Hollywood comes to Southend (From Southend Standard)

Hollywood comes to Southend

8:20am Tuesday 19th March 2013 in Echo News

A LITTLE bit of Hollywood came to Southend this week when a director known for his work on films such as Star Wars filmed in the town.

Bruce Logan, who has done everything from directing to special effects, has also worked on films like Tron and A Space Odyssey.

He was in town shooting on location at the Hamiltons Hotel, Royal Terrace, and the Bacchus restaurant, Alexandria Street. Explaining the reason behind choosing Southend as one of the locations, Mr Logan said: “A cousin of mine brought me down to Leigh about five years ago and we had a lovely pub lunch outside, and I wanted come back since.”

Mr Logan added: “I love it here. The people are been really friendly and helpful. I plan to spend my day off tomorrow here!”

Members of the crew said how Southend was the perfect location to shoot as the sea, hotels and town in general were all in close proximity with each other, and had the French flavour they were looking for, as the film is actually set in southern France.

The film is a three minute promotional short for Sony, which will be premiered in Las Vegas next month, before being broadcast worldwide online.

The story centres on a couple who have a romantic weekend by the seaside.

Chris Irwin, part owner of the Bacchus restaurant, explained how his restaurant came to be involved in the filming. He said: “Some of the crew came in for lunch after looking for locations and stumbled upon here and loved it. It creates a lot of excitement.

“We’ve not had filming here before but we get performers from the Cliffs Pavilion a lot. We had Birds of Feather earlier this week and we’ve had Dame Helen Mirren in here before.”