I never normally work with sets. I like to get the feeling that you’re in the real place. That always makes me feel much more comfortable as well. But there was quite a lot of set work in “Ratcatcher,” mainly because the canals are so polluted that there was no way we could go near them. The kind of canals we could use were far too pretty and didn’t look like the canals in inner cities. We decided for better or worse to build a canal on a very low budget. It was quite a nightmare, really, but luckily I’ve got a great set designer. We started digging and we wanted to go deep but there was toxic waste underground so it cost 10,000 pounds to remove that. The whole thing became a bit of a large-scale event. It gave us loads of freedom in the end, though!
mysong5 