Darklight

The idea for Darklight came to me after a Health and Safety training session. We were told about an accident that had occurred on-set involving ultra-violet light, which rendered nearly twenty members of the crew temporarily blind.

I didn’t instantly think, “hey, that’s a great idea for a film” but it planted a seed in my mind and a few months later it popped up. I started thinking about how ultra-violet light could be used in a sinister way – how someone might use it to deliberately blind another person. The breakthrough came when I was on the London Underground and I saw a mother and daughter at a busking pitch. The daughter was blind and was singing whilst her mother sat next to her on a stool. Despite them taking part in such an outgoing activity as busking, you could tell they were quite reclusive and depended greatly on each other. The daughter was beyond the age you’d expect someone to still be living at home and there was something quite uncomfortable with the way the mother sat there listening to the songs she sang.

This pair became the inspiration for Anne and Sarah, and earlier versions of the script actually featured them busking in much the same way, though we dropped this because we felt that Anne wouldn’t be the sort of person to want to draw attention to herself or Sarah for fear of difficult questions being asked.

We were confident in the script, but knew that casting was going to be fundamental. We had no casting director so took the task in hand ourselves, scanning pages and pages of profiles on ‘Spotlight’ and auditioning as many people as we could see. Alicia was someone we knew we wanted the moment we met her, her eyes are so powerful and the emotion she conveyed was incredible – especially considering that most of her work to date had been comedy. Tilly was a chance find. She’s someone I’ve seen so many times on television and she’s one of those actresses that is constantly in demand. I arrived home one evening to find a drama on the television and looked up just at the moment it cut to a scene featuring Tilly. Instantly I knew we had to have her – but would someone of her status even consider us? Thankfully she has a brilliant agent, and luckily for us she saw the potential in the script and passed it on to Tilly who in turn agreed to take the part.

We had discussed several possible finales to Darklight and realized there were several different things that could happen after Anne’s return home, so we didn’t want to force an outcome on the audience. It actually helps create a really tense ending – and the satisfaction of hearing people discuss their own thoughts on what comes next is very enjoyable indeed.

Darklight was completed in late June 2012 and received its world premiere at the London Film Festival in October 2012.