Couple star in movie filmed in a single shot
STEPHEN GRAHAM PLAYS STRESSED
ACTING couple Stephen Graham and Hannah Walters star in a new film that was filmed in one shot.
Stephen said Boiling Point, set in a restaurant kitchen, will offer “a peek behind the curtain” of the hospitality industry.
The Ibstock actor, currently on the big screen in new Marvel film Venom, plays a head chef pushed to his limits.
Shot days before the first national lockdown last year, Boiling Point is set on the last Friday before Christmas, the busiest night of the year.
Stephen’s character is battling debts, addiction and an imploding personal life when health and safety inspectors unexpectedly show up.
At the film’s premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, Stephen said: “There are so many great characters within every kitchen environment and hopefully we made a fair representation of the diversity of what it’s like in a kitchen.
“There’s all different ethnicities, different cultural backgrounds, different classes, ages... It’s a great amalgamation of loads of different characters and there’s drama going on as well.”
Hannah said: “As a customer, unless it is an open kitchen you don’t get to see anything that’s going on.
“So it’s like seeing the theatre but not seeing what happens backstage and it all happens backstage, that’s where everything is created.
“Then it’s sent out to the front and it’s the same in a kitchen so to be able to see what happens backstage is really interesting for an audience.”
Stephen said chefs such as Gordon Ramsay were in the back of his mind when playing the role but he did not try to emulate the TV star.
He said: “I didn’t make a purposeful decision to do that.
“Obviously in the back of your mind you’ve got those programmes like Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, where he goes somewhere, but we didn’t really want to do that kind of man, but I think it’s influenced hopefully from all those kind of chefs.”
Co-star Ray Panthaki said filming the whole movie in one take added an extra level of pressure to the shoot.
“Stephen takes the whole weight of the movie on his shoulders. And he was completely on it the whole way through.
“There would be moments where the camera would be off me and I’d be like looking through my pieces of paper going ‘Where am I next? Where am I next? What’s my next move? Where am I going?’ and Stephen would be like, ‘Ray, you’re over there.’
“He’s got this amazing awareness of everything that was going on.”
Boiling Point will be released in UK cinemas on December 3.