ABERDEEN fish market, 6.30am and it's raining - heavily. While the fishermen and women are bringing in the night's haul, the film crew for Nightwatch are setting up umbrellas over their cameras, and tempers are already getting frayed.
Croatian line producer Boris Dmitrovic is demanding loudly that the drivers take the same day off as the rest of the crew. The star of the piece, Pierce Brosnan is shouting for a nurse on set: ''There are guys doing stunts here, there's got to be a nurse,'' he insists.
And in the middle of it all is lead actress Alexandra Paul - best known for her role in American lifeguard series Baywatch - looking serene on her pink director's chair and somehow managing to calm everyone down.
A fit vegetarian who neither smokes nor drinks, for whom ''doing coke'' - which she rarely does - means over-indulging in canned soda drinks, Paul is playing the new type of heroine, as able to wield a gun as her screen partner, Brosnan.
They are filming a chase scene, where North Korean baddie, played by shaven headed Singaporean actor Kay Siu Lim, is pursuing Graham (Brosnan) and Sabrina (Paul) through the fishing boats.
Not only is the rain coming down in buckets, but the light is changing dramatically as each angle is shot, and the actors have been banned from using real firearms - as they would have been allowed to do by police almost anywhere else in the world - so are reduced to using unconvincing toys with sound and visual effects to be added during the editing process.
''It's chaotic: instead of setting it in a studio, with plenty of extras, we've set this among real people in Hong Kong, which makes it very hard and unpredictable. We wouldn't have these difficulties in California - but we also wouldn't get the sense of life that we're getting here,'' says Canadian director and screen-writer David Jackson.