VILLAIN: How I (accidentally) DELETED The Work Of An Entire Film Production

Before I tell you my story let me share with you a scoop from inside Hollywood. Not too long ago McG was working on Terminator Salvation, and a lowly fool was hired through a family connection to do some work on set. By inserting the wrong card he effectively deleted the footage of an 8 million dollar explosion. He was never hired in Hollywood again.

(Throughout this post I’ll be using stills from my new film: ‘The Restless’ which I’ll be sending to this year’s Sundance)

Now my story: With the push of a single button I accidentally deleted all the audio of the film I was currently producing. In case you didn’t know, audio is half the movie going experience, and without it there is no film. One simple mistake, and I effectively deleted the work of the 20 crewmembers and 7 actors (worth many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of labor).

(Thats me with the red hair)

It was the worst moment of my entire life. I destroyed something so valuable, not just for myself, but for others. Something I worked so hard for, and that others worked so hard for.

(A still from the climax of the film)

Let me take a step back: I’m a writer, not a technician. Our sound engineer was due to take a day off, so I thought I’d step in, learn a thing or two about sound design, and the next thing I know I’ve reformatted (deleted) an SD card that had never been backed up. Audio files don’t take up a whole lot of space so this one card basically had the entire film on it. A more professional audio engineer would have backed up after every shoot… but it’s in the past.

SO HOW DID I DEAL WITH THE 25 OR SO PEOPLE WHOSE WORK I DELETED???

(This is a still from the film, not me about to go postal)

My best friend, the film’s director, came up with an ingenious plan.

First: We reviewed the footage we had shot so far, most notably absent of audio. We looked for as many mistakes as we could find; botched lines from the actors, botched shots from the cinematographer, color mistakes, lighting mistakes, crew members who can be seen walking in the back round of a particular shot…

We compiled this giant list, then showed up to that day’s shoot to meet the whole crew. I should mention that I and the director put this crew together, we know everyone of them, are friends with everyone of them. But if they were told the truth the entire film would have fallen apart. There is a kind of glue that holds a group of people to a common purpose, especially when no one is getting paid for months or even years. Most of the people on my crew were students, not professionals, they were doing it for fame and glory, the chance to be noticed, not because they were getting a check at the end of the week.

So we needed to turn this highly negative event, in which some 500 hours of human labor was deleted in a single moment, into a positive event that would allow us to finish the film on time and on budget.

We sat the entire production down, all 25 people, and showed them some of the best and worst footage that had been compile so far. We talked about all that had been accomplished, all that could be accomplished, how we needed re-shoots for many of the scenes we had already finished. And then our Director, and my best friend, did something totally unexpected…

He told everyone that he had deleted the audio.

He sold it to them on the basis of: “What we’ve done so far has been good, but if we take this opportunity to reshoot we can do so much better.”

Over the next several minutes a consensus was formed.

Later he would tell me that if I had taken the blame for it we would have seen a drastically different result. If the Director of a production is seen to have made a mistake in trusting someone it sends a totally different message than if he himself stupidly (and accidentally) was responsible.

We finished the production on time and thousands over budget and for some reason this colossal lie has never hung over me. Somehow this highly negative event lead to a film that was of a much higher quality…

Was this the right thing to do? Did the cast/crew have a right to know the truth? Let me know what you think.

For more Villainous Reads head on over to @escapehatch