SUBMITTED BY Stephanie

May 6, 2004 — 'Guardian' has put up bits of a journal actress Saffron Burrows (Andromache) kept while filming the movie, Troy.

There's only four entries, but they are interesting to read. Here's the first two:

Wednesday July 23: day 70, week 15

Arrived three days ago, fresh from the Maltese shoot (we have already spent two weeks filming Troy at Shepperton, and two months in Malta). I play Andromache, she of the Trojan women. As of this morning, I intend to become accomplished on Spanish guitar. Found one in the market and think it might be a route to sanity.

Thursday July 31: day 76, week 16

Peter O'Toole is just settling in. He's working on a book, and this is an ideal place to do it.

To get to the set, you drive through a shantytown. The journey takes you half a mile along a cactus-lined track, and into a village. Along the main street, rivers of water run and skinny children wait for a school bus. Running off this road, are a dozen such streets with dispersed housing, and a padlocked corner grocery store, stocked with Coke, the only sign of wealth.

We pass the school bus and reach the beginnings of Troy - a security gate with a man drinking coffee - and then I see the Horse: grey, singed metal, dwarfing our van, strangely shambolic. The horizon holds the Trojan walls, the battlements and, beyond that, vast planes of beachland that reach to the Pacific.

We are in Baja California, the Costa del Sol of Mexico. The border to San Diego is a three-day drive. I know this because I've inquired. A friend is doing a play up there; I had hopes of reaching it, however the weather is questionable. Yesterday in town, the supermarket was fitted with sandbags and boarded windows. People scurrying home provision-laden. They seem to know something we don't.

Today we are again on the battlements with hope of shooting. Last week, Helen of Troy and I were allowed to visit LA, and then recalled 12 hours later to Mexico to shoot "weather cover". We fled, she mid-cleanse in the dentist's chair, me leaving dishes in the sink with a kind friend inveigled to wash up - only to find the sky too black even for lit close-ups, and shooting cancelled for the day. Back to guitar-strumming in my room.

Wolfgang [Petersen], our director, is a man of habit. Soup at 11, with a shot in the can before the minestrone arrives. In his Das Boot voice, he watches rehearsal: "That was incredibly boring - let's make this BBC1 not BBC2."

To read the last two, click on the link below.