Rush
Rush
Ruth Halliday was working for Star Wars Producer Rick McCallum, when he suggested she start working in clearances. Since then, she's worked on many US and British films as diverse as Mamma Mia to Thor. In this article, Ruth explains what her job involves and why 'Rush' is one of the most complicated film she has ever worked on.
I began work on Rush in the autumn of 2011, which feels like a long time ago now. I knew the story of the Formula 1 season and Peter Morgan’s script did not disappoint when it arrived.
It’s unusual for crew to attend the premier of a film, but I was lucky enough to attend the glitzy Leicester Square premier last week. It was certainly different to the usual Sunday morning screenings for cast and crew. I’m lucky enough to have seen it and I would urge you to do the same, it’s a wonderful film and beautifully directed by Ron Howard.
I work both as a clearance coordinator and film researcher, however on this film, Rush, my main job was the clearances.
If you haven’t come across film ‘clearances’ before, I’ll try to explain this curious niche within the film making process....
Every character name, brand, logo, piece of archive footage or company name that is visible on screen, needs to be ‘cleared’. This means we either need permission from the copyright owner or we create our own version and then ‘clear’ them through a series of research checks, it takes a lot of experience to know what to do. That’s why you often see obscure brands or companies in films.
Generally, I’m the liaison between the production office, art department, the films’ lawyers and the person or company we are trying to get permission from.
Mess anything up and the production could get sued for breach of copyright, the release could even be stopped if the legal claim severe enough. There are huge legal departments in most companies, they want their brand to be shown in the best light and dealing with them can be very tricky.
Some films have very few ‘clearances’, others need full and very careful attention.
Rush was a mammoth task. The final list of clearances grew to over 500, which is far more than most movies. Ron Howard was using archive footage in the film so that it matched with the footage we were shooting; this meant it was vital to get all of the clearances from the old archive footage, from entire racetracks!
Watch the featurette, interview continued below
Before we were able to ask for various permissions, we had to do our research. The film is set 1976 and it is astounding how many companies who were privately owned in 1970s are now part huge conglomerates (or have just disappeared). And whilst getting permission directly from the managing director of a small company is comparatively easy, dealing with the legal departments of large corporations is slightly more difficult
As Rush was set in many different countries we needed to get clearance from several foreign companies. Not being much of a linguist I was lucky that the production provided me with a few people who spoke French, German, Italian and Spanish. Probably the most difficult country to gain clearance from was Japan. Apart from the language problem, the Japanese do not really understand the concept of clearance so in the end we decided to use cleared fictional names. Fortunately I have a friend who is a fluent Japanese speaker and we worked together to create a list of fictional Japanese product names.
For anyone who sees the film it is really very difficult to tell which parts of the film were shot and which is archive. The visual effects department did the most wonderful job. As we were matching shots with archive it was really important that we got clearance to use the names on the big signs which are all over the race tracks. This put a lot of pressure on us - but we did manage to get an OK on everything - eventually!
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