Free Spirits

Synopsis

Oliver Knott was fairly confident of raising the £4m budget for his feature debut - the gangster/boxing project Bare Knuckle. After all, he had a number of short films under his belt, including The Wednesday Club, which toured several international festivals. However, one year later, when his production pot was still empty, he opted to scale down his ambitions and wrote a new script which could be shot on a shoestring.



Free Spirits is set in a bar in south London and follows four characters over the course of the hottest day of the summer: bar owner Bandanna Bob, fighting off a takeover bid; his friend Matty, who's having girlfriend trouble; Jimmy, a boxer trying to make a comeback; and aspiring actress Kelly, who likes Bob but is too shy to tell him.



The single location and one-day timespan of the story helped keep costs to the minimum. Principal photography was scheduled for a mere eight days, including interiors in the main location, a Clapham pub. The deal struck with the pub's owners that the crew would arrive at 8am and wrap by 5.30pm each day meant that cast and crew worked at a heroically frenzied pace.



Free Spirits was the lowest-budget feature ever to be completely post-produced at Twickenham Film Studios. In fact, Sir Richard Attenborough was cutting his latest film, Grey Owl, in the room opposite at the time, and his editing staff donated 30,000ft of mag stock to Free Spirits.



Knott's next project is a screenplay for Swedish production company Channel 1; he is also working on a spec feature script called The Googly.

Details

Year

2000

Type of film

Features

Director

Oliver Knott

Music

Big Jim Sullivan.

Dir

Oliver Knott

Exec prods

Richard Kilshaw, Mark Jackson.

Prods

Oliver Knott, Harry F Rushton.

Scr

Knott.

DoP

David Byrne.

Prod des

Lars Toronto.

Ed

Rhino Von Dingo.

Main cast

Leon Herbert, Richard Clements, Sally Ann Marsh, Jimmy Flint.

Budget

Low.

Funding

Private sources.

Genre

Production status

Complete

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Last updated 24th June 2005