Snow lay thick over the little village of Kingston Bagpuize in Oxfordshire when the fateful decision was made to produce a feature-length romantic comedy and take it all the way to Leicester Square. Three years later, 800 villagers are about to walk up the red carpet to see Tortoise in Love have its premiere this Thursday.
When I finished the last of my regular columns in the Guardian, I set myself the challenge of making a movie. The script was written. A gardener in the big house falls in love but is agonisingly slow to make a move. So the whole village gets together to speed things up.
That's the plot, but it's also how the film was made. It was too late to work my way up from the bottom of the film industry, so I decided to get my entire village involved instead. Safety in numbers. We live in a picturesque setting with a beautiful stately home and, most importantly, there is a hardcore group of inhabitants who will say yes to foolish ideas before they have any notion of the consequences.
Many roles in the film were based on villagers who then auditioned. There were a few tricky moments when some were told that they weren't good enough to play themselves, but it didn't stop everyone coughing up anything from £10 to £1,000 to pay for a professional crew, who I then directed.
The local WI did the catering for 60 people during a six-week period, with one lady baking more than 1,000 fairy cakes. There was an early wobble when the film crew said they wouldn't start their days without bacon butties; a pig was chosen, crisis averted. To keep the budget down, those who weren't locals stayed with families in the village. It wasn't quite what they were used to, but two marriages and one pregnancy later, it all seems to have worked out fine. Eventually we got the film in the can and everyone is still speaking. It's the kind of happy ending Hollywood would be proud of.
