December 2010
Halcrow has played a significant role in the development of Another Year – the latest film from the award-winning and Oscar-nominated director Mike Leigh.
Another Year sees actor Jim Broadbent play Tom Hepple, an engineering geologist. The production team enlisted the help of Halcrow expertise to ensure his role was factually-correct and felt wholly authentic.
Unlike most other filmmakers, who work from a pre-defined script, Mike Leigh works to ‘find’ the story of the film in a period of extended rehearsal before shooting commences. In this time, which totalled five months on Another Year, he and his actors create and flesh-out the characters that will populate the eventual film. During these rehearsals, every detail of the characters’ lives is meticulously crafted, researched and planned.
Halcrow’s highways and transportation sales director, Paul Maliphant was approached through the Geological Society in London. Jim had been searching the society’s website for contacts to help him develop his character and found a link with Paul.
Paul said: “I was convening a field trip in Wales in my role as chairman of the southern Wales regional group of the Geological Society and they contacted me to see if he could join us. I arranged for Jim to have dinner with a former colleague, whose career matched the early stages of Tom’s – mineral exploration in Australia in the early 1970s.”
Paul took Jim on a trip, where they discussed geology and the events that would have moulded Tom’s early career. They visited the Aberfan memorial and cemetery - the famous landslide disaster would have occurred when his character was at university. The party also visited the Church Village bypass for which Halcrow had conducted the early geological work. Following the visit, it was decided that Tom would have worked as a geologist on the original construction of the M25 motorway.
It was also decided that Jim’s character would have joined Mcfadden Belcher - a fictional company that took Halcrow as its inspiration - around 1985, so Jim met up with Halcrow’s associate director Colin Warren to gain an insight into life as an engineering geologist during that period.
Other characters in the film also used Halcrow expertise. Another geologist character was played by Trainspotting star Stuart McQuarrie, who also joined Paul for a day in south Wales for a geology masterclass. Halcrow’s technical director Chris Kelly, who provided insights for actor Phil Davis, who visited Swindon’s Chiseldon Washpool project. Phil was joined by Reading-based Halcrow surveyor Richard Small, who demonstrated the basic elements to the art of surveying and how to use the instruments.
Chris Kelly said: “I helped them with the background as they wanted someone who had worked as a surveyor in the early 1970s. They wanted to know what type of work we did back then, and how it fitted in with your life as you had to move around a lot – and how this affected the relationships you had”.
Whilst the preparatory work for the film features much improvisation, final filming follows a traditional path with a tightly-defined sense of story, action and dialogue. Paul saw this up close when he was invited to attend a part of the shoot at Battersea Power Station and they turned to him for advice. Paul said: “The scene included a lorry-mounted rotary drilling rig set up over a 2.5m-deep mocked up borehole, after deciding that the rig was required for a tunnel, we worked out the details of the proposed borehole and the reasons why the geologist characters had to visit the site.”
Paul went on to advise on the correct number and type of vehicles that should be on set, whilst also giving his input on costumes and the correct use of company logos . Paul said: “We were on location with a crew of 65 from 7.30am until 6.30pm to devising, rehearsing and filming one scene. Though its place in the finished film is short, we’re pleased that gives an authentic flavour of Jim’s character at work”.
Whilst audiences nationwide are only just enjoying the film’s release now, Paul and Chris were invited to a special screening back in March for cast and crew in London’s Leicester Square.
Click here to watch the trailer for Another Year