up here in the West Midlands by our evil scientist, prosthetics professor Paul Hyett who joins us fresh from creating a new crop of albino nasties for THE DESCENT 2 and our Stunt Superman, Nick Chopping.

I won’t give away too much about the sequence, other than to note that it involves a variety of screwdrivers, a sofa and an indecent amount of blood. None of which belongs to Alex Pettyfer or April Pearson or Larissa Wilson or Mary Nighy or Georgia King.

Not yet. Their time will come.

We started shooting our 4th film, the high school horror TORMENTED on Monday. You can read about it all:

on Variety

or on Movie News

or in Metro, if that’s the way your taste goes

I should clarify, though, that despite a lot of erroneous web chat Alex Pettyfer is NOT starring as the movie’s revenging ghost, Darren Mullett. That honour belongs to the remarkable young actor Calvin Dean, pictured below.

Alex, who is also a talented young actor with a charming tendency to take off his shirt whenever possible is, in point of fact, playing another of the leads, Bradley - a fantasically charismatic but viscious bad boy who deserves everything that he gets.

It’s day 4 of shoot and all is going well, here at Fairview High. Not a fatality yet. More news, and full listing as and when.

Dark Knight has already had near universal praise (Denby of the New Yorker one of the few who missed the point) and is approaching the $400m mark, so it hardly needs me to add to it, but there’s been a strange note emerging consistently in the British broadsheet reviews which goes something like ‘good though it is, we wish Nolan would do something more important with his talent’.

That tragically misguided sentiment needs speaking to.
In TDK, Chris Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan take one of modern culture’s greatest myths, and with the help of seven of our finest actors (now sadly, six) and an army of collaborators, re-invent it as a parable for our sad and troubled times.

Telling unvarnished and difficult truths about what America has become in its war against terror, and the corrosive consequences for all of us to have the dream of our superpower so tarnished, The Dark Knight has succeeded where a dozen more ‘worthy’ attempts have failed. In what Randy Pausch would call a ‘head fake’ it wraps a hard moral and political message about Iraq, Terror and our wars in a mythical wrapper and takes that message to a mass audience who are, in astonishing numbers, embracing it: because - not despite - of this layering, this mixing of the mythical and the specifically urgent, TDK is on the way to becoming the biggest movie of all time.

If there is more important work than this for a story teller to do, I don’t know what it is. The Nolans make me proud to be a filmmaker.

I’m sorry to have only heard of this remarkable man on the day of his death. Watch the speech that made him famous here, and learn more about his life here