Production Notes

Splinter started one evening in December 2003, when producer-director Kai Maurer was sitting on a train watching the other passengers. "I was looking around at everybody and I started to wonder what they were thinking. Because we're in Britain, people just don't speak to each other when they're going from one place to another, but all the time their brains are working. You'll see eight people all reading copies of the same newspaper, but they won't all be taking the same thoughts from it. And that was what I wondered about, what it would be like if somehow we got to listen in on these thoughts."

Co-Producer and Maurer's partner in Surface Films Matthew Scott-Perry continues: "Kai came up with this really extraordinary idea about a chip that makes it possible to eavesdrop on our most private thoughts. The story felt so prescient and terrifying, taking reality television to its absolute limit, that we immediately pushed back another project we had been developing and focussed all our energy on getting Splinter made."

a surprisingly large crew attempt to fit into a surprisingly small space

Maurer is no fan of reality television either. "I don't like the programmes you see all the time on TV now where ten people are locked in a room and observed by cameras. It's completely staged, and what I wanted to do was take that aspect of it away. In Splinter, nothing is staged in that sense. The characters are living their regular lives in their ordinary working environments."

Maurer was anxious to keep the main action of the film in a very anonymous tower building – in fact Wembley Point in London. "We forget how much actually can happen in an office in a single day," he says. "The five people in the experiment all work in the same place, but they have very different personalities, and they wouldn't normally notice how much they are interacting. Floss doesn't even know Ramon's name, but they are around each other every day."

After conceiving the idea, Maurer commissioned his friend and colleague James Marquand to write the script, which was finished in record time. "It was actually pretty nerve-wracking," admits Scott-Perry, "because we were scheduled to start shooting a couple of months after the first draft of the script arrived. Kai was totally confident that we would be ready in time, but I'm always more pessimistic than him about this kind of thing!"

his head's that big - really!

Maurer's confidence in the script paid off, because it very quickly enticed an impressive cast to the project.

Another significant film debut is Maurer's as director. Although an experienced film actor himself, Maurer had never previously produced or directed a feature film. A born multi-tasker, he also plays the computer expert Dr Zinger, who works with Dr Lexington on the Splinter project. Despite his relative inexperience, his confidence and ability quickly won over the cast and crew. Joe McGann, Mr Floss in Splinter, says "It's refreshing to work with a director who knows what he wants. You don't spend too much time faffing round doing much else."

Joe McGann goes on "Kai came up with the idea because of thinking about people's interior monologues and at any one minute going through your head could be your shopping list, a couple of songs and the like. Just because it's mundane doesn't mean there's nothing familiar about it. I think that where the writing in this is clever because it doesn't sensationalize it, it just makes you think that people's interior worlds are every bit as chaotic as the universe."

hey - don't I know you from somewhere?

Maurer is conscious of the difficulties faced by being a first-time director. "There never is a right time [to make the first film], and because there isn't a right time you just have to go out there and do it. My advice to anyone thinking of making the first film is just to do it, not spend forever talking about it. Because if you don't then five years later you will still be waiting for the perfect moment to start your career."

Initially there were concerns about the director appearing in the film, "Eva admitted that my being in the film made her think twice about doing it, because Lexington and Zinger have a lot of scenes together, but after our first scene together she apologised for thinking that and said she'd never worry about it again."

All of the actors playing the subjects of the Splinter experiment agree that the strangest aspect of filming was when they were appearing in each other's point of view shots. Joe McGann comments that "It's been interesting because of all the POV stuff, having to work round the camera – be the hands and feet. The first two days' work I did nobody saw my face. This is the stuff you're not supposed to do! It's anathema to an actor." Paul Barber agrees, "It's different… On other productions you just have to look at the other person… but this time I have to look at the camera… It's crazy, but I'm loving it! I suppose if [I] go back onto another normal set I'll probably forget myself and be looking into the camera all the time!"

Poster v3

Issy van Randwyck asks "What's the film about? I think that's the question that everyone will be asking. It's not the kind of thing you can sum up in two minutes." "When we were about to start filming I called Paul Barber up," says Maurer, " and he told me how he had been trying to describe the film to all his friends. He said 'It's not about what you say, but what you think', and that's still the best explanation of Splinter that I've heard." Scott-Perry goes on, "one of the great things about the fantasy sequences in Splinter is just how character-specific they are, but how universal the themes are that they relate to. Ramon is a character who half the time is totally invisible. Floss and Peters ignore him, he quite fancies Joyce but she doesn't notice, and Dan despises him, so it's very organic to the character that his fantasy is essentially about being on display to all these people, and incredibly popular with it. Of course we then push it as far as it can go, so that his fantasy is the most extreme form of [being on display]."

"Everybody has these thoughts," says Maurer. "Everyone thinks about sex, or about being young again, and so I think that the audience is going to find something they relate to in the characters' subconscious."