A CITY YOU'LL NEVER KNOW
2009
ALEXANDER PEACOCK
RUNNING TIME: 35 MINS
A casting agent chases a girl into a bleak metropolis, he quickly finds himself lost in an endless night and confronted by forces of decay and cruelty.
BACKGROUND
After Klaus Barbie, Peacock was ready to tackle a larger project. The film was shot over a period of five months, shooting ending after production wrapped on The Sketcher. The film is set primarily after dark and so shooting took place three or four nights a week between the quiet hours of eleven and three. The police halted shooting multiple times during the production period due to dangerous filming locations or confusion about what was going on. The film was constructed episodically, with a series of characters appearing and disappearing from the plot and only two central figures throughout. Characters would be created and added in unexpectedly depending on who contacted the production asking to be involved. The film remains the lengthiest in Peacock Studios filmography. It was re-edited into a leaner cut in 2013; originally ending with a surreal graveyard rendition of a song from ‘Cats’ the musical but it was generally considered too much and was dropped.
DIRECTOR NOTES
I never had more fun in my life than making this film. Actors and characters would come and go. We’d film in unique locations we’d never been to before. People would frequently lean out of their windows to watch us shoot and applaud us when finished. It was epic in scope. A street murder took place as we were filming at one in the morning on the lane right next to us. However it was from here I began to have no concept of how self indulgent my films were becoming, with endless shots of my character walking glumly in different areas of the city and a confrontation scene with a prostitute also played by me who delivers a scathing monologue about my flaws. I later reedited the film to remove most of that as it was painfully bad. The film was to originally end with my character meeting an old clown on a bench as the sun rose on the city who was to give a withering commentary on the place while the circus music played in the background before leaving, but the actor I had in mind wasn’t able to do it in the end. So the film ends much more violently. It’s hard to say which ending is better, I guess it’s like all of art where it’s impossible to compare apples and oranges to decide which is the best way of doing something. You just hope the scene you choose leaves some kind of impression.
CAST
Young Man: Alexander Peacock
Man in White Mask: Iain Anderson
Girl on Beach: Katie Wilson
Gentleman: Andrew MacGillivray
Young Hustler: David Dey
Running Boy: Nicholas Miller
Tramp: Scott Palmer
Girl in Park: Anna Peacock
CREW
Director: Alexander Peacock
Music: Iain Anderson
Assistant Directors: Nicholas Miller, Kate Wilson
