Production Notes

About the Production

The Truth Game, the second film in writer / producer / director Simon Rumley's trilogy about young people living in London, was shot entirely on location in London with a sharp, rising team of young British stars.

Six friends get together for dinner one evening, an event that could happen at any one of thousands of homes in any one of thousands of towns across the country. Some of the six are old friends, some new; they all reckon they know each other really well; they have a laugh together, they feel great in each other's company. But as the evening unfolds, some of the jokes turn to truths, some of the truths turn to lies, and sometimes it's hard to tell one from another.

Says Rumley: "The film's actually an investigation into what truth really is and whether or not it matters in society today. I've always found it interesting that the truth is something we're told should be adhered to... but in fact the pillars of society, the ones who tell us to be truthful, are actually the ones who are being anything but.

"By writing and directing it the way I have means I'm saying, 'Look here's a bunch of reasonably average people and they're actually all getting on with each other but they're also all lying to each other'... so the audience is the omniscient, all-seeing eye. In terms of direction, it's very much signposted towards who is lying and when they're lying and who they're lying to."

The trilogy - Club Le Monde, Strong Language and The Truth Game - was conceived in 1995 when Simon wrote a script which, he admits, was influenced by Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. Club Le Monde was written, cast and ready to go when finance was pulled at the last minute; not wishing to waste time or the availability of London's most vibrant acting talent, Simon went into action, wrote Strong Language and shot it on a microscopic budget in the summer of 1996.

"Whilst I was doing Strong Language, I was very aware there were a lot of contemporaries of mine who had made one low budget film and then wanted to make a second film. The second film would inevitably mean a larger budget - 2, 3 or 4 million pounds, which is still a very big leap in this country for a first time director to do, unless their project is something like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which obviously 99 out of 100 films aren't.

"So The Truth Game was conceived as being a reasonably cheap film to make," he continues, "but still a step up from Strong Language and still very dialogue and character based. Even if we'd been given, say, 3 million pounds, the style of writing and quite conceivably the casting wouldn't have changed that much."