London Calling

London-Calling
London Calling

London Calling acquired international accomplishment through the filming of this action comedy by Canadian director Allan Ungar starring Josh Duhamel as a hitman with average skills who kills a relative of a London crime boss Aidan Gillen and seeks refuge in Los Angeles. This incident leads to seeking refuge in another notorious chase, set in a buddy road film type, Los Angeles being the second realistic and surprising choice after London. However, it is not an easy city to film in, due to lack of permits.

Producing partner of Short Porch Pictures, Nathan Klinger, offered to relocate to South Africa where foreign film receives a 30% cash rebate. (This goes to 40% when London Calling is an official co-production of South Africa which is not the case as London Calling wanted to be produced quickly.)

Ungar visited some pictures and was first impressed by the possibility of California locations being replaced by places close to and within Cape Town and then also saw the area as suitable for making London’s backdrop.

‘While doing out in the business district of Cape Town, we were lucky enough to find numerous street corners a variety of buildings many sets of those kinds of architecture that were a perfect match to the kind of London we wanted,’ comments Mr. Ungar.

In December of 2023, London Calling was filmed for a total of 26 days in South Africa. Mannequin Films based in Johannesburg acted as a local co-producer, assisted in acquiring necessary permits, and worked within the constraints of shooting within a city. ‘We are slightly different to the average production service company, in that we are also producers’ explains Mannequin’s co-executive Delon Bakker. ‘Kyle Ambrose [Mannequin’s co-executive] manages all the physical production of the films that are brought to South Africa and I am involved in the early stages of bringing such projects into South Africa.’

The Mannequin team assisted Ungar in searching for locations to recreate certain Californian symbols such as the Pacific Coast Highway. The director admits that he was not quite sure how to approach the South African version in the beginning. ‘The freeways (in California) are so wide and so specific,’ he explains. But the team encountered a closed freeway, often used for film and television production, surrounded by a mountain range that resembled Burbank and they built it into a film set.

“We started bringing in the decals and the signage and started turning it into the 405,’’ Ungar explains, stating that they had to cheat the lanes so that the highway could be made to look wider than it was. “It was certainly a tough one,’’ he concedes.

Despite noting similarities in architecture with Los Angeles in Hitaka’s Constantia region, Durbanville, Melkbosstrand, and Simonstown were if not more featured South African-specific features such as electric fencing. However, the team managed to get locations that fit the cinematography. “I feel like I’m starting to have a track record as the guy who has to cheat things in the most absurd way,” says Ungar. His previous film Bandit, which also starred Duhamel, “was a film set in 1980s Canada that we shot entirely in Georgia. And now here we are again.”

The desert to substitute California’s dry landscape was sourced outside the boundaries of the city of Cape Town as Ungar puts it, which was “super easy” to do. He thanked the South African crews for being able to maintain a working schedule throughout the shoot which enabled them to accomplish the film.

“The interesting thing (in South Africa) is about continuous versus straight days, which was something that I had to learn,” he explains. “They do a lot of 10-hour days, which is based on the European way of things. My director of photography Alexander Chinnici and I were so incredibly impressed by the work ethic and the pace.”

Similarly, the crew had an experience in one more management, this time when shooting a movie, namely the weather conditions which are quite an issue while filming in South Africa. “There’s this joke that everybody kept reminding me of, which is ‘Cape Town is four seasons in a day,’” says Ungar. “I was scared because this ‘Malibu in a summer sunny day’ was the look for our first day. What a blessing it was! The weather was more or less school & model perfect for the whole shoot.

While shooting in the desert for two nights, the wind became ‘quite obnoxious’ ‘to the point that we were making plans about when to bring down our Condors,’ which are light markers that mimic the appearance of moonlight. ‘If those go down you can’t shoot, you have no light. But again, we were very lucky it’s kind of like miracle after miracle, the wind cooperated and we didn’t have to make any shifts.’

To this Uncar said, “You have so many landscapes; it’s so eclectic. I initially thought a lot about mountains, a desert, and sand. But if you go up to certain parts of South Africa, you are going to get a very different aesthetic. That is the thing that I love about our business, it brings us to parts of the globe that we wish to see but under normal circumstances would have no chance of reaching. I would love to go back and shoot in Cape Town again.

The US sales company Highland Film Group is also in charge of worldwide rights for London Calling and is connecting international sales for the film during the European Film Market in Berlin this year.

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