Russell and Glen engaging and down to earth, and they live in a very ordinary world. Weekend was shot in Nottingham. For Haigh, London and Manchester, with their large gay communities, were not an option, “I wanted it to be smaller, like it could be any town in the UK.” It was important that these people are not exotic cosmopolites, but the sort of person who can be found anywhere. Tom Cullen, who comes from Cardiff, a similarly post-Industrial city, points out that “these provincial cities are going through a kind of regeneration and trying to find out who they are now ” and likewise Russell is a “a working class guy, but he’s trying to work out who he is.”
Haigh is a fan of Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, he even introduced a screening of the film at the IFC center in New York. When asked about the importance of class in Weekend and Saturday Night…, Haigh says its “not just about the class issue, there’s a whole range of similarities between that film and this one.” For Cullen however, class is an important component, “Russell is a character who has been told that he can never amount or achieve anything.” Certainly, Haigh believes the cinematic representation of the working class seems to have changed, “in those Fifties-Sixties films there are these working class heroes… Nowadays it’s always ‘working class guy who beats up people’.” (Take note Paddy Considine)
The film only took a very short 17 days to film. Despite the time constraints, Chris New never felt rushed,” I felt really relaxed during the shoot, even though it was a very short amount of time.” Cullen explains, “Some of the scenes are ten minutes long, so we didn’t have to do billions of set ups. We were just able to do the scenes six times and move on.”
The crew was very light – roughly the number of people who could fit into the corridor of a Nottingham council flat – which also sped the process up. This lightweight approach to filming kept costs low. “We’re not allowed to say how much,” says Haigh when asked about the costs, before letting slip production costs added up to “not very much… £4.60.”
The work started each night before filming when they would go over the script to see what needed to be taken out or put in. Cullen and New could then go off script if they wanted, as Haigh says “it was really important that it had that element of spontaneity.” They stuck much closer to the script towards the end of the shoot as everyone got to know each other.
Scenes would usually start and finish with improvisation and carry on until Haigh saw the point he would cut in the editing room. These long shots with limited editing are crucial to Weekend‘s emotional punch, Haigh explains “usually you cut to someone else to see their reaction, but this way you don’t, so I think that makes it feel so much more real.” That authenticity is one of the most exciting aspects, of a film with many things going for it.
Read our review of Weekend here.
