Twenty-one nights of rain.

We shot Neon Parish on consecutive night shoots through real weather — no rain towers, no shortcuts. Call time at dusk, wrap at dawn, blackout curtains at the hotel. By week three the whole company was living like a lighthouse crew.

Elias barely speaks forty pages in the whole film, so everything had to live in the hands and the eyes. The director and I rehearsed in moving cars at 2 a.m. to find his rhythm, and most of the quietest moments in the final cut are single takes — there was simply no coverage to hide behind.

“I have never been so tired, or so sure the camera was catching something true.”

The rain confession that opens the showreel was shot on night nineteen, in one unbroken six-minute take, with water finding its way into places water should never go. When the director finally called cut, nobody moved for a full minute.