Killer Bitch, Deaf Armed Robbers and a Strange Sweet Smell

At the boxing club in the evening, it was the heavy-built ex-paratrooper who had fought in the Iraq War who accidentally let off his handgun not once but twice. Bloody loud it was. He seemed to think it was quite funny.

It makes me wonder how the ‘chaps’ in South London and in Essex avoid becoming deaf. All the armed robbers I’ve met have had perfect hearing. But letting off pistols and sawn-off shotguns in enclosed spaces must surely do your ears in after a while? I suppose, though, that firing guns is the last thing the chaps actually want to do.. The cost, my dear! Even sugarglass breakaway beer bottles are expensive.

I bought twelve bottles from Breakaway Effects at Shepperton Studios - cheap and excellent value at £8 a bottle, but still not to be broken lightly.

I thought this was the day we were going to film the scene where transvestites attack and try to kill former football hooligan Jason Marriner. But, apparently, the transvestites need longer to prepare.

So it was a fist and bottle fight in a pub and a gunfight in a boxing club. A relatively quiet day for “Killer Bitch”.

And, on the first bottle fight, there was a problem. The cage fighter smashed the boxer in the face with the bottle but then decided to wham him in the side of the head. Realistic, but he hit him on his ear which was still buzzing from gunfire. We had to have a cooling-down period.

On the “Killer Bitch” filming, we all wear yellow ear plugs supplied by Lou, our armourer and death consultant. Perhaps armed robbers wear them too? They may become fashion accessories.

Guns are glamorous Boys’ Toys even to ‘hard men’. In the back room of the pub in Gillingham, Lou (who has a licence to do such things) opened up his heavy suitcase to let our director Liam choose which weapons he wanted and it was like a flock of tattooed moths suddenly descending on a series of metal flames. Revolvers, automatics, an Armalite and an AK-47. Hard men wanted to touch them, to hold them, to be photographed with them.

Later in the evening, at the boxing club in Chatham, after various club members were filmed being floored by punches from former WBO World Champion Robin Reid, we shot a sequence with Robin firing the AK-47 at two black-coated baddies firing automatic pistols.

Afterwards, as always, the air was filled with the smell of a gunffight.

Our make-up girl Claire looked up at me with wide eyes. “The sweet smell of cordite... and testosterone,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

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