Monday 16th March 2015 is a date that has been circled in our diary for some time now. Monday is the day that we hand over the final version of ‘McQueen: The Man & Le Mans’. The day when the making of our film - a journey spanning over 4 years - can be considered done.



Our co-director John McKenna had this to say on the emotions he felt upon handing over the film into our Sales Agent:

People had said to me that a film is never actually done, you have to let it go at a certain point. And that has proved very true. Time in the end does come into play and forces you to make decisions that you’ve been putting off. Finally you have to look at it and say – ‘that’s it, it’s done’. That’s where we are now. And we are really proud of the film we have made, though It’s taken a long time to get here.

It’s been over 4 years since our Executive Producer Andrew Marriott came to us and said he had an idea for our next television documentary together. On reading the treatment for ‘McQueen: The Man & Le Mans’, I realized that we had to at least try to get this onto the big screen and begged him to delay production for a year whilst we made a boxing documentary that had just been commissioned. Thankfully, he was happy to wait!

It’s probably 3 years since Gabriel Clarke (Co-Director & Writer), Richard Wiseman (Archive Producer) and I started to look at some of the archive that was already out there. That gave us even more incentive – glimpses of Steve McQueen on set from ‘featurettes’ and news-reels from the time. This confirmed that they were shooting around this film – what else could we find? What else is out there and where? (Believe me, Richard has delighted us beyond our dreams in the Archive he has uncovered.)

It seems an age ago that I sat down with Gabriel and tried to work out a plan of action for how we would go about this. Who did we need to speak to in order to tell this story properly? How would we do it?

And it’s nearly 18 months since Andrew, Gabriel and I went out to Malibu to meet Chad McQueen and to share with him how we wanted to tell this story.

The last 14 months however have been an absolute whirlwind. 2014 began with the film being announced at the Berlin film festival. When we realized that there was a genuine interest in what we were doing, it all became very real very quickly…

Gabriel, Victoria Wood (Line Producer & general all round life saver) started to plan out a production schedule. By this stage ‘Next Monday’ was circled and we had to work backwards from there.

When can we start filming? How long do we need to film everyone we want? Where do the people we want to speak with live? How do we get in touch with them? Will they even want to participate? How long do we need after filming before we can realistically start editing? How long do we need for that? Can we get the people we want to film and edit our documentary (a huge yes to that one!)? Music, graphics, grade, sound – so many questions to raise, answer and plan for. And, last but certainly not least, how much do we need to make it and where on earth are we going to find the money?

Thankfully, things all fell into place thanks to the belief and backing of the right people and a the hard work of our talented and committed team. A team that realized this was a story that needed to be told - and a team that were willing to do whatever was necessary to make the finished product as good as possible.

So, a huge thank-you to everyone who has worked on the documentary for getting us where we are now! ‘McQueen: The Man & Le Mans‘ will now start its next phase as it heads off towards festivals and premieres. It will be a brand new experience for a lot of us, but one that we are approaching with both excitement and a little bit of trepidation!

We hope it does well, and we hope people feel the same way about it as we do. And we extend our thanks to everyone who has been following our progress so far via this newsletter and across our social channels. Your support and comments have been followed and shared throughout the production team and helped get us through some very long days and nights. We hope you enjoy it.