In the spring of 1994, I met a man by the name of John Murphy, who was homeless on the streets of New York. He would always talk about the tunnels under the city, and how he wanted to go and live down there because he was sick of the situation up top - the nights that he spent in the parks and on the pavements of the city, he would get almost no rest. The cops would wake him up and tell him to move on, or it would rain and he would get wet, or he was afraid of the kids who might come along and set him on fire, or he was afraid of losing his things to thieves. He was tired. He was tired of being tired. He told me that, in the tunnels, you could build yourself a house and have electricity. He heard that you could be left alone to be homeless in peace. But he had never gone there. The idea of there being tunnels underneath the city where people were living fascinated me. It was deep in the realms of urban myth, and I wanted to know the reality I knew must be lurking behind it. I decided to go exploring. I went into just about every type of tunnel imaginable: train tunnels, both active and abandoned, steam tunnels, electric tunnels and subway tunnels. If there was a hole in the ground, I went into it. People would see me jumping down on the tracks and watch me disappear into the darkness.
After a month of this, I came across a long stretch of tunnel that belonged to Amtrak. It had around 100 people living in it. This tunnel was very different to the others. After stumbling around in the darkness for a bit, I decided I would come back the next day and try to get to know some of the people living there.
I never had any intention of making a film. It wasn't even my idea to do Dark Days. It really happened one night when a group of us were sitting around a fire in the tunnel. We were laughing at something that had happened that day, when one of the guys turned around and said: "Man, someone should be making a film about this." Someone laughed. "Why don't we do it?" I said. It was that simple. What I proposed is that we would make a film, sell it, and the money would get everyone out of the tunnel. I had never touched a movie camera. I had never even seen one. Asking around, it seemed that everyone in the tunnel had even less of an idea about film-making than I did. Where do you start?
The tunnel stretched more than 50 blocks, about three miles. During the day, it is very dark, as almost no daylight squeezes through the iron gratings set high in the ceiling. At night it is pitch black. I knew we would need power for the lights, if there was going to be any filming. We needed to run a lot of electric cable. Miraculously, we did manage to "find" 40 blocks' worth of the stuff in one of the many construction sites we scoured each night. Under the cover of darkness, we carried it back to the tunnel.
My electrician and chief builder was Henry. He was 62, had lived in the tunnel for five years and knew one or two things about getting by on the town's supply. With no apparent regard for the dangers of massive voltage, he prised open a largesilver box which ticked sinisterly, and set about splicing our cable into the two-inch wires that lay within. Sparks flew everywhere. Henry didn't flinch. We had tapped into the city's power.
There was a set of abandoned train tracks that lay parallel to some of the houses that were built along the tunnel. I wanted to build something to roll smoothly along the tracks holding the camera, two people and all the lights. In the business, they call it a dolly; it's big, heavy and very expensive. I mentioned this to Henry and he told me it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
The next day I woke up and stepped out of my house to clean my teeth (being in the tunnel is like camping - it is easier to spit the toothpaste on the ground outside). Looking down the track, I noticed a small fire burning in the distance. It was Henry. He had cut a few pieces of wood to length and was heating up a couple of metal rods in the fire. When the rods were red hot, he took them out and, pushing them through the wood, he burnt holes, tooling the basic components of my dolly. He then took the wheels from a shopping cart and bolted them to the base he had constructed. Within hours we were ready to roll.
We needed a camera. I had found a little yellow book that listed all the different production facilities in New York. I looked up cameras. The first place on the list was called Cinevision. Being close to my apartment, I decided to walk over there and check it out. When I walked into the place, a man came over and introduced himself as Laurie Drake. He asked me what I needed. I told him about the people I had met in the tunnel and what I wanted to do, and that I needed to get a film camera. He picked a camera out of a glass case and started to show me, step by step, how to operate it. He taught me the basics of what it would take to put an image on film, and then watched me walk out of his building dragging $40,000 worth of camera and lenses. We had only known each other for about three hours but, for some reason, Laurie trusted me and believed in what I was trying to do. I kept a Cinevision camera on and off for the next two and a half years, and I have still never seen a bill.
Back in the tunnel, everybody got given film jobs according to their area of expertise. In any group of homeless people, each one has often worked at some kind of a trade. Henry had worked on the railroad, he knew electricity, he was the builder, dolly wrangler and lighting guy. Ralph was the soundman, rigging the mike boom and so on. I started as the only one to do anything that involved the camera, but after a few weeks the crew was so good that they would ask me where I wanted to shoot that day. I would tell them. By the time I arrived, they had set up the lights, loaded the camera and would be standing around impatiently waiting to start. We all got the hang of it pretty fast.
After a while, Ralph mentioned that although we had been shooting for ages, nobody knew if we had captured a single image on film. Looking around Ralph's house I saw what he was talking about - there were cans of exposed film everywhere, people were sitting on stacks of them while they sipped their coffee. We had to bite the bullet and see what we had got.
I pulled out the yellow production guide and fingered the first lab on the list. We went over. They talked us through the steps. It was going to take a few days to process all the film, and those were anxious days. I eventually went up to screen the footage - alone, terrified we were going to have nothing. What would I tell the guys? To begin with there were muddy, underexposed images crossing the screen, then harsh overexposures. Suddenly we locked in. The pictures were clean, crisp and looked luminescent, otherworldly. It was pure jubilation. I ran back to the tunnel, shouting as I stumbled along in the darkness: "We did it! It's beautiful! We have a movie!"
I look back now and I see that that was really only the beginning. After that there were more good times and some really tough times as well. There were times when we didn't shoot film for weeks: we would regularly run out of cash, and so there was no way of buying film stock to shoot. In the beginning, I had been using credit cards, maxing out as many as they would send me. After that, I sold off all the contents of my apartment. The last thing to go was the bed. During editing, we ran out of money and couldn't touch the film for 18 months. I found myself homeless, eating out of the garbage. The process took me to places inside myself that I never knew were there.
When we sat around the fire fantasising about our movie seven years ago, we never dreamed it would travel over the ocean to the big screen in Britain. Who would have thought it? But here it is - and, from the bottom of my heart, I hope you like it.
Dark Days is released next Friday.
