A short comedy drama I directed for Westlake Films.
Production Info:
TITLE: "Rail Rage"
GENRE: Comedy, drama.
RELEASE DATE: 2000
ORIGINAL FORMAT: 4:3 SD analogue (VHS).
STARRING: Nigel Peever & Gareth Preston
WRITTEN BY: Kevin Hiley & John Isles
DIRECTED BY: Kevin Hiley
LOCATIONS: Dent station, Cumbria. Ribblehead, North Yorkshire. Leeds station, West Yorkshire.
MUSIC: Features various tracks taken from the TV series "The Prisoner" scored by Alfred Elms and Wilfred Josephs.
Also "Size of a Cow" by The Wonder Stuff.
DIRECTOR'S NOTES.
Despite it's age and it's production shortcomings, Rail Rage has consistently remained one of our most popular films, especially at amateur film clubs and public viewings. It seems to appeal to all ages and it never fails to get an audience laughing. Perhaps I should feel a little vexed that one of my first ever films is consistently more popular than everything that came after it!
Rail Rage stemmed from a simple idea - two men that hate each other stuck all day alone together on a railway station waiting in vain for a train to show up.
I and John Isles, my usual co-conspirator in these films continued to load up the plot with obstacles to prevent the two men escaping their unhappy predicament and a very traditional British comedy took shape from our brainstorming.
We then set about scouting potential railway stations - mostly on the Leeds-Settle-Carlise line, with an eye on finding somewhere desolate - but also photogenic enough to strand our characters. We decided upon "Dent" - a remote hilltop stop over 4 miles from the village it was built to serve.
The two leads, Gareth and Nigel were picked because they were known to be solid actors with great on-screen chemistry. They were also willing to spend 12 hours on a station being driven like cattle in order to get all their parts done in a single day. Not only that, we had to make sure some scenes were being shot just as scheduled rail services were arriving. No chance of retakes if we missed a train!
Despite being filmed in February, and all of us being dressed for winter weather, the temperature on filming day was unseasonably warm and bathed in glorious sunshine. We ended up in t-shirts, whilst Gareth and Nigel had had to act as if they were cold.
The same could not be said of the second day's filming which involved getting trackside shots of passing trains and beauty shots of the Ribblehead viaduct. We were thoroughly drenched that day and finished it huddled in a pub near to Ribblehead station waiting for the train home, desperately trying to warm back up!
Unlike in the film, Dent station was in reality far from deserted. Busloads of visitors would show up, and many passengers would disembark through the station whilst we were filming. Keeping people and cars out of shot was at times a bit of a struggle.
Rail Rage is the oldest film of mine that I willingly show to a general audience. I was still a teenager attending college when I shot it and much of my inexperience shows in the production. Thankfully I was surrounded during the shoot with much more experienced help which made sure this production pulled together.
Rail Rage was also the first time I had gained decent access to non-linear post production using Adobe Premiere 3. Although light years ahead of the old tape-to-tape editing method I'd known before, my inexperience led to a lot of flabby edit decisions and an over-reliance on long mixes. I did a minor re-edit of the film years later to try and eliminate some of these issues but there is only so much that could be done to modernise it.
As it was shot on VHS/Video8 cameras (one of which I quietly "borrowed" from college in order to make the film) the video quality is significantly lower than our later films. This wasn't an issue at the time as most amateur films of the era looked much the same as Rail Rage did. It's only now in the HD era that it looks horribly degraded.
