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.

www.killerbitch.co.uk

Jehovah's Witnesses and Killing a Baby

As I walked over the drawbridge, two well-dressed people who looked like Jehovah's Witnesses approached me. A man and a woman. Both in unsettlingly neat clothes.

"Are you filming in the moat?" the man asked.

"Yes," I told him, "We've been filming here the last three days."

I was told Fort Horsted was one of three Napoleonic forts overlooking the former naval dockyards in Chatham in case the French invaded. In fact, it was built in 1880 to defend against who knows what. Fort Horsted's moat is empty, a bit marshy and has walls maybe 60 feet high. Our co-star, former world heavyweight boxing champion Robin Reid, had been 'executing' people in the moat all morning.

"What sort of film is it?" the neat woman asked.

"A gangster film."

"Not one of those Madonna ones?" the man asked.

I looked at him blankly.

"You know," the man explained. "Her husband. Guy Richardson. I don't like his films."

"No, not one of his," I reassured him.

"Been going well?" the woman asked. "The filming?"

"Well, our star was trying to shoot a girl about half an hour ago," I explained. "He was trying to shoot her with an AK-47 and she was great. She was screaming out, terrified, in a high-pitched voice, 'No! No! No! Don't kill me! I'm pregnant! My baby! My baby!'. Very good she was. Michelle Dormer. Great scream. She should be in Doctor Who."

The neat Jehovah's Witness couple looked interested.

"Then," I explained, "On the fifth take, a little voice pipes up from 60 feet above us - a very polite man's voice asking, 'I say, are you OK down there?'

"We look up and there's no-one up there. I think he must be some bloke who lives in one of the suburban bungalows on the other side of the moat from the Fort. He must have heard the screaming and gone down the bottom of his garden but couldn't see into the moat. So our director just shouted back: 'It's OK! We're filming!' and the man's voice shouted back: 'Oh! Alright!' and we carried on with Michelle screaming 'Don't kill my baby! My baby! My baby! Don't kill my baby!' for about four more takes.

"The moral to the story is," I told the neat Jehovah's Witness type couple, "if you are committing a serious crime like murder and anyone asks you what you're doing, just say you are shooting a film and they will ignore it."

The couple smiled politely.

"What's the film called?" the woman asked.

"Killer Bitch," I replied.

"Ah," the woman said.

"What do you do?" I asked.

"We're police," the man replied.

"Ah," I replied.

www.killerbitch.co.uk