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Saturday 29 January 2011

The day Clint Eastwood made my day

Clint Eastwood's latest film, Hereafter, was partly filmed in Richard Preston's house in London. He reveals what happened when Hollywood came to town.

Clint Eastwood on a set visit to Richard Preston's home in London for his latest film, Hereafter
Clint Eastwood on a set visit to Richard Preston's home in London for his latest film, Hereafter Photo: RICHARD PRESTON

It started with a handwritten note on the doormat. A film company was interested in shooting at our mid-terrace London house. Not a big deal; they needed to dress up the outside and the doorway. The scene was straightforward: a boy would be dropped off by cab, open the front door and go inside – and that was it. For an ad, probably, or The Bill.

Fine, we thought. Don’t break anything and you can leave the keys with the neighbours afterwards. But then the location scout turned up to have a proper look round. Right, he said, we’re on. The thing is, we’d rather you didn’t tell your neighbours, because also in the cab will be Matt Damon, and the director is... Clint Eastwood.

It doesn’t matter how determined you are not to be starstruck, if someone tells you that Clint Eastwood is going to be sitting in your kitchen, you take the day off work, make sure every camera you own is working and try not to look too much like a five year-old who’s been up all night waiting for Father Christmas.

Interestingly, no one we told – well, of course we told everyone – was remotely excited by the mention of Matt Damon, one of the most bankable film stars in the world, playing a blue collar worker who can communicate with the dead. It was all about Clint. But this was a mere 20-second continuity shot being planned – wasn’t that a job for a promising second assistant, not one of Hollywood’s greatest surviving actor-directors? Oh, Clint’ll be here, said the location people. He makes every decision; he’s very hands-on.

It soon became clear that while epic scenes had been shot for the film, Hereafter, in Hawaii, San Francisco and Paris, our north London doorway moment was not going to be treated lightly. Two days before filming, half a dozen production designers turned up in Mercedes to have a chin-stroking conversation about the door. Was it the right shape? Should it be painted? Should it be replaced? Pretty soon it was going to start demanding its own agent.

We realised they were serious when the talk turned to whether Matt Damon’s trailer could be parked nearby. The answer was no. These are little Victorian streets in the shadow of St Pancras station, whose only filmic significance so far has been as the backdrop to Shane Meadows’ gritty Somers Town and bits of The Ladykillers. Neither production, I think, involved the hiring of gargantuan mobile homes for the stars to change in.

Filming was scheduled for dusk, at around 4.30 (it was February), but the action started early. At 8am a props man called Barry was outside on the pavement trimming some plywood points for our railings that he’d had laser-cut the night before. Our house, it turned out, had to resemble as closely as possible another in south London at which they’d been filming a couple of months earlier. That house had pointed railings, ours doesn’t.

So arose the first of many questions about the mysteries of film-making: why not just go back to the other place? The answer was reassuringly Hollywood. Clint preferred to be closer to his hotel, someone said. Good for him – why travel south of the river if you don’t need to?

Affable, down to earth Barry, I discovered later when I looked him up, isn’t just any props man. He was the props master for the Bridget Jones film and for Quantum of Solace, the last but one Bond movie. If it was a comedown moving from Daniel Craig’s Aston Martin to arranging potted plants outside our door, he didn’t show it. In fact, one of the delights of the day was meeting a string of supremely competent people, all with big films to their credit, but all of them charming, interested and remarkably tolerant of rubberneckers hanging around their set.

There was bad news for the door – a bright blue one had replaced it, but we all took it well. It’s a lot of work for one scene, isn’t it, I said to one of the location team as they finished papering inside the doorway. This is nothing, she said. If this was a Kubrick film, he’d have redecorated your entire ground floor and all the characters’ clothes would have had to be hanging in your wardrobes.

By late morning, there were perhaps a dozen people – location, props, security – milling around the house. I had to go somewhere for lunch and asked how many were likely to be there when I got back. Oh, about a hundred. What? For a short walk from a taxi to our front door? Oh, yes.

A couple of hours later the full scale of the production became apparent. Lorries packed the roads surrounding ours; the street itself was taped off, with police at each end; paparazzi were loitering; a vast klieg light was being raised on a hydraulic cherry-picker. And the people! There were builders, electricians, assistant directors, health and safety people, cooks and coffee makers. A nurse had apparently travelled up from Devon for the day. Inside our kitchen, three canvas chairs bearing the names of the director, the producer and the principal star had been arranged in a line. If this was beginning to feel like a travelling court, then these were the thrones.

The chief courtiers arrived in the shape of Clint Eastwood’s business manager, Howard Bernstein, his wife Bunny and ... Nigel Lythgoe. Yup, “Nasty Nigel”, the judge from ITV’s Popstars who went off to further fame and fortune in the US. Howard wore a fedora and looked a proper mogul, Bunny was a dish – chatty, funny, seemingly unfazed at finding herself in drab north London. And Nigel? He wanted to come on set, Bunny said – everyone wants to see movies being made, don’t they? So it wasn’t just us who wanted to gawp at Clint.

And then the great man rounded the corner, wearing a fleece, baseball cap and trainers, walking down the middle of the street with that unmistakable, unhurried stride, a little hunched in the shoulders as you’d expect at 79, but still taller than everyone around him. Bunny said there’d be calm, and there was: a lot of good humour and handshakes with the crew, many of whom had worked with him on earlier films – Letters from Iwo Jima, Gran Torino, Invictus – and not a hint of a raised voice from anyone.

Things started to happen a little faster. The enormous camera was mounted on rails and loaded with its precious film. A black cab drew up, ready for the scene. Matt Damon emerged from our neighbour Emma’s kitchen, where, trailerless, he’d been sent to change (I say no one was that bothered about him, but Emma delighted in phoning her sister in America to tell her that her favourite film star was topless in the next room).

The Eastwood method, it seems, is to prepare everything meticulously, do the scene in one take, and go, no messing. He paced in and out of our house setting up the angles – a sight that, frankly, was as thrilling the fifth time as it was the first. The cab drew up, and Damon was filmed peering anxiously through its steamy window as a boy got out; then they shot the boy walking to the door and being let in. And that was it. A wrap, signalled by one of the crew doing a sort of chicken dance in front of the camera, to general guffaws, not least from the director. Afterwards, I heard him murmur to someone that the house didn’t look much like the other one. You probably need a sense of humour to say that, given that the day had cost – what, £100,000, maybe more?

The good humour lasted, even as we residents bore down on him with pictures and posters to sign. He posed for photographs, radiating an amused warmth, and was even patient enough to help when, inevitably, the flash on the camera failed. Meanwhile, our door was being rehung, wallpaper was being scraped from the hallway and all the paraphernalia of the Hollywood circus was being bundled into lorries.

Half an hour later, the street was empty. Anyone coming home late from work would have had no idea that anything had happened, except that on the doorstep of each house in the street, they would have been puzzled to see a box of Roses chocolates, left by the location team to say thanks.

I’ve yet to see the film, which is released today, and have no idea if our little scene even made it to the final cut. But who cares? The man with no name walked the length of our street, and we’ve got the pictures to prove it.

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