Another Level of Coolness

James Moran is a busy chappie. Not only is the man writing an episode of Torchwood S2, but he's also on board for Doctor Who's fourth season next year. On top of that he's got a number of film projects up his sleeves - and yet he still finds time to maintain a blog most days! And lookie he's updated on the progress of his Torchwood episode:

"Blimey. It's been a long, but massively fun few days. Torchwood readthrough was amazing, such good fun. Went up the Thursday night, and they put me up in a fancy schmancy hotel. A few of us went for drinks that night - me, another writer, two actors, and script editors. Many drinks were had, many stories were told, none of which I could repeat here, especially .....

Anyway. Readthrough started at half 10 Friday morning, everyone sat around a big square set of tables (you've probably seen it on the TW Declassified and DW Confidential shows), and basically read through the script. Captain RTD did the stage directions, half reading them, half summarising if there was a big block of them, and very funny he was too.

The actors were fantastic, got loads of laughs, and for a brief glorious moment I was sitting next to Eve Myles. But then they needed all the actors sitting together, and my section got shunted down. Just as well really, as my animal magnetism would have rendered her speechless and unable to continue.

We did the readthrough, much laughter was, er, laughed, there were several creepy silences as scary moments played out really well, and it all went swimmingly. I got applause, compliments, and two actors touched me. On purpose. In a friendly, "hi how are you" way, too, not the usual "security, please get him away from me" way.

A while later, I sat in a room with the big cheeses as they gave me my final notes from the readthrough (I'd also made a few notes, lines that just didn't sound right out loud). Lots of little tweaks, here and there, some of which I needed to do on the spot at someone's computer, because they needed to print the pages there and then for filming on Sunday.

There were sandwiches. There was lots of cake. Seriously, tons of it, they were forcing it on people by the end, and we were all rolling around, crying, icing and crumbs smeared all over our faces. It was hell.

Got the train back from Cardiff at 5.25pm, which meant I didn't get home until 9pm - but the rest of the script notes for TW had to be done that very night, as they were needed the next day for printing and distribution. I think I finally got it done around 1am, and sent it off. More final tweaks needed doing during the day on Saturday, last minute changes on the changes, just making sure everything worked perfectly. They should have been filming today (Sunday), the first day of shooting on mine and another episode, so actual STUFF is probably in the can as we speak."

You can read James' blog here, and his film "Severance" is available to buy via play.com here.