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production
Beyond The
I met with Charles-Henri
Belleville and David Boaretto
at the 2007 Raindance Film
Festival after the premiere
of The Inheritance. Charles-
Henri told me then, “You only
have one £5,000 film in you.”
I met them again two months later, the
morning after the British Independent Film
Awards, where their micro budget Scottish
road movie won the Raindance Award, an
award given to films made against all odds
with no industry support. It had been a long
night and I found them both scavenging
through basketball footage at David’s flat.
Hundreds of mini DV, DV Cam and Digibeta
tapes and three hard drives where piled on
the floor around them.
I don’t think they realised then that they had
embarked on an even more difficult and
daunting task then their previous £5,000
endeavour.
I am a former professional basketball player
myself and I knew David and a film crew had
followed Midnight Madness in the summer of
2007; it's an extreme basketball tournament
that takes place at night across the United
Kingdom.
David explained that he had come back from
the tour with a couple of hundred of hours
of footage hoping to piece together the first
European basketball film, but that the original
director had walked out when faced with the
enormity of the task ahead.
After 2 months of filming only £500 remained
from the original £15,000 budget and no
editor was on board. This is when he phoned
Charles-Henri to ask him to have a look at the
footage and see if there was any chance of
salvaging the project.
Possibly anyone other than Charles-Henri
would have declined there and then.
However, touched by what Midnight Madness
stood for, he decided to start patiently going
through the footage convinced he could make
something happen. Charles-Henri recollects,
Madness
“What I found exciting was that you always
hear about the negativity, the knifing and
the gangs in the media, but a lot of people
only focus on the problems rather than
finding the solutions. What I witnessed with
Midnight Madness was a tournament that
was changing thousands of young people’s
lives across the UK and that was incredible.
At Midnight Madness, I was seeing white
kids, black kids, Asian kids, men and women
indiscriminately coming together through
their love of the game.”
As the film shows, Midnight Madness, or
MM as the players call it, was started in
1999 in a local gym in Harlesden by a former
professional player called Nhamo Shire. It has
since become one of the biggest basketball
tournaments in the world, and every year
thousands battle it out through the night
to be one of the ten basketball players who
will win an all-expenses trip of a lifetime to
the United States to take on their American
counterparts.
Charles-Henri and David spent the next two
months together locked away, logging and
capturing the 200 hundred hours of footage
to which had been added another 200 hours
filmed over the previous 8 years and given to
them by the players and spectators.
An editor then came on board only to leave
two weeks later to work on Wes Anderson’s
next film The Fantastic Mr Fox. One week
later a new editor, who had just arrived from
Portugal, joined the team. She was the third
editor to have worked on the project. It was
her first English language film.
Charles-Henri decided to then momentarily
leave the editing room and shoot the footage
he needed to pull the narrative and the film
together. After The Inheritance, it was back
to no budget filmmaking and he ended
up shooting nearly half the film on the
outstanding £500 budget.
Anyone else would have nightmares
recalling these times but Charles-Henri with
his characteristic untameable enthusiasm
recalls: “What was incredible was how
welcome I felt by the Midnight Madness
‘family’ and the community around them.
What was inspiring when I interviewed the
By Almamy Soumah
players was how much they wanted to talk
and open up. It felt like they had been waiting
for someone to finally listen to what they had
to say. Their truthfulness really inspired me
as a filmmaker. It comforted us that we were
making this film for the right reasons.”
Charles-Henri, David and the editor, Claudia,
then worked for the next 6 months without
being paid, cash-flowing rent money and
other little income they had to finish the
production.
They put together the most eclectic of
soundtracks ranging from classical music to
jazz and hip-hop by launching a competition
on MySpace to find the freshest unsigned
UK artists and contacting the multi-talented,
Edinburgh-based, artist, Freemore who had
previously worked on The Inheritance.
Once the editing was locked, they graded the
film and did the online editing at night and on
weekends for free at a post-production studio
in London for 2 months. Other ‘memorable’
incidents include corrupted tapes on a fullday
steady cam reshoot just before locking
the film, drives breaking down with 150
hours of footage and the film nearly losing
two weeks before locking picture, and of
course … not being able to pay rent on time
to keep the editing going.
In July 2008, they put the finishing touches
to the sound mix and the film was finally
complete.
Midnight Madness was then submitted and
selected for the 2008 Raindance Film Festival.
The thrill came when the players watched the
film for the first time on the big screen. Their
joy at having been represented truthfully in
the film as well as in the soundtrack, with the
presence of UK artists rather than US ones,
was overwhelming. The recognition and the
respect meant the world to them and in turn
was the most gratifying reward of all for the
team.
There, Charles Henri turned to me and said,
“never again on five hundred pounds”. We
looked at each other and laughed.
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