No for the silencer August 10, 2009
Posted by joost in : film , comments closedAfter months of slow but steady preparations, I was in full pre-production mode in June and July for the documentary on the life and death of the Palestinian political cartoonist Naji al-Ali, called No for the silencer (“La likatem al sawt”).
I was hired as a freelance producer in charge of the London segment of this docudrama. As always, there is never enough money, which consequently meant I was in charge of arranging everything ranging from the budget to finding locations, cast, crew and props. Good fun but also plenty of stress.
Challenging during this production was the fact that the director, Sandra Abrass, was based in Lebanon. This meant we used email as our main form of communication. Very convenient but also quite frustrating at times, because it is time consuming and can cause miscommunication. We only met for the first time on the day before we started our eleven day shoot in London!
One of the many new things I learned on this production was casting and working with a “name actor” – in this case Selva Rasalingam. He has an uncanny resemblance with Naji, and also is a respectable actor who has featured in numerous English series and will play one of the supporting roles in next summer’s blockbuster Prince of Persia.
There’s plenty of anecdotes to tell: we nearly got arrested outside the Israeli embassy, had to do some covert filming at other locations to work around limited permissions, alerted everyone in a five block radius because the 1980′s style ambulance was driving around with lights and siren, and the director fainting on the last day of re-enactments – in a hospital set of all places!
I also had the opportunity to brush up on my production design skills. It turned out to be hard to find either a real or a fake silencer, so I asked a friend for some advice and made one myself. Dito for two fake explosives.
Custom made silencer for a 9mm firearm
All and all a good experience. It has been the most ambitious project that I have produced so far, with the longest number of consecutive shooting days, biggest cast and the highest budget. Glad that it is over though 
Time to focus on my own projects now.