A visit to the editing room

Last week I climbed four flights of narrow stairs to a small room at (nearly) the top of a tatty building off Oxford Circus. At a large desk in front of the window: two screens and all the techie stuff for film editing. Against a side wall: lines of thumbnail photos, a short caption to each. These represented each scene in the film of Tell it to the Bees, organised into six “reels” (by name only in our digital age: no reels were actually used).

And then I got to see three scenes from the movie. AJ (Annabel Jankel, director) and one of the film’s editors, Maya Maffioli, had selected them for me, and so there I was, watching the movie of my book. Amazing.

The scenes were beautiful, emotionally powerful, wonderfully acted. I watched Holliday Grainger, Anna Paquin, Kate Dickie, Emun Elliot and Gregor Selkirk, and I was taken back inside the story I wrote. What a wonderful strange experience. A new and one-off kind of filmgoing!