CityLife

Gunmen brought real terror to movie crew

ON SET: Shaun Dooley and Dean Andrews

THE motorcycle messenger arrived at the film set in the dusty desert of Pakistan with a message that sent shivers down the spines of cast and crew.

The compound where the team shooting Kandahar Break were staying had been attacked by gunmen sympathetic to the Taliban – and four Pakistani crew members had been shot.

“We were undoubtedly the target,” says Dave Whitney, 31, writer and director, who lives in Horwich and trained at the University of Salford.

“We were filming outside Quetta, Pakistan, near to the border with Afghanistan. Unfortunately, some gunmen were laying in wait outside our compound as four of our crew drove out. They were shot, but all survived.

"The British crew were about 10 miles out and a bike was immediately sent out to tell us what had happened.

“The gunmen were connected in some form or other to the Taliban. It wasn’t a statement against the film, because they couldn’t have known that much about the film we were making. They just didn’t like the idea of a Western crew in that area.”

The next day saw similarly dramatic scenes as Whitney and his director of photography, Russell Nabb, 40, from Bury, were whisked away from Pakistan by members of the country’s police force, along with other cast and crew members.

Police

“The Pakistani government sent the police force to come and get us and we were evacuated and left Islamabad the next day,” Whitney adds.

“The police did a quick search of the compound to make sure it was safe and we got our stuff. We had to do that because our rushes were there – a lot of the filming we’d done so far.

“It’s important for us to say that We were prepared for the risks. I’m an adventure film-maker. On the actual set we had lots of security, so we weren’t just being gung-ho about this.

“We were doing this with the permission of the Pakistani Government. We’d spent many months beforehand setting all this up and that bore fruit when this kicked off because it meant we had immediate support from the police.

“We were very nervous and very tense and there was a sense of relief that everybody had survived.”

Kandahar Break is Whitney’s first feature film and was completed in Tunisia, which is remarkably similar to the Pakistan location.

“The reason we chose Pakistan and not Tunisia in the first place is because we couldn’t afford to shoot the whole thing in Tunisia, and also because they speak a different language,” Whitney adds.

“We wanted it to be authentic. In our film there are a lot of actors and extras speaking Pashtun. Their tribal dress is all very Afghan and very accurate.”

Whitney, who’s worked mainly on TV commercials since graduating from a media production course at Salford in 1998, earned the break which led to this film in 2005, when he made his first short film, shot in Bolton, again with Russell Nabb, and called Taken Out. It was nominated for a BBC award and was shown on BBC3.

He wrote the script for Kandahar Break himself, based on his experience making a documentary for Sky TV in Afghanistan in 2002.

He was delighted to secure the services of the well-known actors Shaun Dooley, who has previously appeared in Coronation Street and The Mark Of Cain, and Dean Andrews, a veteran of Ashes To Ashes and Life On Mars.

Attack

Both were on set on the day of the attack.

Whitney adds: “The experience of working in Kabul led me to want to write about it in a dramatic form. I was with the Paras. We had to leave pretty quickly and drive through the Khyber Pass because a government official was killed at the airport and all the flights out of the country were halted.

“We drove for two days into Pakistan and that experience sowed the seed for the film. It was frightening but also quite exciting and it was a fascinating time that I spent out there, so I was very keen to revisit that location.

“At that time Afghanistan was a very different place. There wasn’t a war as such and the Taliban hadn’t regrouped. In 2002 there wasn’t much going on. It’s not like now.”

The film itself is set in 1999, three years after the Taliban came to power, and follows the exploits of a team of British mine clearance engineers working for the Taliban government.

Mines Advisory Group

Whitney took the advice of the Manchester-based Mines Advisory Group in researching the story.

“At that time there were freelance mine clearance contractors working for the Taliban Government and I met some of them when I was in Afghanistan,” he adds.

“Those mines were left over from the Russians conflict and from the Afghan civil war.

The main characters in my film are privateers, making money from mine clearance.

“One of them breaks Sharia law and has to escape before the Taliban can execute him,” explains Whitney.

“He has to escape on foot across the border to Pakistan. En route he meets anti-Taliban guerrillas and they help him to escape.”

Whitney secured a meeting with one of the highest ranking members of the Taliban while in Pakistan and says that he is fascinated by the politics of the regime.

“The context of the film has political resonance but ultimately this is a thriller that people will hopefully be entertained by,” he adds.

He says he’d rather not express his opinions on the British army’s current operations in the region, but adds: “At the time of filming the documentary back in 2002, I met a lot of local people, but nobody really high up in the Taliban.

“At that time they were very pleased that the Taliban had been ousted and they were enjoying their freedom."

Despite the drama, he is proud that this is a “Bolton production, written, produced and conceived in Bolton” and that post-production work took place at 422 in Manchester.

Casting was done through Beverley Keogh in Manchester.

“I’m delighted with the finished product. I’m excited,” he adds. “We are holding a screening for the film in London in August and we hope for a theatrical and DVD release. We’re getting some really good feedback and I can’t wait to get out there and let people see it.”