Making The Deadline

It is the first 95-degree day of the summer in Baton Rouge on the first day of shooting for The Deadline, a psychological thriller that intrigued Brittany Murphy enough to spend 24 days in this condemning heat. It’s 9:45 a.m. and already sweltering out on the sidewalk in front of The Roux House on Third Street. It’s even hotter upstairs in the loft owned by Howell Gibbens, a sound designer and studio manager for Celtic Media Centre. Even day one provides little relief from the small budget film’s breakneck pace to wrap. “It gets tedious pretty quick,” quips Jeremy Woolsey, a production designer.

In an apartment hallway screenwriter Sean McConville watches the action on a small playback monitor, scribbling notes at intervals with succinct speed, like a doctor writing a prescription. Murphy packs her bags in a bedroom as the camera pans slowly left to right across open windows, peering in through curtains waving in the artificial breeze.

This is the first scene of McConville’s first shoot as a director, and the planned first scene of his finished film. It is going well, but the London native, sweating even next to a large box fan, is not sure what to think. “It’s early days, yeah?” he says. “But I’m excited and happy with the talent and the crew.” This he says far out of earshot from the Louisiana-based production assistants and assistant designers who help make the film go, so it just might be true.

McConville wants The Deadline to have a palpable European aesthetic, something akin to Roman Polanski, he says, whose films he has admired and studied. “It’s about a female screenwriter who uncovers a murder,” he says with a glint in his eye. That’s as much detail as reporters get from directors on sets of thrillers, at least without sifting through the trash or stealing things.

Thankfully production designer Steve Arnold—“just like the Governator,” he tells me—provides a little more insight. Tomorrow production moves to the Ardoyne Plantation House, a 19th-century gothic plantation in Houma, where he and his team have been prepping the mansion for the bulk of The Deadline’s shooting schedule. Arnold served as an art director on Forrest Gump, Spider-Man, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I ask him what his challenges are for this project. “You mean besides time and money?” he says with a laugh. Turns out what was good for the project—signing star Brittany Murphy—put constraints on Arnold, because production was pushed up to fit the actress’ schedule. In turn, his usual months of prep time got squeezed down to three weeks.

“One of Sean’s big ideas for this movie is voyeurism, so we’re exploring that,” Arnold says. “We’re exploiting these situations where you can have the camera sort of lurking behind objects. And that makes the camera like another character.”

Murphy plays the screenwriter who decamps to an old estate after suffering a breakdown. While there she discovers a trove of videotapes, each of which could hold a dangerous secret about her new home.

The Ardoyne Plantation House plays this haunted host for the rest of the production. Arnold’s team had to work with the home’s elderly owner to comb through what he calls “150 years of stuff.” Everything from antique furniture and family knickknacks to old phonograph records had to be removed carefully and placed in moving trucks on the property. Arnold then went through and kept the things he liked for the sets. “We wanted to respect its historic nature,” he says. “It’s just a great find.”

The Deadline does not have an official release date yet, but updates are available at myspace.com/thedeadlinemovie.