Telegraph UK: Seventh Installment of 'My Week'
My Week: Olivia Williams
By Olivia Williams
11:30AM BST 10 Apr 2012
Who could turn down the chance to play a pig farmer's wife (who is really a witch) opposite Jeff Bridges?
I am your foreign correspondent this week. A job came up shooting in Canada, and the chance to play a pig farmer’s wife who is really a witch opposite Jeff Bridges is not one to turn down. So I packed up my pig farming hand book and a tome of spells and spent a week in a remote bay overlooking the sound just north of Vancouver, British Columbia. We were south of Squamish, which when written in First Nation dialect has the number 7 in it, an unfair trick, I felt, as I couldn’t even have a stab at saying it right. A little research and I found that the number 7 denoted a glottal stop, and having been born and educated in London I felt much more at home.
A good cockney accent comes in handy at the strangest times.
I’ve been working on some independent movies for a while, whereas this is a big-studio movie with the kind of budget where everything is made from scratch. The fabric for the costumes is woven and dyed to order, the magical rowan staff that Bridges carries is designed and moulded and inlaid with pewter and electrified so it glows.
As the director of photography calls for more moss in a shot, a man scuttles out from behind a tree with a huge bin-bag and starts spreading armfuls of moss artfully over tree trunks. As the natural morning mist rises up and out of the frame, a signal goes to the art department dotted about the forest. Within minutes the mist is back, wafted from countless smoke machines in the wilderness.
It was extremely cold, and a bitter sleet slapped our faces as we waited for action. I found I couldn’t move my face - a great discovery! British Columbia’s answer to Botox! Sadly, when the moment comes, I am unable to form any expression, and the chances of saying the phrase “You are the seventh son of a seventh son” through my blue rigid lips are negligible.
I came back with clean lungs and rosy cheeks to a buzzing London where spring had sprung and everyone was walking in the park, picnicking, playing - and then dumping their sandwich packets, beer cans, and pizza boxes in, on or in the vicinity of the inadequate bins. By five o’clock, Regent’s Park was an unsightly landfill, with orange bags from an unnameable supermarket beginning with S and ending in ainsbury’s blowing across the fields.
Now here’s a challenge for the Olympic-Diamond Jubilee year: a set of bins embossed with the Queen’s proud year and the London Olympics, that separates the biodegradable from the indestructible from the recyclable.
Come on, Royal Parks. You need to wake up and smell the decomposing tuna bagels.
source
The movie she shot in Canada is The Seventh Son ( post). I'm guessing she's playing Bin Bons Ben Barnes' mother (or whoever's playing the seventh son... who is probably Ben Barnes). There are actually three witches in the first book-- two evil ones, and the third one being the protagonist's mother... something which was only revealed in the later books.
And no, I haven't read any of the books -- The Spook's Apprentice (wikipedia)
By Olivia Williams
11:30AM BST 10 Apr 2012
Who could turn down the chance to play a pig farmer's wife (who is really a witch) opposite Jeff Bridges?
I am your foreign correspondent this week. A job came up shooting in Canada, and the chance to play a pig farmer’s wife who is really a witch opposite Jeff Bridges is not one to turn down. So I packed up my pig farming hand book and a tome of spells and spent a week in a remote bay overlooking the sound just north of Vancouver, British Columbia. We were south of Squamish, which when written in First Nation dialect has the number 7 in it, an unfair trick, I felt, as I couldn’t even have a stab at saying it right. A little research and I found that the number 7 denoted a glottal stop, and having been born and educated in London I felt much more at home.
A good cockney accent comes in handy at the strangest times.
I’ve been working on some independent movies for a while, whereas this is a big-studio movie with the kind of budget where everything is made from scratch. The fabric for the costumes is woven and dyed to order, the magical rowan staff that Bridges carries is designed and moulded and inlaid with pewter and electrified so it glows.
As the director of photography calls for more moss in a shot, a man scuttles out from behind a tree with a huge bin-bag and starts spreading armfuls of moss artfully over tree trunks. As the natural morning mist rises up and out of the frame, a signal goes to the art department dotted about the forest. Within minutes the mist is back, wafted from countless smoke machines in the wilderness.
It was extremely cold, and a bitter sleet slapped our faces as we waited for action. I found I couldn’t move my face - a great discovery! British Columbia’s answer to Botox! Sadly, when the moment comes, I am unable to form any expression, and the chances of saying the phrase “You are the seventh son of a seventh son” through my blue rigid lips are negligible.
I came back with clean lungs and rosy cheeks to a buzzing London where spring had sprung and everyone was walking in the park, picnicking, playing - and then dumping their sandwich packets, beer cans, and pizza boxes in, on or in the vicinity of the inadequate bins. By five o’clock, Regent’s Park was an unsightly landfill, with orange bags from an unnameable supermarket beginning with S and ending in ainsbury’s blowing across the fields.
Now here’s a challenge for the Olympic-Diamond Jubilee year: a set of bins embossed with the Queen’s proud year and the London Olympics, that separates the biodegradable from the indestructible from the recyclable.
Come on, Royal Parks. You need to wake up and smell the decomposing tuna bagels.
source
The movie she shot in Canada is The Seventh Son ( post). I'm guessing she's playing Bin Bons Ben Barnes' mother (or whoever's playing the seventh son... who is probably Ben Barnes). There are actually three witches in the first book-- two evil ones, and the third one being the protagonist's mother... something which was only revealed in the later books.
And no, I haven't read any of the books -- The Spook's Apprentice (wikipedia)