Film / News
Helen McCrory’s Bristol connection remembered
Helen McCrory, who has died of cancer at the age of 52, was best known for her starry roles in Peaky Blinders, the Bond flick Skyfall and the Harry Potter films. But she was also committed to low-budget work by rising young directors. Back in 2012, in between The Deathly Hallows and Skyfall, she found time to star in the £300,000 budgeted “passionate post-9/11 love story” Flying Blind.
The third film produced by the Bristol iFeatures initiative, Flying Blind casts McCrory as single fortysomething aerospace engineer Frankie, who designs military drones at Filton and lectures at Bristol University. Enter handsome, mysteriously scarred young French-Algerian Muslim student Kahil (Najib Oudghiri) for an unlikely if passionate affair. This disturbs Frankie’s retired Concorde engineer dad (Kenneth Cranham) and, subsequently, the security services, who declare Kahil a “person of interest”.
Helen McCrory and Kenneth Cranham up on the Downs in ‘Flying Blind’
Filmed entirely on location in Bristol, Flying Blind certainly makes excellent use of diverse city locations (the docks, Clifton, the Downs, the Filton Airbus factory, the Glass Boat, er, that grotty bit of Easton in the shadow of the M32), while sparing us the clichéd shot of the suspension bridge.
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Polish director Katarzyna Klimkiewicz first visited the city in 2009, when her short Hanoi-Warszawa was selected for the world-renowned Encounters festival. It so impressed locally based producer Alison Sterling that she pitched the young Warsaw-based filmmaker the idea for Flying Blind on the spot.
Helen McCrory down in the docks in ‘Flying Blind’
A few years later, Katarzyna found herself making her debut feature in a foreign city, directing professional actors for the first time and working from a script that wasn’t written in her native language. But she was full of praise for the support offered by veterans McCrory and Cranham.
“It was a bit intimidating to work with such great and experienced actors,” she confessed at the time. “They knew much more about film-making than me. But they were really great and helpful. I learned a lot from them. It was scary at first, but I like this kind of challenge.”
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