David Tennant's Obscure Short Films: ‘SPACES’ (1993)
Today’s David Tennant post will stick with my trend of covering David’s roles in his harder-to-find short films. Before 1997’s short Bite (covered in more depth here) and 2001’s One-Eyed Jacques: (covered a few posts back right here), David played the lead role in the 1993 short film SPACES.
SPACES got made because of a Scottish joint short film initiative called First Reels. First Reels - funded by Scottish Screen/Scottish Film Council and STV - was launched in 1991 to provide grants for young and first-time filmmakers to complete their first film or video project.
With a running time of 14:54, SPACES was written and directed by Steve Pang and produced by Pang, Jo Roberts, and Stray Dog Film Company. SPACES starred David as Vinny, Colin Brown as Duncan, Becky Baxter as Jane, Mike Gibbin as the Kilted Drunk, and Daniel Byrne as the Homeless Boy.
When the First Reels project was announced, Pang was studying at Edinburgh’s Napier University. He submitted a script - and won the grant. When I spoke with him, Pang told me winning the grant helped provide the funds to make SPACES a reality, in the way he wanted it made. “Had we not won the grant,” he said, “I think the film would have still gone ahead in some form, but we would not have been able to pay the cast or equipment suppliers – which would have undoubtedly had a detrimental effect on the film, in my opinion.”
In the following years Pang decided to shift gears and move into film and television editing. He began in film as an assistant editor in the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies and on television in 1997-1998’s The Vicar of Dibley. Since then he’s worked in various editing capacities on a lengthy list of projects including Band of Brothers, The Da Vinci Code, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The 10th Kingdom, and Gravity.
Initiatives like First Reels (and Prime Cuts, which funded six 5-minute film dramas annually and helped fund the production of Bite) allowed creators the funds to produce incredible pieces of art that would have otherwise never been made.
And bless them for it! The years these kinds of initiatives were active also happened to be some of the first professional ones of David’s career since graduating in 1991 from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). The fact these initiatives were both available and encouraged certainly gave us David Tennant fans more early opportunities to see him on film!
IMDb describes the short as “a young man’s night shift in a car park in Edinburgh and the characters he meets over the course of the night: an older colleague with a troubled past, a bright young girl who uses the empty car park for her violin practice, and a young homeless boy.” David’s character, Vinny, is challenged with a difficult situation and must rise to the occasion to face it.
Pang told me his goal was to “keep things simple”, and he came up with an idea to collate all his experiences working part time in a 24-hr car park into a single night. He settled upon an idea that could be shot in one location, and with a small cast.
About David, Pang told me that he was his first choice for the lead role of Vinny in the film. He said DT seemed remarkably in tune with the character he had written, and came across as incredibly natural in the first audition. The role was his immediately. “We contacted a number of local actors’ agencies and as I recall, the actors in the film were all our first choices for each role,” Pang told me. “Working with him from rehearsal to shoot was great. We had a tiny budget, a cold dark location, and a night shoot. I remember once our equipment caused a short circuit at the location which required us to completely re-order the schedule. I think our catering consisted of soup and bread for everyone? It was all very basic.”
And that’s it for SPACES. If you want to see it, you can - it’s available for onsite viewing only at the Moving Image Archive in Glasgow. If you’re near there, go reserve a viewing. Oh, and here’s a screenshot of the film taken from the entry for SPACES at the Moving Image Archive website:
And here are a few other screenshots I’ve gathered up from the film: