Lucky devil films

Central to this great adventure is a mystery. While the film needed to have a feeling of grandeur I also felt I needed to create that feeling of mystery though the music and visuals.

To achieve this on location, we shot the majority of material in early morning or evening light. In many situations we deliberately used back light, even choosing to silhouette the subject in many shots. I personally like backlight anyway, because just like framing for black and white, you get that sense of separation of subject to background which I always strive for in my composition.

I have a great friendship and understanding with the film's cinematographer, Grant Douglas, and as always we saw eye to eye on the visual approach right from the start. We both wanted a very cinematic look and this was achieved by being very careful in our framing, choice of lenses and choice of natural lighting situations. Viji , the film's colourist was delighted with the pictures that we gave him to work with and I must say the whole process a delight.

To enhance the feeling of mystery even more, when the opportunity presented itself we shot through heat haze, dust or smoke. In at least one case we even created the dust ourselves by driving our van through shot and rolling the camera on Mike as the dust began to settle.

Mike has a very natural, easy going style and delivers his most engaging commentary when stimulated by the experience of the moment. So I aimed to record most of Mike's narrative on location. Of course for editorial reasons we did have to record some sections in studio several months later. But for me the life and soul comes through in the location recordings.

The mask elements were shot months after the location photography in Shooting Gallery studios, Singapore. The mask I finally settled on is medieval Venetian. More recent ones are colourful and elaborately designed. The mask I wanted for Marco needed as far as possible, to evoke the period he came from. The modern ones have real character, but to represent the legend, the man Marco Polo, their character was too specific for me. Everyone will see something different in the simple plain white mask.

We ate local food from the Pamirs to Mongolia and didn't have a bad meal the entire trip. It was a privilege to have met such a diversity of people in some of the most remote and least visited parts of the world.