I know one projectionist who isn’t having a good day. I am sitting in a special preview screening of danny boyles new film sunshine and halfway into the movie it started to go backwards. it was we had suddenly jumped into a david lynch film. it took ten minutes for the cinema folks to notice and stop the screening. the worst news? director boyle is here for a Q&A. so is star rose byrne. at the moment the audience is just taking an unscheduled intermission. UPDATE: its 30 minutes later and we are still waiting. apparently the projectionist discovered that the next reel was reversed as well. ouch. someone is going to get their ass kicked over this. I bet popcorn sales are up though. UPDATE 2: well another half hour has past and we are still sitting here. thank god I have my ipod and dopod. Popcorn Taxi, the organisers of the event, are still trying to get it sorted but have offered everyone a refund if they don’t want to hang around. I’m sticking around for the Q&A. They should have brought Boyle out to chat to the crowd while we wait….
FINAL UPDATE: when they finally got the film re-started after an hour, it was the wrong reel. so they let it run for ten minutes then stopped it for good. Boyle explained that the reels are all in the wrong order and there is no way of telling which order to run it in without him watching all of it first. So we are doing Q&A without having seen the film….
FINAL UPDATE 2: I’m home now. Popcorn Taxi, who do a great job putting on these events in Melbourne, told everyone that they will get a free ticket to see SUNSHINE when it opens. Danny Boyle and Rose Byrne did a great job at the Q&A. She seemed more pissed off than he did – perhaps because it was the first chance she had to see the finished film as well. She said that when she first realized the reel was “fucked up” (her words), she had to leave the cinema. I thought Boyle would be majorly pissed off but he seemed to take it in his stride with good humour, which made the audience relax. I guess I can’t do the review of the film that I hoped to but I can say that the 35 – 45 minutes of it that I saw – out of order – I very much enjoyed. I look forward to seeing it properly when it opens.
G’day Cameron,
I was at this screening too, and thought for a minute that I was watching one long dream sequence, until they started to talk backwards semi Lynch style. I’d seen the reel change and had my suspicions it had stuffed up.
My mate and I took off for a beer (or two) after about 20 minutes of waiting for them to get it fixed and never made it back. I do want to go see this in from start to finish when its finally released – definitely one for the big screen and super speakers.
Hindsight suggests we probably should have crept back in for the interviews but ah well, glad we didn’t miss the rest of the movie.
hey Ben, yeah the Q&A was great, if shorter than I would have liked. I’m used to Kevin Smith’s 3 hour jobs. Seeing half the film was a bitch because now I will have to sit through it again but there are worse things in life. 🙂
You weren’t the guys sitting outside the bar just down one level were you? I noticed a couple of blokes there who seemed to be paying attention to the audience leaving after the Q&A and wondered if they had left the show early!
Yeah that sounds like us.
I’m going to get some mileage out of this story, embellishments and all.
Some suggested lies include:
*I was sitting in the seat directly behind Rose Byrne, and that isn’t her real colour
*Those sitting in the front few rows actually reached for their sunglasses during some bright parts of the movie.