My friend Calie started a blog about writers earlier in the year and asked me to be one of the writers to submit a piece about their work to her
blog. I must say I felt a tad apprehensive after reading some of the guest
pieces she’d already ran – authors who were several published books down the
line, whereas I didn’t really see where my film making could stand toe to toe
with the previous contributors. After her reassurance that she was keen to hear
from a variety of writers who work in different mediums and had different
levels of success I felt pacified enough to commit to the below. I never
expected it to turn into such a self analytical and historical piece...unfortunately she never got to run the piece, with life getting in the way of her running the blog...and a lot of what I talk about below also feels slightly less relevant three quarters of a year further down the line, I'm still in a limbo state trying to finish the same 3 films which I probably mention below.
For anyone (hello?) who does "follow" this blog, some of the below towards more recent years will be going over old ground...but if you get that far anyway, hats of the highest size and magnitude off to you for persevering!
Why do I
write? Why do I do what I do? Possibly, most importantly, what is it that
I really want to do? These were questions which I’ve already been asking myself
over the past year, compounded no doubt by a significant death in the family
and one of those awful milestone birthdays, where in the aftermath your body
alarmingly seems rapidly more aching and fragile, derailing any feelings of
invulnerability that you may have previously held.
I’ve always
held a significant moment in my teenage years as THE catalyst moment from
where everything else has unravelled from, yet as I try to analyse the how and
I why of that moment I found myself going further back, looking for the groundwork
which made me susceptible and open to that moment.
I realised,
that like the vast majority of things in my life, most of it can be traced back
to my Sinclair 48K ZX Spectrum.
It seems odd
that Sir Clive Sinclair’s computer for the masses should have such a
significant effect on my very being, but it was everything around it as a
result of computing which exposed me to a wider cultural awareness.
Firstly and
most simply, were the masses of licensed product that were adapted into video
games…or if not officially licensed, years later I’d realise how storylines,
themes etc were heavily inspired from other sources. As this was the
wonderful lawless wild west of the early world of home computing, for the most
part these all managed to exist under the radar without legal
ramifications…with only the odd arcade inspired conversion receiving any
lawsuit ire, which usually resulted in a quick reskinning of graphics to bypass
such issues – a situation which mostly continued until Rainbow Arts “Great
Giana Sisters” proved too close to Nintendo’s “Super Mario Brothers” (see what
they did there?) *
The breadth of
licensed software is really quite staggering when looked at from a distance.
Over the years video games were seen as more of a “kids” thing, a perception which
is no longer with us, but it’s also interesting to see how video games with
more “mature” tie ins must have been aimed at an older audience, as
realistically the younger audience wouldn’t have been aware of the original
material…though, as in my case, press and promotion in video games magazines
suddenly raised awareness.
Some examples-
video games of Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Minder – programmes which were aimed
more at the 8pm/ 9pm watershed adult audience. Book publishers seemed keen to
get involved in this new medium, resulting in adaptations of James Herbert’s
The Rats (resulting in full page advertisements of the striking book cover
illustration in video game magazines…the game was a mixture of strategy and
adventure, with some tense decision making moments, sometimes which would
result in rats “biting” through the electronic page of text – beat that
Kindle!) There was a ground breaking icon driven adaptation of Frederick
Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol, more child friendly fare such as Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory (which came with as a game/ book package), Beam Software’s
recognised classic graphic adventure interpretation of The Hobbit, followed by
similar ambitious games by Mike Singleton tackling the Lord of the Rings
trilogy…many book, tv and film adaptations…even music inspired “games” would
follow, including a light synthesizer tie in with Mike Oldfield’s Tubular
Bells. Often these tie ins would be graphic adventures where, for those unaware
of the genre, required VERB NOUN entry to play (ie GET ROPE, OPEN DOOR, INSERT
CARD) – I recall a review of one adventure game called 4 Minutes To Midnight,
which had an evocative opening at a petrol station and a car crashing into the
petrol pumps, inside the car was someone who had succumbed to some super virus
outbreak…years later I would discover the source of inspiration for this
opening…
Many of these
games I would never get to play, or not until many many years later thanks to
the wonders of modern emulation (and the removal of the tedious waiting for the
game to load from cassette.) However, my window into this world was wide open
thanks to the UK video game press. From around mid 1985 I would regularly be
reading a mixture of Crash and Sinclair User (followed by Your Sinclair at the
end of 1985) – magazines specifically covering the ZX Spectrum, as well as
Computer and Video Games, a broader magazine which covered all formats. On a
similar tip, for around 20 issues we also had at home Marshall Cavendish’s
INPUT magazine, which brought a 52 week run of magazines with across format
type in programmes, ranging from action, adventure and strategy games,
word processing and spreadsheet type applications leading into the world of
Machine Code. Even this type in magazine would throw in various cultural references,
usually in the illustrations to make the tedious idea of typing in programs
more exciting – for the word processor type in, there were several
illustrations with the text “Tolstoy could have used a word processor”, then
over the page amongst a picture of a pig’s head and several people wearing
identical blue overalls “And Orwell couldn’t wait for 1984…” So my initial
awareness of the existence of Orwell came from a magazine designed to teach
programming…
My reading of
books at this time became quite limited – apart from reading books at school,
the weekly trips to the library seemed to dissipate somewhat, probably out of a
lack of adventure in knowing where to take my reading next – bar Roald Dahl
books, my reading of literature seemed to stall somewhat – ironically, any
books I did read were usually related to a game, in the hope of garnering some
clues – I read The Hobbit in the hope it would give me some extra help in
tackling the graphic adventure but found the book an arduous, dry exercise at
the age of 11 …and as there was a graphic adventure of Terry Pratchett’s Colour
Of Magic I tried to reserve that book from the library, but was told it was
“unsuitable for someone my age.” Typical of my non rebellious 10 year old
nature I accepted this…instead of wanting to discover what made it such a
forbidden fruit!
But most of my
time would be taken poring over these magazines, re-reading issues fervently –
tea time would usually mean taking a stack of issues and sitting at the kitchen
table, going back through articles I never read at the time or reconnecting
with favourite features. It wasn’t just the articles about video games – as the
years passed and the readership aged, more “lifestyle” features would crop up.
With close tie ins genre wise with fantasy, sci-fi and horror it’s unsurprising
that many features would tap into those worlds. I recall an interview with
Douglas Adams in C+VG, surrounded with a DIY flip book of a computer generated
tea cup and saucer flying around Adams. Following the massive success of his
tie in adventure game of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy with Infocom, he’d
created a new game inspired by his own experiences called Bureaucracy (Infocom
games were too complex for my mere little Speccy, so I never played them…but
the first time I heard the name H.P Lovecraft was a result of their Lurking
Horror adventure game.) C+VG also ran a feature on Steven King, 2 pages briefly
covering his career in books and the film adaptations…I recall a book review
“round up” in Sinclair User which featured a particularly striking image of a
pair of eyes and stretched light beams, which highlighted a novel called The
Damnation Game by a new author called Clive Barker…and by the time we get to
1990 and I’ve upgraded to my Amiga, I’m reading a massive feature on special
make up and FX company Image Animation for their work on Clive Barker’s
Nightbreed, which had 2 tie in video games.
So, as a
result of all of this, I had a grounding and an awareness of these creators and
these worlds, even if I had never experienced them first hand by seeing the
films, reading the books etc.
What happened
next I’m not entirely sure, but there were two events. In my head, the primary
event was a visit to an overstocks bookshop in Nottingham in my early teens…I
have no idea why, but I’d picked up a book called HORROR MOVIES*. I think it
had a main image on the cover along with 3 boxed out images on the bottom, all
stills from the movies…one of which I’m sure was Klaus Kinski in the role of
Nosferatu. I didn’t have a particular interest in horror movies, though I’d
always been fascinated by the image of Frankenstein’s monster since seeing a
photo of it in the first TV listing for Channel 4 coming on the air (which, I
would later realise, wasn’t Boris Karloff but was Fred Gywneth as Herman
Munster*)
I can’t recall
if Frankenstein’s monster was on the cover, but as I flicked through the pages
I somehow found myself stopping on a striking image of Alice Krige’s
frighteningly decaying corpse from the adaptation of Peter Straub’s Ghost
Story. It really was quite shocking. Amazing Dick Smith special effects. As I
had the book open some classic cloth cap style Midlands pensioner shuffled
behind me, looked over my shoulder, saw what I was looking at and declared
“THAT STUFF WILL GIVE YOU NIGHTMARES!”
Despite
lacking any rebellious streak, I sincerely believe it was his words, his
disapproval of the book, which prompted me to take the book to the counter and
purchase it.
This book
became my absolute bible, re-reading and re-reading articles, introducing me to
such a variety of films from the beginning of silent cineama – The Golem,
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Nosferatu, to the Universal world of Lugosi, Chaney and
Karloff, through to the 50s shlock, the fabulous world of Roger Corman’s run of
Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (with a wonderful double page still of the various
figured “colours of death” from the conclusion of the Masque Of The Red Death
film), Romero’s world of zombies, into the harder 70s horror and the
extremities of 80s horror and “video nasties” where I would see the names of
the Italian directors (Fulci, Argento) who would become my heroes before the
end of my teens. Some of these films I would eventually see, some I’ve still
not…
The other
event, which was no less significant, was my purchase of Stephen King’s Carrie.
I don’t know where I bought it – I have a strange feeling it must have been an
airport and that it was an American published copy, but my purchase of this
predates a family holiday to America at the age of 16…nevertheless, I was
completely taken by the book and convinced all my core friends to read it,
which then turned them on to this world. What followed was a rapid devouring of
King’s work – I recall a post Christmas family visit to Manchester, where I
came back with a stack of newly purchased books, including his pseudonymous
Richard Bachman books and the novel of The Running Man, which Schwarzeneggar
had already starred in - an adaptation which disregarded most of the book* I
recall a family holiday away to some Meditteranean island where I spent the
whole week ripping through several novels at high speed including The Shining.
I had two
favourites – The Stand, his apocalyptic epic tale of the world devastated by
the super flu “Captain Trips” fired my imagination of that “What if?” question
that last people on earth tales continue to tap in to. It also had a familiar
opening sequence involving a petrol station and a car crashing at the
opening…which if you haven’t fallen asleep by this point in this article, you may
recall that it means the adventure game 4 Minutes To Midnight was inspired by
The Stand. His short story collection “Night Shift” featured so many
short stories I would revisit over and over – Grey Matter, the story of some
bad bacteria in a can of beer turning an abusive father into a more hideous
monster continues to make me shudder…and there was also a lovely melancholic
teens on the beach story called Night Surf, which was like a little side story
to The Stand and existed in the Captain Trips epidemic world – the idea of
these side stories apart but part of a bigger story, expanding the world and
scope, appealed to me massively.
From King I
then went to James Herbert, burning through The Rats trilogy at an alarming
rate and finding his nuclear horror of Domain haunting my seared mind, already
suffering blast burns from the horror of the film adaptation of When The Wind
Blows, apocalyptic 80s cinema and the Orson Welles narrated “documentary” about
Nostradamus “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” (which is a whole other story of how
that film RUINED me and my teenage years.)
It’s around
this time, probably at the age of 14 or 15 I wanted to be a writer. King was my
hero, even though there were many of his books I never read (and still are very
many, as I’ve not read any of his books for years) but he was my template, my
idol to aspire to. My favourite classes at school were English (language, not
literature as I couldn’t get on with the books we HAD to read in class) and
Art. But oddly I don’t really remember writing. It was something I wanted to
be, without doing it. Or something. The only thing I remember writing - which
probably was when I was 15 and funnily is something I’ve only recalled while
thinking about this piece – was a story called A Pinch Of Snuff*. Tapping into
video nasties and my new interest in horror films I started writing the story
of a woman coaxed to a rich bachelor’s mansion with a view to killing her off
on camera, which I’m presuming would turn into a game of cat and mouse. I
really don’t remember. I do, to my elder shame, recall writing a sex scene
inspired by James Herbert’s more saucier moments. I don’t recall it getting
very far into the cat and mouse escapades.
I also
remember passing this handwritten work in progress, maybe about 10-15 sides of
lined A4 at a push, around some people at school and suddenly quite a few
people in my circle of friends had read it, with more interested as word got
around (I say this, but this is a very small word getting around.) But there
was something in the response, as I look back at it now, which scared me
– it wasn’t a negative response, it wasn’t people laughing at me, there was
possibly some excitement, some enthusiasm – “Have you read Luther’s
story!?” type thing….I can’t recall…but quite why it made me feel
sheepish, on the spot I really don’t know*. Whatever the reason, I
suddenly decided at this early age that I was not very good at writing. I had
no style.
I wished I’d
known someone a little bit more beyond my years, in a similar creative mindset,
who could have took me to one side and tell me everyone at that age is of
course useless, derivative and dreadful…but you have to continue to work
through it. But there wasn’t. So that was the end of my career as a writer.
Alas, snuffed
out at such an early stage.
But, I still
wanted to tell stories. By now one of the other biggest things in my life was
comics, in particular 2000ad which became another obsession to devour. Saturday
mornings were spent at Ground Zero comics in a shopping arcade in Mansfield,
hanging out, 20 years before geek comic book culture would explode into the
mainstream with The Big Bang Theory and hugely successful Marvel film
adaptations. My friend and I wanted to put a comic anthology together ourselves
called “Bad Apples.” We tried to come up with a storyline for something…devoid
of inspiration, we listened to The Orb’s “Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld” in
the hope of their aural landscapes giving us that nugget of a storyline. Quite
how we got to a murderous politician getting snapped by a nosey, arrogant
investigative photo journalist I have no idea…but that was the storyline for
him, while I had to come up with my own. One initial short story was The Tap,
where a man kept endlessly awake from a dripping tap calls for a plumber, only
for the plumber to inform him that he doesn’t have the particular washer
required and he’d have to come back…resulting in the man, already on the edge,
murdering the plumber and then being kept awake by the sound of blood dripping
from his victim’s head. Arf. I also created several pages of an ongoing
storyline of Armour Plated, a psychopathic robot policeman – like an unhinged,
archly ironic Robocop – who goes on an unstoppable rampage in an irreverent
ridiculous tale heavily inspired by the madness of Pat Mills and Kevin
O’Neill’s fabulous Marshal Law series.
However, after
hearing through the grapevine how my friend thought my stories and drawings
were a bit…well…shit…I suddenly lost any confidence in my ability to draw (and
to be fair, I had little confidence in my abilities as it was…) and so that was
the end of my comic book career…(and funnily enough Bad Apples too, with the
photo journalist story never getting any further than 6 striking pages)
Alas, snuffed
out at such an early stage.
So, can’t
write, can’t draw – what can you do? Nope, Goody Two Shoes wasn’t to decide
that singing stories in song form was to be my next path…I realised that surely
making a film is no different to creating a comic book – it’s framing action
and dialogue in a TV or cinema screen shaped box – and if I can’t draw, then
surely I can put people together in a frame and press record?
Incredulously,
it was this simple line of thought which set me off on the path which I’ve been
following for nearly 25 years.
Of course, to
make a film, I needed a script. I didn’t know anyone who wrote scripts, or had
scripts or any ideas for me to film, so by default to have something to make I
began writing films with a view to making them.
The first
cinematic master piece? “Agent 009.5 and Fez Head”, an improvised collaboration
recorded in my best friend’s bedroom with a camcorder which was connected to a
VHS recorder in his room, limiting the reach and angles we could get in a
completely random act of madness. Sadly this filmic equivalent of a first
Rutles demo recording was lost when it was taped over with a pirated copy of
Hellraiser 2: Hellbound (Clive Barker AGAIN!)*
Armed with my
dad’s newly bought camcorder, my first solo entry Silicon Seeds was conceived,
taking inspiration from David Lynch’s The Grandmother short film (something I
hadn’t seen, only heard mentioned briefly in the Lynch special of Jonathan
Ross’ Incredibly Strange Film Show) where a man grows a robot spider from some
silicon chips in his back garden which then goes on to attack to him. Go
figure. Except the production ground to a halt on the attack when I was worried
about getting fake blood all over our bathroom and my mum going mental at me. I
believe it languishes on a dusty VHS tape after a pirate recording of Kubrick’s
Clockwork Orange.
After which I
hit college and within various class projects and my own work… the obligatory
goth(ic) inspired pretentious film that exists in EVERY teenage film maker
(mine taking its The Soul That Pines For Eternity title from a headstone in
Fulci’s City Of The Living Dead) and other work…somewhere between this time I
wrote a feature length script called “Parad-Eyes” which inexplicably and
hilariously was the name of a mental hospital where, obviously inspired by some
throwaway reference to Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor or something like that
(which I’ve still never seen) someone goes into the aforementioned hospital to
– shock (corridor) horror – discover the inmates are running the asylum!
MADNESS! However, as I was lacking a printer compatible with my Amiga this
script remained digital only and the disc is long gone, never to be recovered.
On a similar
tip I wrote another feature length project – “The Final Hit” a tale of two hit
men paid to take each other out. Imagine my annoyance when I saw the
announcement of the film “Assassins” where Sylvester Stallone and Antonio
Banderas play rival hit men hired to take each other out then join
forces…Hollywood must have had moles in the armpit of the Midlands! Much like
Parad-Eyes, I don’t believe this script ever got beyond my public domain word
processor software so is also lost…despite shooting a John Woo/ Quentin
Tarantino action fest with no money was beyond my abilities, I still decided to
create a fake trailer for the film which in retrospect took as much work as it
would have been to shoot the whole thing…still, messing around Mansfield with
bb guns and having no attention from authorities seems wonderfully naïve now
and I did put together a nice action montage to The Moody Blues’ “Go Now” which
I always had a soft spot for.
Somehow I
cranked out another feature length script called Acts Of Creation where some of
my new obsessions – Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Sergio Leone and Robert De
Niro – were somehow put together in a room to bash together an action script
and in moments of meta madness (years before I would even hear the term) they
would find themselves in their imaginary scenes, directing the actors, making
them repeat painful scenarios as they rewrote the script, sat in the back of
cars involved in a car chase… (Years later I would see An American In Paris and
be amused how unsurprisingly this idea had been mined before, but to a far more
delightful effect than my 18 year old mind could muster.) I even shot one of
the more low key scenes from the film in my college class room, where the 4
creatives discuss the music for the film…for some reason Tarantino suggested
Man 2 Man meets Man Parrish’s Male Stripper song, gets up on the table and
starts to strip, to the horror and annoyance of De Niro.
Go figure.
This script
did actually make it to paper – not sure if I hand typed every page out on my
dad’s electric typewriter or used the aging Amstrad word processors we had at
college, but somehow a paper copy of this script resides in my loft…and after
spending what seemed like a small fortune (at least to a poor student) at the
5p photocopier in the local shop a copy went winging it’s way to Channel 4 and
Film Four, never to be heard of again. I hope someone at the office got a good
laugh out of it, or some scrap paper at least.
The
horror…several college projects revolved around horror – Modern Art involved
modern “artist” Bartholmew Myers (umm…dunno, a mash up of Bart Simpson and
Michael Myers – no idea) whose artwork happens to involve REAL CORPSES! MORE
MADNESS! Interestingly, I took extreme inspiration from Roger Corman’s A Bucket
Of Blood, a film I wouldn’t get to see until years later and at least would
take some delight seeing there were similar scenes in tone, especially with the
art critics. Taking inspiration from Dario Argento’s giallo and colour scheme
of his fabulous nightmare fairy tale Suspiria I cranked out A Walk In The Dark,
an oddly pointless half baked stylized story involving the smallest, stupidest
child’s policeman’s helmet and two unsatisfying twists all of which added up to
it failing to gain entry to a local film festival competition. Great soundtrack
though…
If anything,
attempts to do cack handed amateur horror films put me off attempting to make
horror films for many years. Although I’d continue to have a love for the genre
and my Italian trash cinema heroes, I was in my “stylised real life” phase
loving Woody Allen, Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Lindsay
Anderson and my writing was more about people, relationships, especially those
in their late teens going into their 20s..basically where I was at and the rude
awakening of leaving college and entering the real world.
Plus, in
theory, filming two people chatting in the room was a lot easier than depending
on special effects, most of which were way beyond anything of my abilities and
meagre budgets nor did I know any creative people who could supply them. These
pre-internet days were pretty hard to network!
My crash and
burn entry level into a) failing to get into university b) somehow landing a
job at Nottingham’s legendary record shop Selectadisc (and its “school of hard
knocks”) and c) coming to the tail end of some misery guts teenage depression
and angst resulted in me writing “5 Times For”, an anthology film with a view
that I can make 5 short films and put them all together in one package.
So, this began
with (Time For A) “Bitch” where 3 friends got together around a kitchen table,
drank wine and had a good old bitch about their dead end jobs, things which
were bugging them and childhood dreams drawing on some of my own embarrassing
admissions…each of these characters then got their own story (to some degree)
so one character went on (Time For A) “Date” following his discussions to
camera about his inner turmoil and over analysis before going on the
aforementioned date, another went to (Time For A)“Party” (which was supposed to
be shot all from the character’s point of view, seeing the house party through
his eyes), (Time For A) “Fall Out” followed the female character walking out on
an argument with her partner and literally being passed by the l’esprit de
l’escalier as she realised how she should have responded to each comment from
her now ex…with the final storyline “Time For A….” inspired by the surrealistic
fantastical story “How To Kill A…” from Jaime Hernandez’s rightly lauded Love
And Rockets comic book, this was a playful exploration of the filmic frame…I
think it was supposed to also include a music video interlude to a song from
Bob Tilton, a local band whose lead singer I worked with at the time.
With no access
to a word processor I think must have been typed on my dad’s electric
typewriter again. Pretty sure I have all of this script in the loft…I managed
to film “Date” with the help of a new bunch of creative people I’d met at the
Broadway Cinema in Nottingham (which became my new spiritual, romantic hang out
in terms of tortured writer/ film maker loitering drinking endless coffee on
his day off – a walking, caffeine wired jittering cliché, if ever there was
one) Ironically, my “casting” meeting with the barmaid in the café whom I had
asked to be in the film would turn out to be as awkward as the date in the
film, in an art aping life aping art to be style. Date would be shot over a period
of time and partially edited…but would remain unfinished until many years later
when the some titles, including pretentious quote courtesy of Joseph Conrad,
were added.*
Despite not
finishing Date, but frustrated by how long the process had been, I swiftly
wrote a short diatribe between two friends, one of whom was at the end of her
tether at the other’s ignorant attitude. (Mono)(Tone)(Drone) was shot quickly
in a morning in a pub…*
There some
significant changes in my social circle, with best friend/ confidante/ actor/
creative moving off to university. Luckily I fell into a new group of
performing arts students, which gave me a pool of people to work with…so
bizarrely having still not given up on this 5 Times For debacle I shot Bitch in
my kitchen with 3 friends becoming increasingly wired on neat Ribena standing
in for wine…when wine would have probably had less toxic results. Again, it
would remain unfinished due to a lack of titles for many years…
With my new
found friend we crafted a bonkers Phillip K Dick inspired tale of a man who is
sent by some acolytes via the use of some powerful eye drops to go and kill
God. We came up with the whole storyline on the top deck of a bus ride back to
my house, where we enacted and described the whole film with such gusto to
another friend that he remained eternally convinced our performance was better
than the final film. This film WAS finished and The Sky Is Empty was submitted
once again to that same local film festival competition held at my new
spiritual hang out…but once again, was not selected for screening.*
One final film
would be made in this period – a daft comedy short called Ansafone about one
young woman’s exaggerated obsession with her answer machine. It remained
unfinished for several years as, yet again, it never had the titles and some
remaining sound effects put on. Despite being incomplete, this film would have
a profound effect on the next 15 years of my life…
Ever restless,
between periods of waiting for the stars to align to shoot these films around
the limited availability of cast, crew, English weather, locations, cars
starting etc I would grow tired of my “current” film and begin writing another,
which of course was always far more exciting than the one I was currently
committed to making, an endless Catch 22 which made me ever more frustrated
with my film making. I’d written a 30-40 page “short” called Way Of Life, where
a girl went on 10 consecutive blind dates and would report back on each
disaster to her housemate…and blow me down if the person she should be seeing
isn’t already living with her…what a fresh concept…
But it was a
visit to see Swingers at the cinema which would prove a turning point – upon
exiting the cinema, my friend remarked on the similarity between Ansafone and
the sequence where Jon Favreau has a conversation with his answer machine. My
friend suggested that I take a bunch of ideas for short films that I had,
perhaps even use elements of Way Of Life, and put together a feature length
project in that slice of modern life style.
A year later I
had a script for a film called “Gettin’ Some” – in my head I always hoped it
would be like an almost low budget/ early 20 something take on Robert Altman’s
Short Cuts – slices of various people’s lives, but with a venn diagram crossover
where the lives intersect in equally interesting and banal ways across the
running time of the film. It had over 30 speaking roles, countless locations
across the city and for someone with no money, no car and only Sundays and
evenings to film due to work commitments stupidly ambitious. The 2 year long
production of this is far too arduous to go into here, but involved a failed
National Lottery funding bid, losing my camera man and sound crew, reshooting
and recasting everything we had shot, losing my lead actor the night before we
came to finally shoot his first scene, losing my lead actress not once but
twice, the second time almost resulting in some “throwing the baby out with the
bathwater” reinvention of the film I was now sick of making, broken microphones,
discovering video cameras, concrete floors and red wine when mixed create
expensive and disasterous results, forged and fracturing friendships and both
blossoming and broken relationships. 14 years later the film was finished – and
no, the delay wasn’t only down to a lack of finished titles…but again, another
story of again Catch 22 tedium….for another time…
As the shoot
for Gettin’ Some ground to a halt I found myself armed with over 24 hours of
footage and no way of editing it…this coincided with a move to Brighton and
leaving my life in the Midlands behind. Exhausted with no money, equipment or
any idea where to find a film making network in Brighton (very early days of
the internet!) my film making took a hiatus. But the writing continued – Agent
009.5 was now attending the directing course at the prestigious National Film
and Television School and wanted me to write something for one of two pieces
for his 2nd year. Originally it was to be based on a situation our
friendship found itself in during our time at college but at the 11th
hour of the deadline he decided that we should scrap everything we’d already
written. The premise was based around an incomplete painting being deliberately
delayed and, knowing his love of Scorsese’s Life Lessons film from the
Scorsese/ Woody Allen/ Francis Ford Coppola “New York Stories” film, in a fit
of rage I declared to myself “HE WANTS LIFE LESSONS!? I’LL GIVE HIM LIFE
LESSONS!” The resulting film “Scorn” turned out very well and with it I finally
got my first and only visit to a film festival, where it was shown in Leuven
and we had a rather marvellous jolly to go and support our far from jolly
intense drama.
Over the next
few years we worked on a variety of projects – several feature length horror
treatments none of which seemed to get close enough to start the script
stage…and through him I almost got my first commission (well, unpaid) when I
was asked to work on a story idea from a female producer. Unfortunately when I
handed in a treatment she only seemed to focus on the particular elements which
she had insisted had to happen and didn’t seem to care for the food I’d brought
to the picnic, including the main protagonist trying to connect with her long
gone dad via his tape collection…so that fizzled out as it was apparent it was
such a personal piece it was clear to everyone but her that she should be the
one writing it.
After several
years I was able to get some money together, pay off debts from shooting
Getting’ Some and buy a Mac to start editing the film. I’d stupidly convinced
myself that I shouldn’t start another film while this mammoth project laid
unfinished (wasted time I would regret) but as an edit of Gettin’ Some
finally took form and required the help of other people to grade and sound
design I felt ready to return to film making.
Strangely both
of these short films – “The Crunch” and “Stranded” arrived pretty fully formed
in my head quite quickly. The Crunch was to be a heavily stylised two hander
following two computer programmers working late throughout the night, with the
“young buck” rubbing up the stiffening older colleague with his energy and
arrogance of youth. Stranded’s starting point was oddly wheels spinning….which
led to 3 interconnecting storylines of dysfunctional families in a coastal setting.
The film making landscape had also changed rapidly over the previous years –
websites such as Shooting People and the emergence of social media made it much
easier to discover, connect, cast and crew films – and with my Mac there would
be less delays when it came to editing and post production (well, in theory –
both films would be delayed due to various post production issues usually
around sound problems…meaning I had 3 films stuck in various stages of post
production.*)
During a break
in the making of Stranded I quickly wrote a short fantasy thriller entitled
“Goodnight, Halloween” which I’d half jokingly described to people as a cross
between The Diary Of Anne Frank and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed… in an
alternative mid 80s America where “Halloween” creatures had existed alongside
mankind forever a religious fascist government suddenly declared the creatures
to have no rights and could be exterminated on sight without repercussion, The
film was also inspired by the emergence of Skype and video calling – I liked
the idea of the film taking place simply on a monitor screen with various
character phoning in from their hiding places – with desktop screen taking
inspiration from icon driven adventure games such as Shadowfire back from those
ZX Spectrum days. Although it required a worrying return to special effects,
something I’d deliberately avoided for over ten years, I was confident in the
abilities of our family friend (who had done the make up for The Crunch and
Stranded) to create the creature make up. The initial batch of film making to
help create the footage we needed to create the desktop footage went well, but
my Mac, now beginning to age, would struggle with the footage and the
difficulties in trying to synch up all the elements was a challenge. This
footage then went off to a friend to create the amazing desktop animations and
windows, which took a long time but was worth the wait.
Although my
initial plan was only to show the protagonist with the final shot of the film,
revealing him at the monitor screen, several people felt that we needed to see
THE main character performing in the film…so I had to shoot this footage which,
to complicate matters massively, required an actor wearing a pumpkin head make
up effect – something beyond my make up artist. In the end, out of desperation
to get this yet-another-long-winded project finished, we shot this key footage
with a rather ropey mask bought from ebay. The editing of this new footage,
combined with the desktop animation now incorporating the original footage
really was too much for my Mac, so a friend was roped in on editing duties,
which were slowed down by work on his own film….after which he provided an edit
which required me to go back to and work on extensively. This resulting edit
unfortunately showed up something I was avoiding to acknowledge – the pumpkin
head sequences looked awful and diluted down the quality of the desktop
sequence. Years of trying to find a replacement mask or FX artist who could
deliver a convincing appliance (and which would fit my no budget) followed…and
are only just coming to a head now, 9 years since the original shoot.
With delays
upon delays upon delays with all of these films which were supposed to be my
“return” (and THAT STILL unfinished Gettin’ Some) I wanted to do something
quick, simple and…well…disposable…that I wouldn’t be hung up on being perfect
and get so frustrated by. Buoyed by the results of the shoot of Goodnight,
Halloween it was finally time for me to return to HORROR.
So, a few
months after the birth of my first child I wrote “Creak”, a 5 minute horror
film inspired by an event which happened to my wife and I – we were both woken
at 3am by a very loud creaking sound, which was completely inexplicable as
there was nothing in our house, or anything in the obvious vicinity of the
house that could have created that sound. It was a pretty flimsy script,
deliberately kept low key with the exploration of the house in the early hours
of the morning by the couple who live there. It was one day shoot and it all
went pretty smoothly and was a fun shoot.
Quelle
surprise, once again the wheels fell off with the post production* (though
nothing to do with the titles – they were done some efficiently by my animator
friend) However, when it was finally finished I did attend a local screening
where I got one hell of a kick watching a girl in front of me jump at the “jump
scare” moment in the film, which felt very satisfying to see that genuine
response. I sent the film to various horror film festivals, but the film did
get pretty strong support from horror bloggers worldwide who I contacted about
the film. To this day it’s my most watched film online.
Although some
friends and peers didn’t agree with my “disposable” approach (one friend was
particularly scathing at this idea) it was interesting to me that the film
which I had spent less time on and wasn’t as “important” to me was the film
which had the best response. The Crunch and Stranded had no support from film
festivals around the world, which felt very disappointing (especially with
Stranded, as I had hoped it would appeal on European film festival circuits)
whereas the instant fix response back to Creak felt like the right road to
travel down, at least where my ego was concerned.
I had a whole
slew of ideas for the next episodes in the series, but Knock Knock, which was
intended to be the 2nd Disposable Scream didn’t happen for quite
some time as I juggled pre production on that and a non horror short. Knock
Knock was/ is intended to be my homage to the Italian genre directors I loved –
Argento, Fulci, Bava – again with a pretty flimsy premise of a woman who has
had a horrific breakdown culminating in becoming a self inflicted burn victim
being driven round the bend by a constant knocking at her door. Pick-Ups was my
non horror short, a kind of comedic drama with a sting in the tail, where a man
throws away his past life all on an infatuation with a woman abroad in the
Czech Republic, then realises too late that he completely misinterpreted her
meaning when they last met.
Knock Knock’s
starting point was a friend’s flat in Hove which had a striking red lounge, a
deep blue hallway and fantastic black and white tiles in the hallway, which
gave it some David Lynch meets Italian Giallo style that I knew I had to film
in one day. Pick Ups came about as an intended throwaway project I was hoping
to shoot in a day while visiting a friend in Copenhagen – when this didn’t
happen I retooled the film and shot it in the UK.
Both of these
films were enormous struggles to make despite being, in theory, very simple to
shoot – as always, the tangled lives of others would hamper the pre production
with a variety of recastings , lost locations, broken limbs etc stacking up to
quite endless delays (in the case of Pick Ups, at one point I was prepared to
shoot the whole film with just the one man crew of myself, so desperate I was
to shoot the film!) Knock Knock, now renamed the ludicrous Knockknockknockknock
to avoid confusion with M Night Shyamalan’s Knock Knock, is currently stuck in
post production due to a variety of set backs and due to the painstaking time
spent on it has become very far from the “disposable” idea. Pick Ups was
completed and very well received (one acquaintance described it as a mixture of
Jacques Tati and English kitchen sink drama, which I will take, thank you very
much) and did get a few screenings at festivals around the world, but a
disappointing few after I hoped it had a broad audience appeal.*
During the
delays on both of these, I followed Creak with a very quick one day shoot film,
this time in 3D. After spotting a strangely cheap 3D camera on the internet
(£28!) and being a sucker for gimmicky 3D I decided to make a psychothriller to
test out the capabilities of the camera. Black Spot was again a very simple
premise of a man finding his car breaking down on a lonely county road. After
setting off on foot he comes across another broken down car, where he discovers
a dead woman in the back seat. He’s suddenly attacked and has to take refuge in
this car and try to plot an escape from the psychopath terrorising him. *
Building on
the support I’d received for Creak from the horror blog community, Black Spot
received a fantastic amount of mostly positive attention and again dabbled in a
few festivals worldwide. As with Creak it seemed the films I’d spent the least
time and money on seemed to receive the best attention. Something to think
about….
As a result of
casting a particular actor in Black Spot and through a random series of events
I found myself working with my first (and only) “proper” actor who was a
massive household name in the 60s and 70s but is sadly off the radar of most
people now. He had a personal piece he wanted shooting, so a day was spent at
his flat working through his script. The aftermath of this involved another
protracted editing period to get the work how he wanted it, made difficult by
the footage we shot and at one point resulted in me receiving a rather terse
email from a production company affiliated with Channel 4 with a potential
legal threat as a result of the work. However, I was rather taken with the
actor’s presence, look and the rich timbre of his voice (even with his aging
years) and came up with a topical script idea which I hoped he would respond
to, played to his aforementioned strengths and worked around his weaknesses (an
understandable reduced mobility.) I felt it had potential to be funded swiftly
via crowd funding with a view to capitalising on his large cult fanbase
worldwide. I roped Calie, dear editor of this here blog, to help me write it
and she turned out an amazing script with an end monologue so utterly wonderful
we were achingly desperate to hear the actor read it aloud.
Unfortunately,
our work was sadly in vain – I had hoped that in return for all my unpaid hours
and hard work on his piece may have bought some favour and time for him to
actually read the script, but as far as I’m aware he’s still never read it…and
so Poison The Well stalled in that regard, but remains a script that I am still
enthusiastic about and have high hopes if only we could get it under the nose
of some old time stage-y thesps.
Inspiration
can come from any source and in the case of another short film, Snore, it came
from – as the title suggests – my snoring problem (sadly a family trait, judging
by my dad’s nasal emanations.) This was originally conceived as a couple
terrorized by a puppet creature in the style of the Drew Barrymore “General”
episode of the Stephen King portmanteau film Cat’s Eye. However, I
decided that people being terrorized by a puppet would be more interesting if
it were puppets being terrorized by a man in a suit. Hence Snore became a
muppet style splatstick film, with a brief collaboration with a local horror
writer and a shift of the middle aged main characters to now being a Dragon’s
Den style no nonsense businesswoman and her suffering toy boy/ PA fighting for
their lives.
The film
received a local grant to help with the puppets, but delays in their
construction, and then further pre production delays (again, including a loss
of location…and this time the loss of a family member) means this film is still
in production two years after first receiving the grant. However, some
improvised test footage of the landlord puppet, shot in the original location
was put online as “an introduction to.”
Which leads me
to the soul searching as mentioned way back at the beginning of this piece…why
do I continue to work in a medium where the delays are constant and
frustrating? Why do I do what I do? What do I want to do?
The answer seems
to be the first answer I had all those years ago* - I want to write. One of the
factors in encouraging me to return to this avenue is the opportunity to self
publish on digital platforms. A short film, quite simply, can never make its
money back – the best value it can have is as a calling card to take your
career on to the next level where you can begin to make a living…something that
none of mine have ever done and potentially may never will. I’m not naïve
enough to think that I can suddenly waltz in to the world of fiction and make a
living, but even if one book sold 10 copies at £2, that’s more than my short
films have ever got me back. Though some maybe snobbish of the democratization
that digital services provide, I see it no different to recording artists who
record albums at home and then find platforms to help distribute their music –
musicians aren’t seen as any lowlier for self releasing material and I don’t
see why authors should be seen that way either.
I have a
plenty of ideas which were intended for scripts – either shorts or features, or
in the case of Creak and Black Spot they inspired ideas for feature length
sequels, with the short films in a sense providing prologues to the features.
With a short film already in hand, I have a way of promoting any novel with a
film that already exists…or I can utilise my film making “talents” to either
make a short film to promote the novel, or a trailer to promote the novel.
The world of
Goodnight, Halloween was always something I wanted to revisit on a bigger
scale, but I could never figure out how it would work – would it be a feature
length project? Would it be a series? Something with webisode side stories? At
times it felt very sprawling and I could never get a grasp of it to
ham-fistedly shove it into a script form. Writing short films that you intend
to make can actually be a limiting exercise in terms of imagination – at some
point I would have to find a way to get this on screen, so writing meka-orcs
battling forgas on the shimmering rings of Tanar IV was never going to
happen…therefore as a result you self censor and never write such flights of
fantasy. But taken away from the limitations of either my own film making
“scale” or even the constraints of how a film script is supposed work (see the
screenplay writing book Saves The Cat and the formulaic effect it has had on
Western cinema) my imagination can go where it wants.
My first
attempt at being untethered was actually really difficult. Free of the script
framework box to work in, instead of liberating it felt quite bewildering…like
an animal which has been released after years in captivity, it felt like a
tentative exploration of where and when I can go, where thoughts and memories
and recalls can drift across the same paragraph without needing a line break
and new INT or EXT to demarcate the next element. I could hear the words in my
head, yet for some reason they wouldn’t come out…of it they did, they didn’t
sound as it did in my head. My scripts had always been heavily written with
quite detailed descriptions – at times I wanted to make sure any external
reader “got it” with where we were, what was happening, how the characters were
feeling…I always felt it better to overwrite to make the intention clear, then
remove anything too “on the nose” at the shoot or in the edit. My treatments
similarly were quite detailed and didn’t use a script template. Yet for some
reason it wouldn’t come out as novel form and it was a real struggle.
I managed
several chapters of Goodnight, Halloween before my attention shifted to another
project – as it was based on a completed treatment I felt that this was a more
complete picture to work from for my first novel. After quite an enthusiastic
spurt the writing petered out…I have to wonder if writing a cremation scene
around the anniversary of a family member’s cremation was my subconscious not
wanting to go back to that at this moment in time, or at least not right now.
It feels like
I’m in a bit of a limbo place - my film making isn’t over, but at this moment
in time I’m as keen as ever to get these long term projects finished and free
that headspace with the hope of it allowing me to concentrate on these novels,
as I don’t feel I can give them 100% (or any percent) while these films still
remain incomplete…yet the delays in making them could mean it may be another 6
months before I am free of them.
It feels like
I’ve taken a very long circular journey to get back to where I always wanted to
be. Perhaps it will only be a temporary distraction before the film making bug
swoops me back up again. But for now, once I can concentrate all my efforts on
writing novels, I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me.
Date
Bitch
(Mono)(Tone)(Drone)
The Sky Is
Empty
Ansafon
The Crunch
Stranded
Gettin’ Some
Creak
Black Spot
Red/ Cyan - https://vimeo.com/85603481
Stereoscopic -
https://vimeo.com/86361148
Pick-Ups
Meet Frances
- Ironically this game
would receive a sequel with a pretty much reskinned robotic/ metal look
under the name Hard’n’Heavy, changes which seemed to avoid any further
lawsuit action.
- I have since lost this
book and a search online is pretty fruitless as HORROR MOVIES brings up a
gazillion search results. It may not have had such a simplistic title. I’m
sure one day I’ll come across it again, but for now it’s just a memory.
I’ve no idea why I would have got rid of the book, probably not realising
at the time the influence it had on me.
- Irony of ironies, who
would then give a wonderful final performance in Mary Lambert’s adaptation
of Steven King’s Pet Semetery.
- Further irony – Rome
2033: The Fighter Centurions, a film my brother and I had hired out
several times from Huthwaite Video as kids and found UTTERLY BORING
despite the fabulous futuristic centurions cover was pretty much ripped
off for the American “adaptation” of The Running Man…and as I would later
discover, Rome 2033 was directed by Lucio Fulci, one of my new found
Italian heroes.
- Imagine my fury when a
few months later British “comedians” Hale and Pace played
uncharacteristically straight roles in an ITV drama about snuff movies
called, you’ve guessed it, A Pinch Of Snuff
- As I like back on my
imaginary therapist couch I realise there could well be some subconscious
memory of this which has inspired elements of a script Calie and I are
working on together…
- I bring this up every so
often to my friend’s annoyance. It will no doubt come up again many times
in years to come.
- Further reading on the
making of Date can be found here - http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/5-times-for-beginning-making-of-date.html
- Further reading on the
making of (Mono)(Tone)(Drone) can be found here - http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/in-meantime-making-of-monotonedrone.html
- A film I’ve realised I
haven’t mentioned here is Past Present Future, the most awful overly
written late teens going on early 20 life crisis film you could ever come
across. I want to gouge myself in my ears every time I watch it and find
myself screaming at the screen. Ironically there were some nice shots in
it. I’ve joked to myself that should I ever find myself with so much free
time that I don’t know what I’d do with it I’d go back, George Lucas
style, and try to salvage this film for my own curiosity to see if it can
be saved with some scissor happy pruning of the dialogue. But you can read
more about it here - http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/mistakes-have-to-be-made-making-of-past.html
- As a result of this I
joked to my friend that we should make a film about entering the
competition, not getting selected and killing the judges in a fit of rage.
He went and made this film the following year and ironically Here Comes
The Judge WAS selected for screening. C’est la vie.
- Rather than go into them
in detail here, massive comprehensive makings of The Crunch can be found
here http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/
and Stranded can be found here http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/you-might-be-if-you-stick-around-making.html
- The making of Creak can
be read at http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/yoko-spilts-up-band-birth-of-sincerely.html,
http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/whats-that-noise-shooting-of-creak.html
and http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/different-joke-same-fucking-punchline.html
- Pre production of Pick
Ups (a very painful read) can be found here http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/you-will-not-break-me-making-of-pick.html
- Pre and production of
Black Spot can be read here http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/murder-in-hi-viz-making-of-black.html
and http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/murder-in-hi-viz-making-of-black.html
- Actually the first thing
I seriously wanted to do (beyond clichéd childhood dreams of spaceman/
space pilot of a giant intergalactic space craft) was design computer
games, but interestingly all my games were always very story based, rather
than twitch gaming.
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