Film Stories chats to Stewart Homan of Dream Cars, one of the UK’s leading companies in film industry car supply.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 45 in August 2023.
At one point or another, you’ve likely had to deal with car trouble. To most of us, though, cars operate through an indecipherable form of pixie magic, and the thought of having to spend time figuring out how that magic works? No thanks!
I’m sure most of us can think of ways to spend our time other than fixing cars – like watching films where characters have to fix cars – but there are some out there who choose such a line of work, curious as that may seem. These everyday magicians seem to actually enjoy working with these complex machines, tinkering and transforming them until they are things of wonder.
Folks such as them are also needed in the film industry, which has countless productions going on at any given time here in the UK. Given that cars are, well… everywhere, it stands to reason that these film productions need lots of them. But where do they come from? Who makes sure they work? What happens when a production needs a vehicle that is ‘a little different’? Given that the UK is one of the world’s busiest film production sectors, you won’t be surprised to learn that several flourishing businesses sprang up long ago to meet this demand. Determined to find out more, we buckled up, turned on our sat-nav and set out to discover where movie cars come from, where they go to and what interesting bits happen in-between. In the article that follows, you’ll find plenty of talk of customising interiors or modifying liveries… but no spoilers, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Hollywood cars
Before we focus on the UK, it should be noted, Los Angeles has its own movie car Mecca too, in the form of Cinema Vehicles, a gigantic lot that has sat near North Hollywood since 1975 and houses some 1,600 vehicles that are available for film productions to rent. These days, the company also has a second location in Atlanta, one of the US’s biggest film production hubs, too.
It doesn’t just rent vehicles, either: it also provides custom builds and has assembled some memorable cinematic rides, not least of which is the tricked-out Dodge Charger that has become an iconic mainstay of The Fast And The Furious series. Given that the UK is a key global destination for film productions, it too boasts companies that offer the same services.
Dream Cars is one such outfit, fulfilling the rocketing demand for vehicles to appear in films since the early 1990s. It’s quite a job, though, with no two days ever being the same, as company co-founder Stewart Homan tells us.
“We’re a resource that has one foot in the film industry and one foot in the motor industry,” he explains. “We get a brief from a film’s production designer or art director or sometimes through an agency for a particular vehicle or number of vehicles. Sometimes we’ll be asked to contribute ideas for cars or sometimes they’ll come up with the car they want and we’ll highlight things to be aware of that they might not have thought of, like a particularly low seating position for example.”
It’s often said that film production is about solving problems, and Homan agrees that spotting issues before they arise is an important part of his role.
“You have to think of everything, flag everything first,” he states. “Because whilst they [the film production] might think that everything will be great, we have to think of the reality, of the unforeseen things that could crop up, so they get a vehicle that will work.”
It’s work that, when done well, doesn’t draw attention.
“We always say if you watch the film and don’t notice it, that means we’ve done our job properly,” adds Homan, but although a perfectly selected (often modified or customised) vehicle may blend seamlessly into a well-dressed set, the work that goes into making that happen might surprise you.
Ambulance questing
To give us an example, Homan talks about the work they did for a scene in the 2022 Harry Styles-led film, My Policeman.
“On My Policeman they wanted a 1990s patient transport ambulance for the shoot down in Brighton, but who is ever going to keep one of those?”
That wasn’t the full extent of the request either.
“It also needed to have a wheelchair ramp that could fold down out the back, but didn’t fold back up above the line of the window,” he adds. “We couldn’t find one until we ended up locating a camper which someone had converted from a 1990s ambulance.”
Tracking down this unicorn of a vehicle was just the beginning.
“We gutted it, filled in all the holes they’d drilled for pipework, waste and that,” he recalls. “Then we scoured the country for old ’90s ambulance seats, the ramp, and we drove to Skegness [that’s a 300-mile round trip] just to get a bed for this ambulance. We reupholstered it too.”
Just to be clear, Homan seems to relish describing this project. Even though Film Stories is chatting to him on the phone [he’s transporting a secret vehicle to a secret location somewhere in Europe when we chat], the enthusiasm in his voice is clear and you can hear the joy he takes in getting the little details just right.
“On the morning of the shoot,” he adds, “I got some Dettol spray from the supermarket and sprayed it in the ambulance to give it that slightly nasal antiseptic smell. It couldn’t have been any better!”
The invisible touches
Although you can watch My Policeman and enjoy the labours of Homan’s team, he points out that much of the work that they do is never seen on screen as it involves modifying cars with invisible alterations – taking parts off so cameras can move in and out, building frames so that cameras can be attached.
If a car is altered beyond reversal, the production has to purchase it (or them, in cases where duplicates are required).
“With some productions we’ll have to provide several of the same car,” explains Homan. “You’ll have the hero car, the stunt version, the grip version, the A-frame version, you can have eight or ten vehicles sometimes appearing as one vehicle on‑screen.”
It doesn’t sound like a cheap process, does it? Still, says Homan, that kind of detail is what filmmakers want and whilst productions might sometimes try to haggle over costs, getting it right costs money.
“It’s always too much!” laughs Homan. “They always ask you about it and say ‘we wouldn’t have done it that way’, but the reality is that to make it seamless it all costs money. Everyone’s got a car and thinks they know about cars. You can rent a car from Hertz for so much money a day, so when we charge more, it might be questioned. The time, manpower and resources that it takes to make that detail happen, it costs what it costs.”
Driving for Kubrick
Of course, bigger film productions could just handle this in-house and try and save a few bob, but Homan wouldn’t advise it.
“They tried doing that on Eyes Wide Shut,” he remembers, “and they just got buried.”
The 1999 Stanley Kubrick film famously reconstructed New York’s Greenwich Village at Pinewood Studios and on actual London streets because director Stanley Kubrick was afraid of flying. As such, the UK-based production needed copious amounts of US vehicles, Dream Cars’ speciality.
“It was all American cars,” says Homan, “pickups and the like. They tried to do some of it and they needed so many cars so quickly they just couldn’t.”
Eyes Wide Shut was Stanley Kubrick’s final film, but his difficult-to-please nature remains legendary to this day. The clever chaps at Dream Cars quickly figured out how to stay on his good side, though, always keeping somebody loitering around the camera area to keep tabs on the situation.
“On Eyes Wide Shut, the assistant director didn’t always relay Stanley’s orders straight away,” remembers Homan. “Stanley asked for this car on set, so we overheard that and by the time Stanley had finished talking to the director of photography, the car was pulling up on set. Stanley got on the radio and said ‘Dream Cars are very efficient.’ We’ll take that!” remembers Homan, chuckling.
It wasn’t a short shoot either, with 400 days of production still sitting it in the Guinness World Records book as the longest-ever consecutive shoot.
“We ended up doing it for six months; it was fantastic,” recalls Homan. “Back in ’96–’97, the big studios weren’t there making films at the level they are now, so it was massive.”
In some ways, it would pre-empt the huge studio demand for vehicles that Dream Cars would soon be facing as UK studios like Leavesden opened in the mid-’90s, and UK film production went into overdrive.
“We were on the back lot from April to October on this crazy deal; it was great business in that respect,” recalls Homan.
Speak to the Dream Cars co-founder for any amount of time and it’s clear to see just how much he relishes applying his knowledge of cars to add accuracy and detail to any film production.
“I want it to look as real as it can,” he insists. “In the movie My Dinner With Hervé [the 2018 Peter Dinklage movie focused on the life of Hervé Villechaize, who played Nick Nack in 1974’s The Man With The Golden Gun], there’s a shot set in Islington in 1993,” explains Homan. “I told them they needed a Nissan Figaro in the shot and they said they were too bright, but I insisted: every single square in Islington in the early ’90s had a bloody Nissan Figaro on it, it was the car that everybody wanted.”
Homan got his way and supplied the car.
“You don’t even register it when you watch the film,” he adds, “but the fact is, that’s the bang-on-the-money right vehicle to have for that place at that time.”
More than a car
It’s not always just about the vehicles being right, but the situation that they’re in being accurate too.
“We did [2019’s] Blinded By The Light, which is set on a council estate in Luton in the 1980s,” says Homan. “We got this old Rover and put it up on axle stands so it looked like somebody was working on it on the street. That’s what it was like back then: people worked on their own cars on their drives, sometimes for weeks. It adds realism; it’s those details that are important. I like to think of us as art directors for the vehicles. Some designers just let us get on with it and with other designers it’s more of a collaboration.”
Sometimes those collaborations can lead to unexpected answers to filmmaking conundrums.
“On Cruella [for which Dream Cars were commissioned to lovingly build the film’s customised and sumptuous Panther De Ville, which you can see getting dinged in our opening spread], it was all 1970s London,” explains Homan. “When you watch old film of central London, there were always coaches in the traffic going in and out of Victoria Coach Station and it’s so subliminal you don’t think about it, but in three or four of the big traffic shots in the film we had old ’60s and ’70s coaches at the back.”
Their inclusion didn’t just add realism, though.
“It also helped to block out parts of modern London,” recalls Homan.
In Cruella, the stunt car version of the Panther De Ville had its Jaguar engine replaced by that of a small-block Chevy V8 to withstand the rigours of stunt-driving. However, such major rebuilding efforts by Homan’s team are equally matched by their attention to the tiniest details.
“There’s things we get pedantic about,” he adds. “If you watch Cruella, there’s loads of buses with different numbers, adverts on the side, registration plates. We only ever had two buses, so we were constantly changing the looks of each bus to make them look like different vehicles.”
Whilst the current strikes have slowed down their film work to some degree, work on commercials is keeping the company in rude health until film production inevitably ramps back up again in the UK. So, the next time you watch a film and a car trundles past in the background, or perhaps a scene even takes place within a vehicle, take a moment to appreciate the many hours of work that have likely gone in to making that brief moment happen. For the fine folks at Dream Cars and the other worthy UK outfits that serve a similar function across the UK, getting the right car for the right moment is always worth going that extra mile, and in the quest to get things just right, there’s no such thing as too much trouble.
