It had been a year and a half since filming The Morning Before and Ben and I decided that, after our last two failed attempts at filming in-between, we should knuckle down and get another completed project under our belts. Thus was born Leaving is the hardest part.

The idea for this project was to use all of the things we had learnt from making such a pig's earhole of The Morning Before. We needed to come up with a good script which didn't give us the same or similar technical problems. This would hopefully push us in the right direction for making a moderate to fair film.

A decision was made very early on that we needed to keep the locations to a minimum which would give us more filming time and make the whole process a lot easier. This would also cut down on the opportunity for continuity errors with not just acting but also lighting and sound (something that was a real problem with The Morning Before). For this reason, we decided that the majority of the film would be based in my flat, which would also enable us to rehearse in the actual space it was going to be filmed.

Ben's original premise was a simple idea and one which we stuck with right through to the end. The script centres around 3 main characters, John and Dee (a couple) and Ryan, who all share a flat together. The governing idea for this story was that you should "never go to sleep on an argument".

Ben started work on the script and within a couple of weeks we realised we had a right little chestnut on the go. After about a month's work we had a draft version of the script and time had come to start thinking about the cast. An additional character, Claire, had been added as a love interest for Ryan, so now we were looking for four main characters. This was a relatively easy task as Coral Flood, an actress from the Green Theatre Company, had already expressed an interest in acting for film. She was cast as Dee very early on. Peter Gardiner, well known in the area for his excellent work with TTC and YAT, was also cast as John. Now came the hard part, finding someone to play Ryan and Claire. Both Ben and I were at a loose end until a chance meeting with Giles Ward and Anneke Sando during YAT's production of Animal Farm. Giles had done quite a bit of professional work, including an appearance in Eastenders and Anneke had done a lot of work with TTC and YAT. Both were very keen to get involved so the first hurdle was crossed quite sweetly.

During the following month, Ben and I tinkered with the script quite a bit. I was concerned that we had too many locations, and that we could actually reduce it from 4 to 1. Ben was okay with this but didn't like the ending. Several independent readers also agreed that it just didn't seem to work and we spent another month trying to find the right ending. Don't get me wrong, the original idea was still there, it was just it's execution could have been construed as something completely different. Eventually we decided to make it simple and let the audience decide.