thelondonfilmschool

[thelondonfilmschool]

“The course at LFS gave me the confidence to go out and write and to get commissioned”

Makalla McPherson, who graduated from MA Screenwriting in 2016, will debut her first play, When the Lights Go Out, at London’s Ovalhouse theatre in March this year. Makalla, who is originally from London but now lives in Kent with her two children, wrote and directed the play after several years as a self-taught director who started out making music videos and progressed to short films and TV drama. Having originally enrolled on the MA Filmmaking program, she transferred to Screenwriting after being ‘blown away’ by one of previous Head of Screenwriting Brian Dunnigan’s lectures. She talked to us about the play’s themes, making the move from screenwriting to theatre, finding the confidence to write and what she learnt from her time at LFS.

Sophie McVeigh: What’s been happening for you since you graduated?

Makalla McPherson: Well, I’ve just done a four-month job for the BBC directing a children’s drama called Apple Tree House which will be txing this summer. Then, I got this commission for my play, so I’ve just been working on redrafting the script because we’re going into rehearsals mid-February.

S.M: Who was the play commissioned by and how did you go about getting the commission?

M.M: The Arts Council and the Ovalhouse theatre. I approached Ovalhouse initially about the play. They read it and got back to me and said they were interested and would support me getting funding through the Arts Council. They also provide a lot of in-kind support so it was an amalgamation of both the Arts Council and Ovalhouse.

 S.M: How did you approach writing a play rather than a screenplay?

 M.M: Ultimately, I just believe you’re creating characters and I think the principals are all the same when it comes to story and characters. The format’s different because you’re talking about stage versus screen. I read some plays and I read a lot about plays, and then I just decided to write my own. 

S.M: What is When the Lights Go Out about?

M: It’s about a father and son – a son who wants to live his own independent life, a son that’s done everything right. He’s been to school, college and university, got all good grades, ticked all the boxes, but yet struggles to find work and find his place and identity in society. It’s exploring connection and communication. The son is just your typical person trying to move out of the parent’s house and find his feet. Then you’ve got the father, who has immigrated from the Caribbean and now wants to go back, but he’s brought up his son on his own and is worried about leaving him here in London. So, it’s a play about two men that live together and have grown up together, but yet they can’t connect, they can’t talk. Their perceptions of the world are different. And through Nathan, the son’s struggle to find his identity, he ends up having a breakdown. I was very much interested in exploring mental health within black men. That was one of the triggers for me with writing this play and the main theme that goes across it. I know quite a few men who have suffered and I wanted to know why. From my research, a lot of mental health problems in the black community, especially with men, is because they feel oppressed in a white man’s society. Whether that’s schooling, policing, education, work, housing … It could be a number of things. I wanted to explore that, but also it looks at generational differences, because the dad is almost 60 and the son’s 28. They come from completely different mindsets and have different generational perceptions of life. There’s also a bit of poetry, which was the way that I interpreted the son’s psychosis. It’s a play about people, ultimately, which hopefully covers a little bit of humour, sorrow and reality.

S.M: What did you gain from your time at LFS that helped you?

M.M: The confidence to write, because that’s something I was lacking massively. I’ve got dyslexia and I always liked writing, but it’s never something I’ve had the confidence to do. I thought, “That’s not me, I’m no Stephen King, I’ll leave that to the professionals.” But I do like creating stories as a director, and I have loads of stories going on in my head, so I think what that course did for me is to make me believe that I could do it and give it a go. I mean, I’m 11 drafts into this script and I started writing it as soon as I finished the course, so it’s been more than a year. And I think just learning how to create stories and characters. Even just the basics – the three-act structure, that sort of thing. And knowing that your first draft is not supposed to be a masterpiece. Before, I never would have got to 11 drafts. I probably would have just started the first few pages and given up. So, I think just knowing that masterpieces don’t come from one draft, that they are work. Even the best of writers rewrite, and like they say, writing is rewriting. It was Brian’s course at LFS that gave me the confidence to go out and write, and I’ve managed to get it commissioned. So, even if I never write again. I’ll thank LFS for that!

 S.M: What’s coming up next for you?

 M.M: In an ideal world we want to take the play to other theatre houses – bigger ones, as well. Only time will tell as to whether that’s going to be possible, but it’s nice to know, when you’re stuck in a room scrutinising your work that you’ve actually had the opportunity to have people come out and see it. I’ve got another play in my head, and a short film, so we’ll see whether those materialise! I’ve often pondered whether I’ll go back to my feature script that I wrote at LFS. Also, obviously, I direct, so finding my next directing job. I’ve got some meetings in the New Year. So, watch this space.

 S.M: When is the play released?

 M.M: March 1st, 2nd and 3rd at Ovalhouse theatre. Come down and check it out! The best £5 you’ll ever spend.

#london #screenwriting #playwright #play #film school #film #lfs #london film school

[thelondonfilmschool]

“I know that I’ve got a purpose on this Earth and I’m being used to fulfil it”

Ghanaian in origin, born in Ivory Coast and brought up in London, filmmaker and London Calling Plus winner Koby Adom ended up at London Film School after a chance series of events brought about by a single tweet. He talks to Sophie McVeigh about representing the worlds he comes from, avoiding categorisation and how LFS changed his life.

Sophie McVeigh: When did you graduate from London Film School?

Koby Adom: I graduated last July with my short House Girl. It’s set in Accra, Ghana, where I’m originally from, and it’s a story of a girl from the UK going home to Ghana for the first time. She experiences a “house girl”, and what that is, which is a young female domestic worker, like a maid. In Ghana, in some households, the treatment isn’t the nicest - it’s almost borderline slavery. So, I’m exploring that modern-day slavery theme and the African diaspora as well. This is obviously a global issue, but I’m tackling the topic using Ghana because that’s where I’m from. I’d like to encourage fellow Ghanaians to lead the way in tackling this issue, and then begin a chain reaction globally.

S.M: How did that relate to your background?

K.A: I was actually born in Ivory Coast, which is next to Ghana on the coast of West Africa because my dad was working there. I’m 27 and I’ve probably lived in Ghana for about a year and a half in my life. The majority of the time, my upbringing was here in London. I moved quite a lot until I got to about eight, but from 1998 forwards it was strict London.

S.M: What inspired the film and made you want to write it? Had you experienced anything similar with the culture shock of going back home?

K.A: Definitely, the culture shock was a definite factor. One thing I did know was that I wanted to shoot my graduation film in Ghana. When I was in 2nd, 3rd and 4th term, I was watching all these international students making their films back home in some beautiful landscapes, and I thought “Well, I’m not going back to my block to go shoot a film that everyone’s seen before!” (laughs) I wanted a different landscape, and I hadn’t been to Ghana at this point since about ’98, so 15 years. I remember, I went to Ghana in my second year of LFS just to look around and see what it was. I lived there, like I said, when I was younger, but it’s different now. It’s very modern, very westernised, which I didn’t know. So, I went there and reconnected with the land itself. It’s just a beautiful place and I made up my mind that I was definitely shooting in this country. The story itself came from something my mum told me, which was quite a dated account, and to be fair I didn’t stick to what actually happened. I know the full story, which I’m planning to make into a feature, but I just got a really small narrative from that to make a short. It was more of an exploration of the situation. I wanted to show people Ghana, and show them the topic. I wanted people to have more of an education on that matter and make up their own mind.

S.M: What’s the reception been like to the film and how has the festival circuit gone?

K.A: It’s been so good. It got into the London Short Film Festival, and a really cool festival in Nigeria called the Africa International Film Festival, and that was a big celebration of film. They put me into a really nice hotel and there was a closing ceremony with dancing and singing and glamour! It screened on four different continents. With festivals it can be about what boxes you tick as well as how good the film is, so I took it as a compliment that I got into some good festivals but not as many as I anticipated, simply because I’ve made a film that no one can categorise. And I love that! It’s not an African film that’s just based on the suffering of Africans. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in going to a place and complaining, you know? Obviously, the film is quite dark in parts, but there are parts where we show how beautiful Ghana is, there are some jokes as well. The auntie whose house we go to lives in a big house, bigger than anyone’s from my area in London. There is that side in Ghana, there are affluent societies. Don’t get me wrong, poverty is there. In Accra, the capital city, you see little kids hawking on the road, but I like to give a complete account of things. I feel like, in the main stream, a lot of people like to give very one-sided accounts of things, and it’s very frustrating when you’re from that background and you know there are so many more layers to offer.

S.M: Do you think that affected how it was received, because people were expecting to see a different story?

K.A: For sure. It was definitely a revelation for people. That’s feedback that I got quite lot – people said they’d learnt so much. Not solely based on the fact that Ghana’s not just poor people, but more the story itself – to understand that this actually goes on in 2017. There’s a class system in Ghana, and rich people can treat the poor people even worse than what you’ve experienced in your own country. It’s an interesting thing to examine, but I have to underline that the film isn’t saying that Ghana’s all like that. It’s just showing that that is there. Not all stories about black people are about slavery or gangsters. I’m from an area of London where you’d expect everyone to end up in jail, whereas I’ve got a friend who is doing extremely well in the corporate world and making a lot of money, I know people doing insanely well in the music industry, I know people in film from my area doing big, big things. People do really well in these areas, and let’s try and celebrate the people who make the right decisions as well, rather than focusing on the people who don’t and making it seem like if you go to these areas someone’s gonna come and stab you. It’s not the case!

S.M: Can you tell me a bit about London Calling Plus, which you’ve just been awarded?

K.A: London Calling is a scheme under Film London – they’ve got London Calling and London Calling Plus. It’s for emerging filmmakers who have some footprint in the industry and have got something to show for their career, to push them into a more professional surrounding. It’s almost like the next step in your career to making you the next best thing! A leg up with money, with crew, in terms of people watching your film, you have a spotlight. London Calling Plus is for Black and Ethnic Minority (BAME) filmmakers. You submit a treatment or script for the idea that you want to make with Film London and you have to write a director’s statement. And then you have to say who your team is. The producer I’m working with, Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, who produced House Girl as well, submitted the script to Film London and we got shortlisted. The film we’ll be making is called Haircut and, like with House Girl, I’m examining something which I think is known to the masses in a one-sided way. I’m going in again with the camera and I’m gonna give you a full picture of what goes on. It’s set in an Afro-Caribbean barber shop in South East London, and it’s basically exploring what the barbershop is in such communities. They’re not just a barbershop, they’re so iconic. People go there to socialise, for therapy, for all sorts of reasons, not just to cut your hair. So much happens there and there’s so much conflict. I decided to choose something that may happen in a typical South-East London barbershop. The logline is “A middle aged barber has to keep the situation calm when a desperate teenaged drug-dealer holds up the shop at gunpoint.” It explores motives, and it adds the story behind what happened, rather than reading the news and seeing a black kid and thinking that he’s the devil himself. That just doesn’t help anyone. I’m not justifying it, but let’s offer human accounts. How do we stop these things from happening rather than demonising people? I’m from that background, I’ve seen it first hand and I know people personally that have made good and bad decisions and I’ve seen the results. We need to start taking people’s situations into account. PTSD is a huge thing in such communities. You can’t imagine what people go through, on a psychological and emotional level, to the point where they’re so vulnerable now, that that vulnerability is covered up with violence. The system is really difficult. If you come from nothing, to get out of nothing is enough to send you crazy. At the end of the day, I’m from that kind of background and I’ve gone to London Film School, but it’s because I’ve always been someone who looks for opportunities. I’m a Christian, and I feel like that’s got a big part to play in it, because God has led me to the right place at the right time. When I came to the London Film School I saw a whole new world that I was interested in, and some of what I came from had no interest for me. Slowly but surely, I started letting go of some of the negative interests which came with my neighbourhood, and that allowed me to learn new things in my new environment. I love the area that I grew up in, and it will always be my home, but I also want to explore different things, meet new people, dress differently, go to different places. I guess, if more people had that knowledge and support, and it wasn’t so difficult to leave behind the bad decisions and come to good ones, then more people would. So, what am I doing with Haircut? I’m going to these people and I’m taking a camera there with me, and I’m showing you an example of someone from such an area and what he has to deal with. I understand the slots that films like this can be put in, you can call it a hood film, call it what you like. But at the end of the day, the story’s not about the gun.  

S.M: How are you casting it?

K.A: I’ve got a really good casting director, Isabella Odoffin, who my producer put me in touch with. She’s casted for films like Pan, '71, etc. We’re using half and half, professional and non-professional actors. I’ve chosen somebody for the protagonist already but I’m not gonna give it away! We’re looking at some very talented up-and-coming black actors. The one thing that I like about this project, as a whole, is that it’s a black story told by black people. I’ve got a mixed crew as well, but it’s about that visibility – black people making black films, telling our stories.

S.M: What led you to study at LFS?

K.A: I went to university straight away - in terms of education, I’ve always been on time! I graduated from Brunel in 2011, where I studied Communication and Media. At college, that’s when I really started editing and shooting and stuff and I really loved it. It was a whole different world to me, it kept me out of trouble and it had all my focus. That was all I wanted to do. At Brunel, it turned out there weren’t many modules to do with film, so I invested in a DSLR and I started taking pictures and using it for video as well. I started shooting commercials and music videos, doing that kind of stuff. And then … I wanted to know my purpose. I’ve always wanted to know what my purpose on Earth was, so I really explored myself quite a lot. I was a DOP at that stage and I was reading a book on film lighting, training myself. There was a quote in the book from Alan Daviau, who shot E.T, and I quoted it on Twitter. Then, some people called Master’s POV - which is a conference in LA - tweeted me back and said, “Alan Daviau’s gonna be here in January, you should come!” I thought that was some sort of sign. I didn’t @ anybody, but they found me. I told my dad I wanted to go, and he helped me out with some money. I went by myself and that was the turning point for me. I met huge people – Robbie Greenberg, who shot Free Willy, I met Alan Daviau … But the big person that I met, for me, was a guy called Karl Walter Lindenlaub. He’s a German DOP, and I asked him, “This whole film world, I’m learning so much and I want to be a part of it. Do I have to come to LA?” He asked where I was from. I was one of the only black people there, and I was from London, so I stuck out like a sore thumb. He said, “London is the film hub of Europe. You live in the film capital of Europe – so start there. Don’t go running anywhere. Apply for film school.” I didn’t have a clue about it, so I came back and Googled ‘Film Schools in London’ and the London Film School came up! I looked at the website and my soul just took to it straight away. I didn’t want to go anywhere else. I didn’t even bother applying anywhere else. You had to write a three-minute script, so I wrote a script called 3 Minutes, about the last three minutes on Earth. I’d never written a script at that stage, but I applied and I got in.

S.M: What did you get out of your time at London Film School?

K.A: It changed my life. It turned it upside down. You go in thinking you know everything, and then you realise you don’t know anything. It taught me to let go of what I think I know, even in my general life. I made a documentary, the first thing I ever directed, Deborah’s Letter, in the 3rd term. When we were getting the end of term crits, I was listening to the tutor give feedback and I thought, “You don’t know my sister!” (because it was about her). But he made such good points, and what he told me in third term has carried me through everything I’ve made since. “When you watch films you look at the information on the screen, not what they say, but what they do - the data that they’re giving you, that you’re observing yourself and that relates to you.” That helped me to cut things out that I thought had to be there just because I’d shot it - to tear things down and streamline it. That helped me with my grad film, it’s helping me now with Haircut. And LFS is based on that – putting that foundation in you so that you’re so confident when it comes to filmmaking that you can just focus on being creative. You know how to make a film with your eyes closed. They put you through your paces, and every term is intense. You learn really quickly, and you’re actually making films, over and over again until you know what to do without thinking. It’s an inclusive course, as well – I’ve done sound, I DOP’d, I camera operated, I directed. You learn everything, and you meet some great people while you’re there that give you great advice. The teachers are people that have been there and done it, so they give you that confidence. LFS has made me the filmmaker that I am right now.

S.M: Did you work with other LFS students on House Girl?

K.A: My DOP was Mark Kuczewski, who was in my class. The co-producer was Aegina Brahim, the editor was Julian Smith. We all started LFS together and it was really cool going to Ghana with them and showing them “my country”, in inverted commas because I was kind of a stranger myself. But it was really cool getting them involved.

S.M: Your films cover quite diverse issues, such as disability, spirituality, class, sexual and domestic abuse, but you seem to mainly tell them from a female perspective. Is there a reason for that?

K.A: I connect with women really easily, simply because I grew up living with my mum and my two sisters, so I was always around women. I live with my dad now, and my dad’s always been around, but growing up the only time I was around males was when I went out with my friends or my dad. Predominantly it was just women, so maybe I listened to their stories and wanted to put that on screen. I don’t think that was on purpose, but the type of subject matter was, for sure. I always wanted to do social commentary and say something about society – to shine a light on these things that people hear about but don’t know about. Let me share some knowledge!

S.M: So, what’s next for you? Will the support from Film London allow you to work full time on developing Haircut?

K.A: There’s not really money to pay myself, so I’m still balancing life. I’m a Christian and I base everything I do on that. I wake up in the morning and somehow I get fed – I don’t know how but it happens! I know that I’ve got a purpose on this Earth and I’m being used to fulfil it, so I’m totally comfortable. I don’t look at all the stresses, I don’t look at the difficulties. I ignore those things because I know that, when push comes to shove, there’s a lot of glory to come. Off the back of Film London and Haircut I’m working on a feature film as well, that’s been developed through a scheme called Modern Tales, which is so cool. I’m developing my feature with them, and they literally just take apart the idea and then piece it back together. It puts your product in a place where you’re ready to go to investors and ask for some money. I’ve got the confidence now to pitch it – you definitely have to mention Modern Tales, that changed my life as well, man! (laughs) I had an industry day with them last week and we were pitching our ideas to some really big execs. It puts us straight in front of the people that matter, which is amazing. It’s such a good opportunity, just to be there and see it and know how it feels. The feature explores similar themes to Haircut – it’s not a proof of concept, exactly, but it’s exploring the themes that I’m going to transfer into the feature. So, next year, fingers crossed, a feature and a short. That’s my aim. I know it’s very ambitious, but I’ve always been ambitious. I went to shoot a film in Ghana, you know? Everything else is easy! (laughs)

Watch House Girl and Koby’s other work at: https://www.kobyadom.com/

#film #koby adom #housegirl #filmmaker #filmmaking #london #londonfilmschool

[thelondonfilmschool]

LFS provided the creative environment and network of mentors and peers who helped me find my voice, and taught me to trust it.

Monica Santis graduated from the London Film School in 2016, and her graduation film ‘Hacia el Sol’ (Towards the Sun) is currently touring the festival circuit, the highlight of which has been a double win in her home town at the Academy award-qualifying Austin Film Festival. Following a recent screening and nomination for Best Editing at London’s Underwire Festival, we caught up with Monica while she was back in town to talk about making a film about unaccompanied migrants in Trump’s America, why we need festivals like Underwire now more than ever, and what it’s like when your producer is also your Mum …

Sophie McVeigh: Could you explain the story behind Hacia el Sol?

Monica Santis: It’s about a 12-year-old girl named Esmerelda who has recently been placed at a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children in Texas, and the film is about how she reclaims her voice through her artwork in the midst of the looming threat of deportation. She’s gone through a very traumatic border crossing and we see her confront her scarring past and take the first steps towards healing. She’s a girl whose voice has been silenced by violence, so she doesn’t open up because she’s traumatized. This was my graduation film, shot in Austin, my home town, and I got to work with a fantastic local cast and crew, and I brought several key LFS crew members because I love them and we work really well together, so I wanted them to be a part of this journey with me. My first AD was Andres Salas who is extremely hardworking, talented, and so positive. He has a great attitude, so I knew he would take on the challenge of running a set with up to 100 extras at one time! I’ve got to give a major thanks and congrats to the entire production team for working hard to coordinate that scale of a shoot. My DOP was Zeta Spyraki, and she was so grounded, disciplined, and creative. It was so special to work with a strong woman; Zeta is a true leader and artist and I loved collaborating with her.  The film’s camera operator was the wonderful Mark Kuczewski, who directed ‘Happy Anniversary’, the first AC was Stephen Glass, the gaffer was Sebastián Lojo and the sound recordist was Heikki Simppula … so all phenomenal filmmakers. I was truly blessed to have a lot of talented fellow LFS students/friends there! I co-wrote the script with Elie Choufany, who is an alum of the LFS Screenwriting program (Cohort 9). We met my first year at LFS, and we just clicked and became really good friends and collaborators. We had worked together on several LFS course exercises, so we had developed a good working relationship and I admire him as a writer. I was so lucky to work with a cast and crew who poured their heart into this film.

S.M: What inspired the story and why did you want to make it?

M.S: In 2015, I visited a shelter for unaccompanied minors who had been placed there after being detained by border patrol on the United States-Mexico border. I went with an organization that runs shelters throughout Texas/Arizona—their aim is to reunify kids with their family members in the USA and provide humanitarian services. The shelter supplies housing, educational courses, legal representation, medical attention and emotional support. Their goal is to provide a home-like environment. I was moved by the sense of community and support from both children and adults. The majority of the kids are fleeing violence in their home countries and are desperately trying to reunify with family in the USA and seek refuge. As I sat and spoke with kids and shelter staff, I was particularly moved by stories about healing. A majority of children had survived an extremely traumatic border crossing and encountered violence and abuse along the perilous way. It broke my heart and motivated me to write this story; what I observed truly stirred me into action. I observed how a lot of children were in limbo as they waited - waiting to see what the uncertain future holds for them, waiting to hear from family, waiting for good news, waiting and anticipating bad news. I wanted to explore the point of view of a girl who had recently arrived, and I wanted to take the audience on an emotional journey with her as she takes her first steps towards integration and healing---in doing so, I wanted to humanize and create compassion around the immigration debate, which is being heavily politicized in the US. I wanted to shed light on a resilient community of children who deserve our support and deserve to feel safe.

S.M: What made you choose art as a way to tell Esmerelda’s story?

M.S: I remember walking through one of the shelters, and I thought that it would look bleak like the horrible detention centers that I’ve seen in the media. But it didn’t. It popped with color. There were murals, decorations and artwork that kids had drawn adorning the walls. I paused and looked at a drawing that caught my eye - a ten-year-old girl had drawn a beautiful, colorful hummingbird and she had written ‘May joy find you wherever you are.’ And I thought, my God, in the midst of all of this, all the struggle, the fear about an unknown future, this girl had drawn something really beautiful and hopeful. I thought, where is she now? What’s her story? Is she ok? I hope she’s safe, I thought. As I observed and connected with staff at the shelter, they told me heartbreaking stories of kids enduring physical and emotional abuse, of survival and facing death, of kids almost dying in the desert, running away from human traffickers, and crossing the border alone which appears in the film at one point in the drawing reveal sequence. We incorporated these details into the story. Since film is a powerful visual medium, I thought the drawing process would be therapeutic for Esmeralda’s initially withdrawn character, and that the drawings could speak for her.

S.M: Had you started working on the film before the current administration came into power, and do you think it’s had more resonance with audiences as a result of Trump’s presidency?

M.S: Story development and principle shooting took place during the Obama administration, but as we entered post production, and as the election fervor was gathering momentum, yes, I changed my approach because of Trump’s anti-immigrant, racist campaign rhetoric. I thought, should I discuss deportation very directly? Do we call out the monster or do we examine that in a more subtle way? But then I decided to insert the word ‘deportation’ in post because I saw that Trump was probably going to be the next president. To clarify, the Obama administration deported thousands of people, but Trump has run a campaign that cruelly depicts immigrants as the ‘other’, ‘the rapists’, ’the bad hombres’, and he has used that fear to stir up his supporter base. It’s a scary time in the US for undocumented kids/families, and I remember sitting with James Hynes, the film’s sound designer, and we just looked at one another somberly and said ‘yep, the word deportation needs to be included because it’s a palpable fear now that’s going to get worse’. In the festival circuit, during Q and As, we’ve had really good discussions where people are genuinely distraught and had no idea that thousands of kids were fleeing violence at immigration shelters. Generating this discussion about immigration is important because we’re talking about vulnerable kids, so actively creating awareness, compassion and understanding has become more crucial than ever now.

S.M: Was this your mom’s first time producing?

M.S: She had helped me produce a couple other smaller scale short films – as an independent filmmaker, you can’t help but get everyone you know on board in some capacity! (laughs) So, she had helped before and she’s a strong business woman; she’s CEO of a company, so she’s very on it! Those management and leadership skills came into great use, and she deeply cares about the kids at the shelters and knows the topic well, so she was outstanding. We learned a lot together throughout the process. I think she finally understands why I would be exhausted at the end of every shoot (laughs). She was super-Mom, always making sure plenty of food was provided and she recruited a huge amount of extras so I was really impressed. She did a really amazing job, especially for her first big producing role. I love my mom, she’s the best.

S.M: Has she been on the festival circuit with you?

M.S: She’s extremely busy, but we went to the Austin Film Festival screenings together which was great and a very moving experience for both of us. Zeta, Elie, and I got to attend the world premiere at Palm Springs ShortFest together which was truly awesome and memorable. Elie then flew in for the Austin Film Festival. Karen Garcia Cruz, the phenomenal leading actress, and her sister, the super talented Daniela Garcia Cruz, who plays Maria the new girl, got to watch the film with their whole family and with a full house at AFF. The screening was sold out, so that was a special day for all of us. We won the Jury Award for Narrative Student Short and the Hiscox Audience Award for Narrative Student Short at AFF. We won twice which was amazing – the best a student film could hope to do there. It means that people truly connected with Esmeralda’s story, and I am so grateful to the AFF jury, programmers, and audiences that supported us. What a surreal and truly wonderful experience. I’m so proud of our team.

S.M: Did it mean even more considering it’s your home town?

M.S: Yes! My heart was just so full. My passion for film grew there. The Austin film community helped develop my creativity, and to win at AFF was such an honour. I used to go to their screenings and dream about being a part of it someday. ‘Towards the Sun’ is still on the festival circuit now. We just got into another really great festival that I can’t announce yet! We still have a couple to hear back from, so stay tuned - some that are in US border states, which I’d love to screen at since I feel like audiences would particularly understand and connect with the story. I’d really like to be there to generate discussion and help create awareness about the plight of unaccompanied minors, so fingers crossed.

S.M: Could you tell me a bit about your background before you ended up at London Film School?

M.S: I’m first generation in the States, so my mom immigrated from Peru and my dad immigrated from Chile. I’m proud of my South American roots, and I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. I worked at the Austin Film School for several years as the Director of Outreach and it further sparked my passion for filmmaking. While I was there I helped develop the Cine Joven: Filmmaking in Spanish program for young filmmakers. I met a lot of talented kids, and I’ve always been an advocate for children’s rights so after working with them, I followed that interest and my interest in US-Latin America international policy and decided to attend The George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs to get my Masters in Latin American & Hemispheric studies, focusing on anthropology, sociology and history. My thesis capstone project had to do with researching/creating awareness about human/child trafficking in Puerto Rico. I went into it thinking I might want to go work for the State Department or Unicef, and I respect everyone who went that route, but then I missed writing creatively. I watched a lot of documentaries about human rights while I was at GW, and I realized how powerful films are and I wanted to make an impact that way.  So, I went back to filmmaking and joined the Documentary Film Institute at George Washington University. I learned a great deal there, and I’m still in touch with peers and the amazing mentors who jumpstarted my return to filmmaking. From there I thought I really needed to catch up and get more technical training because I was making a big career change.  So, while I was visiting a friend in London, I immediately fell in love with the creative energy of the city, so I started researching film schools and found LFS. I loved LFS’s mission, and I highly respected the filmmakers that have come out of LFS, so I applied and was so happy to get in. I really liked this idea of organically finding your voice, getting to try out different roles and shooting on film stock.  So I thought, ok, let me give this a whirl. It was the best decision I’ve ever made because the amount of personal and creative growth I experienced during my time at LFS was just amazing.

S.M: How did you find adapting to life in London, coming from sunny Texas?

M.S: It’s a little drearier, obviously, but I didn’t mind it! I did miss my family, but thankfully I was able to make friends quickly. I openly embraced London, and I really loved the creative, bustling lifestyle here. I felt an instant click from the moment I landed, and I miss the film community here obviously, hence why I try to come back so often!

S.M: What’s the most important thing you learnt at LFS?

M.S: LFS provided the creative environment and network of mentors and peers who helped me find my voice, and it taught me to trust that voice. It brought out a confidence in me, towards the end there especially, that I didn’t know I had and that I was searching for.  Being supported by teachers and peers that love the craft as much as I do created a strong sense of community to collaborate and grow with. I loved analyzing and being exposed to new films, styles, techniques.  As a result, I was able to expand my mind, really open my heart and put it into the work. That invaluable network of storytellers/collaborators continues to inspire me, and I truly cherish the LFS community.

S.M: Your background has obviously had a lot of influence on the kind of stories you want to tell, but did you find that the people you met at LFS also had an impact on how you tell them?

M.S: Yes, I was constantly learning from my teachers and peers. I loved the fact that LFS is so international, and I wanted to meet people with different perspectives and different backgrounds but with a similar passion for filmmaking. I wanted to meet and learn from fellow story tellers from all over the world. That was a big selling point for me and why I chose to apply to LFS, because I value diversity. I found it incredibly enriching.  

S.M: You’ve recently screened Hacia el Sol at Underwire in London, which is a festival that promotes the work of female filmmakers. Do you think it’s even more important, given the current climate, that we have these kinds of festivals?

M.S: Yes, definitely. The patriarchy is real and we gotta take it down! The industry is extremely unequal, and women have been systemically undervalued and denied the same opportunities that men get; women deserve representation and to have their voices amplified. At the opening screening at Underwire, I heard someone say something to the effect that, as a woman, it’s important to remember that you have a right to claim your space in the filmmaking industry. To be honest, I got chills. It was a good reminder that we don’t have to make ourselves small, we can claim that space and demand respect. I felt such a surge of empowerment, and I felt so happy that Underwire exists, because they’re creating a space to recognise, support, encourage and celebrate female filmmakers. By the way, we need more female directors and DPs! It was so inspiring to be at festival screenings with up to 80% women in attendance; I felt so honored to be in solidarity with such talented women. When there’s an unequal power dynamic and when abusive men like Harvey Weinstein exist, I believe festivals like Underwire are crucial in helping bridge that inequality gap and creating a safe space for women to learn and grow.

S.M: Do you think that had an influence on the atmosphere at the festival, coming so soon after what’s been happening in Hollywood?

M.S: I think it must have. This was my first time at Underwire so I can’t compare, but I felt that beautiful feminist warrior spirit in full force. In line with the #metoo movement, there were a lot of women fearlessly speaking their truths and sharing their stories on screen. One of the filmmakers at the festival noted how it’s important for women to feel more empowered to just express themselves freely, not be perfectionists as society has conditioned many to be, and just say what you’ve got to say! That spirit of speaking your truth and being your authentic self was really shining through at screenings and in discussions.

S.M: What are you working on at the moment?

M.S: Right now, I’m working on a short script from a similar world to Towards the Sun, so another kid’s perspective in a shelter. And then I’m slowly developing the idea of a feature length story within that world, about unaccompanied minors. That’s in early stages of development, and otherwise I freelance edit. I edited a short documentary that’s currently in the festival circuit called ‘An Uncertain Future’, which was directed by Chelsea Hernandez and Iliana Sosa, produced by Firelight Media and Field of Vision, which is Laura Poitras’s production company. So that was a really cool experience as an editor, to be getting notes from Laura Poitras! I learned a lot!

S.M: Was editing a skill you learnt at LFS?

M.S: I began learning on Final Cut Pro at the GW Documentary Film Institute. LFS gave me many opportunities to edit, and I learned a great deal from the amazing teachers in the editing department. I edited in terms one through three, but I learned the most in term 3 when I edited ‘How We Are Now’, directed by Andrea Niada.  Since there’s so much footage to work with in documentary, the editing process was a true lesson in how to craft the story through the edit.  

S.M: What’s your process as a writer? How do you balance your work and your time to be creative?

M.S: I’m actually in the writing process right now. It can be tricky to fit everything in, so I make sure to write something every day, whether that’s a line or a scene. I try to make sure I keep the inspiration flowing, because writers’ block can happen so easily! I aim to find that kernel of inspiration and make sure that I’m constantly reminding myself why I’m telling a certain story. When things get hard, I remind myself what the heart of the story is and that motivates me to keep going.

 Keep up with Hacia el Sol’s progress on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HaciaElSolFilm/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/HaciaElSolFilm and watch the trailer: https://vimeo.com/226004442

#london londonfilm school film femalefilmmaker monicasantis

[thelondonfilmschool]

“LFS is just this mixture of people that brings this energy which holds in its center cinema itself” - Jiajun (Oscar) Zhang

Jiajun (Oscar) Zhang (above third left) graduated from the MAF program this year and has recently taken part in the Asian Film Academy, which takes place every year in Busan in South Korea.

AFA, similar to the Berlinale Talent Campus and Serial Eyes programmes, is “an educational program hosted by Busan International Film Festival, Busan Film Commission and GKL Foundation to foster young Asian talents and build their networks throughout Asia.” Over the past 12 years, 289 alumni from 31 countries have taken part, along with world-renowned directors such as Béla Tarr, Jia Zhangke, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Lee Chang Dong, participating in a program which includes short film production, workshops and special lectures. The two short films completed by attendees are then officially presented at the Busan International Film Festival. 

We spoke to Oscar having just completed the programme to find out how he found his way to London Film School, what he learnt from his time here and at AFA, and where he’s headed to next…

Sophie McVeigh: Could you tell me a little bit about your background before coming to LFS?

Oscar Zhang: I was born in China, in Shanghai. It’s a big city and I was interested in cinema since I was 14,15 years old. As a lonely teenager I naturally got drawn into cinema, like a lot of us! Then I studied at university, a media subject, and I started making short films at that point. That got me started... travelling to small festivals around the world, and I thought, wow, this is really a career that I could do. After that I started working as a commercial director, to make a living for about two years. I got really tired of it, so I thought maybe it was time to stop. By that time, I was working with a bunch of guys who had studied in London and came back to China, and they told me there was a good film school called the London Film School. They said if I wanted a change of atmosphere I should consider going there.

S.M: What made you want to come to Britain, over say the US or schools in Asia?

O.Z: I guess because a lot of my friends, they’d graduated from UK universities and they came back and worked in the industry. I was living with a bunch of older boys at the age of 18, 19, and they were telling me about life in the UK every day, so it seemed natural for me to go there.

S.M: How did you find adapting to life in London when you first arrived?

O.Z: It’s super different to Shanghai, the system and how everything works, and my English wasn’t perfect when I arrived. I couldn’t understand all of the classes at first. That’s what I most regret because I realised the stuff I missed could have been very important! But later on, it got better and better and I started to get the most out of it, lecture-wise and making friends.

S.M: Did you always want to specialise in directing?

O.Z: So, at LFS we have six terms and we make films each term, but you have to pitch to be a director. I was kind of lucky, I did five times directing out of six terms. I think I optimised my chances in school as a director! So, I think I can call myself a major in directing (laughs). I was always writing my own scripts too for all those terms.

S.M: Can you tell us a bit about your graduation film, which has been chosen to screen in the Showcase in December?

O.Z: It’s a film that’s actually inspired by one of my colleagues in my class. She’s from Taiwan and she’d been living in Shanghai all her life. The political situation between Taiwan and mainland China is kind of sensitive. There’s actually 800,000 immigrants in my city but they don’t have a proper identity. So, what I heard from this girl, she was complaining to me one day as we were walking in Covent Garden, just chatting. She said, “I don’t know what to do when I go back to China, because I grew up there, but they don’t really want me for any jobs when they see my identity as a Taiwanese. It’s hard for me to get a working certificate, but if I go back to Taipei I don’t have any friends there so it’s gonna be hard as well. I’m really in a state of limbo.” That inspired me to make a film focused on a character like that. So, my main character is a teenage Taiwanese girl working in Shanghai. She’s living with her family and there’s an emotional story around the relationship between her, a teacher and a younger boy. This was the film I submitted to get accepted to the AFA (Asian Film Academy).

S.M: Can you tell us a bit more about that?

O.Z: It’s a selective group that takes part for one month and it’s like a platform. You have the most prestigious directors in Asia. All the candidates are from Asian countries, it’s one or two candidates from each country, and they select 24 people and you make two short films there and attend a bunch of lectures. They will be in this sort of Busan Film Festival family from that moment, so you get to be part of it and to submit your film later. There’s also a pitching session to pitch our first feature script idea. Luckily, I got the first prize for that so they’re sending me to LA next year for further pitches to producers and stuff like that. The film I pitched was one of the ideas that I submitted with my application to LFS. It was an idea that had been in my head for a long time which focuses on contemporary Chinese society issues. One thing I liked the most about the experience was that it’s this dream like place, that gathers all the filmmakers from across the region. And the moment you leave the platform after spending almost a month with all these people sharing the same kind of dream… at one point, I felt like all of these people had been like a family before, you know - a filmmakers’ family just like the people I met at LFS. We belonged to the same unknown planet, and were sent to this world to create something. But then, after we die or before we were born, we would be always together, as a family, and we would meet each other in that place after death, a place that belongs to all worthy filmmakers. That’s the kind of crazy dream idea I got after this emotional experience there!

S[4] .M: Are the issues in contemporary Chinese society something that you’re focusing on at the moment in your filmmaking?

O.Z: Yeah, in a way I am doing that. But, at the same time, as I look at all the films that I’ve done, including the ones at LFS, I realise that most of them aren’t really about social issues that much. They are in the background, but I was mainly interested in relationships between people rather than the hardcore social issues.

S.M: What did you like about living in London?

O.Z: It was just party after party (laughs). I met a lot of people that I thought were strange at first, in terms of my culture, but as it went on I realised they were very interesting and inspiring. Not just people from Britain, actually, I was influenced by people from all over the world. It’s just this mixture of people that brings this energy which holds in its centre cinema itself. This kind of turned me into a hardcore cinephile! That was the most life-changing event that’s ever happened to me. And the BFI (British Film Institute) as well. The BFI is the place me and my cohort mostly slept (laughs). We went there very early in the morning and we came out after the last screening finished, when we didn’t have classes. You don’t have to buy tickets, it’s free. Me and my colleague actually collected the tickets and there were hundreds of them. I think we made our school fees back! The films they screened there were invaluable.

S.M: What was the most important thing that LFS taught you?

O.Z: I think I’d divide it into two parts. The tutors that I encountered were two or three of the most important in my life. They were there back in the day of the early British film movement. Their experience, their knowledge, the insights they gave me – they gave me a lot, and they opened me up, to put it simply. For example, one of the tutors would show Westerns films, like the films of John Ford that I would never have touched because Westerns are nothing to do with my culture, I was super not interested in Westerns! But he analysed the film and the way he turned it into a useful strategy for us to learn as directors was just very precious for me. The tutors were great. The other part is that I learnt the most from my colleagues at the school. I had the luck to have the best cohort I’ve ever seen! We were a big bunch, 36 or something of us from 30 different countries, but strangely we bonded very well together. They were all very passionate people. We would go for drinks and not stop talking about film. When we graduated some of us were still working together and making films together. After leaving I’ve visited three different countries to meet LFS colleagues. I guess I learnt my life’s lesson from these people.

S.M: Do you think that international influence has had an effect on your filmmaking?

O.Z: Absolutely. One of my colleagues, Keenen and I were talking about what the next wave is going to be – you know there was French New Wave, Italian Neo-Realism, all this. So, we were thinking, what’s gonna be the next one? And he told me what’s going to happen is that it’s not going to be regional waves anymore, it’s going to be a global one. As you can see, how the internet brings us together, how this school brings us together. We are really becoming a world family, this film society. And as we experienced in the school, when I make a film I would have 15 non-Chinese people on-board and we worked perfectly fine. So that enabled me to think about being a global filmmaker. My next feature project, I was thinking it will be collaborating in Korea, I’ve got something else that I’ll shoot in London, another in Malaysia… so that’s what the school brought me, the courage to become a filmmaker that will make films globally.

S.M: What are your plans for the coming year?

O.Z: Me and some other colleagues have decided to meet regularly somewhere and make small independent film that really don’t cost very much. The next one we’re going to do is in Seoul, South Korea, next year. At the same time, I will work on scripts both for indie films and the Chinese film industry. I’ll be in the US for a year at some point. At the moment, I’m really into super low-budget shoots. Anywhere I go, I have my camera and sound-recording equipment. We’ve got a cohort in the States, so we’ve been talking about working together there.

S.M: What advice would you give to someone who’s been accepted to LFS, to help them make the most of their time here?

O.Z: I think the reason why we were a very conscious cohort was that we had good tutors who told us the truth and kept us sober. My most critical advice is, in any circumstance, be aware of your work and always reflect on that. We are here in film school to learn. Open your heart to a lot of things. And also, don’t rush your career. In my experience it’s better to wait and perfect your skills than rush into stuff. 

FOLLOWING (27:11 mins, 2017)

Writer-Director: Zhang, Jiajun Producer: Gong, Yingqing Production Designer: Pyun, Heeyoung Cinematographer: Marranghino, Vincenzo Assistant Director: Testa, Julien Camera Assistant: Walsh, Paisley Sound Editor: Chim, Terence

Interview: Sophie McVeigh | Photos: Annual Show by Katie Garner, Group Selfie by Putri Purnama Sugua, Film Poster of FOLLOWING

#bfi #french new wave #italian neo-realism #korean film #filmschool #busan film festival #afa #asian film academy #bela tarr #jia zhangke #hou hsiao-hsien #lee chang dong #chinese film market #hollywood #londonfilmschool #film directing #westerns #international

[thelondonfilmschool]

INTERVIEW with Newcastle-based and one-of-a-kind filmmaker: Benjamin Bee

Writer/Director Benjamin Bee graduated from London Film School in 2015 and moved back to his home town of Newcastle Upon Tyne, where he’s continued to hone the unique brand of personal- tragi-comedy which has seen his films screened at some of the world’s biggest film festivals and attracted the likes of Mike Leigh to his Crowdfunding videos. Ben turns his own life story into art, and it’s not hard to see why – within minutes of meeting him I’d been told an anecdote involving an axe, a crazed lunatic and a carton of banana milkshake. Below is the publishable version of Ben’s take on the North-South divide, his time at LFS and what it is that makes his ‘bonkers’ stories so universal.

S.M: Can you tell me a bit about your life before applying to London Film School?

B.B: I left school in Newcastle when I was 14 without any qualifications, and then I went to an access to college course. They did photography and had an old, broken VHS video camera, and with the people that I met there we started making comedy, stupid little films. They were unscripted, and weirdly I used that to get into the University of Westminster to do Contemporary Media Practice. That was in 2002, and then at the end of that course I made a short film called The Plastic Toy Dinosaur, which was produced by Rob Watson who’s an NFTS producing grad who’s doing really well now. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, I wrote it when I was 21 and I directed it when I was 22. I moved back to Newcastle and started working in a bar, but I hated it and I was miserable and the only thing I realised I had was this short film. I didn’t know about anything, I didn’t even know Cannes or Sundance existed. 

So, I just started entering it in places that I found and one of them was the BBC3 New Filmmaker of the Year Award. There were tons of submissions and they selected it down to the last ten. It was actually a really good year – Alice Lowe had written and starred in one of them, and Sean Conway had a film as well, he writes for Ray Donavan now. It was nice because people started to screen the film and it seemed like they liked it and it resonated with audiences, but I still had no idea what I was doing and I was incredibly naïve. I mean, seriously dyslexic and had the reading and writing age of an 8-year-old. Not going to school probably didn’t help. So, I was kind of lost. I started working a theatre box office and I worked, like, 60 hours a week and tried to save money. And then I saw a Skillset bursary advertised. I’d always looked at LFS but I couldn’t afford the fees, but eventually after I’d saved some money from my job I applied and I got the bursary.

S.M: What did applying for that involve?

B.B: It’s based on previous work and it’s means tested so you basically have to be poor and talented, or at least fake them into believing that you have some form of talent (laughs). I think I had something to say, coming from a slightly different background, and all my stories are weirdly personal. You go in front of a panel and when I got called back I literally cried like a small child. And then I went to LFS! It was interesting and difficult and there were people from so many different walks of life. I learnt the craft of filmmaking – I tried to eat up everything. 

The most important thing for me was the people – you’re surrounded by people who are really passionate about film. It’s two years surrounded by people who’ll put a lot of effort in, and I met a lot of people who had a lot of fun making films that I’m really proud of. I did a film called Step Right Up when I was there, which was my Term 4 exercise. We had 36 minutes of film stock to make a nine-minute film and it was screened at 40 film festivals. We got long-listed for the BAFTA, which means we were down to the last 10 or 15, which had never been done before by a fourth term film. It was huge.

S.M: What do you think it was about that film that made it so successful?

B.B: I make comedies and they’re personal. I’ve never really struggled with getting films into festivals because I don’t try to make arduous bulls**t. It’s personal, and also I’m not the most masculine man but I know lots of masculine men who do have feelings, and everybody has a shared experience of feelings and pain so there’s nothing that makes even the most masculine, awful guy not sensitive. A lot of my films are about paternal bonds or absent father figures, because my dad left and he was an utter c***. So, I’ve got a lot of things like that, that kind of resonate. 

My new one’s about something that genuinely happened, which was when my dad left when I was five and my mum decided to take me and my brother out of school and take us to Metroland, which is a theme park in Newcastle. My brother went on the dodgems but I was too little, so I had to go on the merry-go-round. It was amazing, and I was on a big white horse going round and round. Every time I’d come round I’d see my mum just stood there in floods and floods of tears, and then I’d go past her, and I could see my brother having the best time ever. That’s an analogy for my relationships with my siblings! I think if you say things that are deeply personal then they’re always going to do much better than things that aren’t you. When I started in term one and term two, I started trying to make stuff to look more “intelligent”, and then I realised that it wasn’t making me at all happy. So, by term four I made something ridiculous and by graduation I made a film called Sebastian which was a horror comedy which was also a bit nuts.

S.M: Was it always your plan to go back to Newcastle after graduation?

B.B: The day I handed my grad film in I went for a meeting to direct a pilot taster for Baby Cow, Steve Coogan and Henry Normal’s company. I got that, and I brought Yiannis (Manolopoulos, fellow LFS student and cinematographer) in, it was written by a friend of mine, Dan Mersh, who was also in Step Right Up, Plastic Toy Dinosaur, Sebastian and Mordechai. And that was really good because I got to meet Henry Normal, who was the managing director of the company. He’d written the Royle Family, Mrs Merton, he’d produced some of my fave TV shows, including the Mighty Boosh … He loved it. but Channel 4 didn’t pick it up. Then I moved back to Newcastle, in 2015, and broke my ankle running for a train! I was in a cast for over a year. 

Then I applied to the Jewish Film Fund for my film Mordechai, I’m not actually Jewish but the film’s subject is. It’s doing really well, it’s got into Palm Springs, BFI London Film Festival, and various others. It’s about these identical twins, one of which has left the community and one of whom has stayed at home. There’s an ultra-orthodox community in Gateshead and it’s quite insular and interesting. So, I developed a story about, what if one of them had left and then had to come home for a reason? The dad dies and the other brother comes home and he has to go and pick him up. They’ve got very different life choices – one brother’s dressed in black and the other turns up wearing tie-dyed hippy shit. He’s still Jewish but in his own way. Mordechai is really happy and charming and Daniel, who stayed at home, is a bit more down-trodden and miserable. Then Mordechai drops dead and Daniel makes the decision to body swap and becomes Mordechai and goes to his own funeral. It comes out the end quite positive but it’s also quite emotional!

S.M: You work a lot with producer Maria Caruana Galizia – is she someone you met through LFS?

B.B: No, she’s from Malta. She moved to Newcastle after living in Scotland for a while (I think), and there’s very few producers here. I met her at a networking event – she liked something I’d made, I liked something she’d made and we just decided to try and apply for stuff. She’s fu***ng awesome, super talented and incredibly hardworking. Also, she puts up with me…

S.M: Do you find that being based up in Newcastle has its pros and cons?

B.B: It really does. The benefits are that you can shoot anywhere for dead cheap but crewing’s impossible because every good member of crew’s doing Vera or The Dumping Ground. There’s swings and roundabouts. It’s beautiful, and has a better quality of life but there is definitely a massive divide. All the work’s in London, all the agents are there.

S.M: Do you manage to make a living out of the work you’re doing at the moment?

B.B: I’m a very cheap human being. It’s difficult when you start out because a lot of the stuff that you’re doing, like the shorts, aren’t going to make any money unless you start winning prize money. I’m at the stage now where it’s a little bit easier because I can apply for funding for development from the BFI etc. That’s what I’m applying for at the moment. I’m doing a project with Henry Normal, a documentary on him and his poetry. I’m also just finishing Metroland and I’m really, really happy with it, but I’ve got no idea how it’s going to go down ‘cause it’s a bit mental.

S.M: How did you get Mike Leigh to appear in the crowdfunding promo?

B.B: He pops up in it, and basically the whole joke is that the film’s kind of like Weekend at Bernie’s, but imagine Weekend at Bernie’s if it was directed by Mike Leigh. You see the door open and it’s Mike Leigh going “Ben, can you stop phoning and emailing me and if you give me another copy of Weekend at Bernie’s …” (laughs). 

I sent him an email going, “Hi Mike! Creative England are insisting that I do Crowdfunding and I really don’t wanna do it, so instead of making a video in which everybody’s positive, I want to make a video where everybody’s really negative about the experience.” He said yes without questioning it for a second… When I shot the video with Mike it was me, Yiannis and Eoin Maher, who did Filmmaking at LFS as well, and Mike who was just really hilarious. It was a lot of fun. Mike’s always been incredibly kind and supportive. He’s got a really good sense of humour. It’s the thing I love about his work to be honest.

S.M: Have you found it cathartic making such personal work based on your own life?

B.B: Unless you’re very good at what you do, this is just my advice, you can hide everything but what you do has to at some point be personal and resonate. Deconstruct any movie ever, like every movie Wes Anderson ever made is basically about his father walking out on his family, even though you don’t always realise it. It’s all about masculinity. It’s that thing that all your faults are your strongest features. I definitely find it therapeutic and I definitely think you deal with stuff. Spielberg says that it’s the only job where you get paid for therapy. I think that’s a great quote because it’s true in a way. Especially if you can’t afford therapy!

S.M: What do you think was the most important thing that LFS taught you?

B.B: The main revelation was that, whenever anybody goes into anything, doesn’t matter if it’s school, college or university, everybody comes in with a competitive nature that they’re going to be the best. Being competitive with yourself and wanting to make the best work is amazing, that’s the best way to be. But anybody else, whether they’re a director or whatever, should be your friends and your peer group, people that will help you. You basically have a support network with other filmmakers. That was really helpful, because it felt like you had a cheerleading squad and you could also do it for other people and you’d be really grateful. And that’s the industry – you’re not really in competition because nobody’s going to make the same film as you. You learn that very quickly at LFS because there’s people making such different work and you can really appreciate it. Then those people can come and work and collaborate on something you’re making, and you make something different and everybody learns from each other. Definitely the international vibe really helps as well. I was one of very few Brits and that was really nice, because obviously in Newcastle it’s mostly just people from there. In my term I had Yiannis from Greece, Pauline who was French, Rodrigo who was Mexican, Habib who’s American … it was really nice. I enjoyed it. Everybody’s great! Working with happy, positive people who feel comfortable in a nice environment is what makes the best work. And I think that’s what comes from having so many passionate people at LFS. It was a life-changing opportunity.

#mike leigh #filmmaking #weekendatbernies #filmstudies #wes anderson #creativeskillset #lfsorguk #gateshead #newcastle #steve coogan #babycow #metroland #sundance #rob watson #sean conway #dyslexia #london #bfi #jewish film fund

[thelondonfilmschool]

“Students are the purest fuel for the film industry and it’s great to be around them” - Heads of Screenwriting, Sophia Wellington & Jonathan Hourigan

Sophia Wellington and Jonathan Hourigan have been popular tutors for many years at London Film School (LFS), so it was no surprise when they were chosen to fill Brian Dunnigan’s considerable shoes when he left this year after 12 years as Head of Screenwriting. We chatted to them about their new shared role, what they love about LFS and how they’re continuing its legacy.

S.M: Could you tell us a little bit about your background before working at London Film School?

Sophia Wellington: I got into film, I think like a lot of people, by accident. I had a temporary job at the BBC, at Television Film Studios, Ealing (TFS) and then whilst I was there I started to follow the camera crew around and went every weekend for about four weeks, going on set and just talking to them. And then, from doing that, I got onto a course at the BBC where I trained in technical production and on studio cameras. I then became a camera assistant on film cameras and then in the cutting room. My training was mainly technical and, as I say, by accident, but that’s how I started. Then, when Avid became very popular, I made that switch to development and worked in development and production as a freelancer, working with writers. And the rest is history!

S.M: You’d taught before, in Singapore?

S.W: I did, but actually the first place that I taught was at the LFS. Like a lot of people in the industry, I thought that once you get to a certain level in your work it’s really important to try and give back. So, I was a mentor here in 2004 and then started as a feature development tutor, around 2005-6. I did that for a year or so and then went to Singapore and taught full time. New York University has a film school in Singapore, Tisch Asia, and I taught there for eight years. It’s a long time to be away from the UK industry, but it was really useful to be in Asia. The training that I got in Singapore made me aware of the different film industries, but also how universal stories can be and should be, and how to approach them and ways of storytelling. When I left Singapore, I came back to work at LFS.

Jonathan Hourigan: I was interested in photography when I was a teenager, my uncle was a photographer and taught photography at West Sussex College of Art and Design. I remember going to a screening there one afternoon and I saw The Spirit of the Beehive, projected on a scratchy 16mm print, literally onto a white sheet stretched onto a wall. And that was the moment I vividly remember thinking, “Oh, that looks like an interesting thing to do, I don’t want to take photographs, I want to do something about making movies.” Then I went to university and did an academic degree, and was interested in the cinema but didn’t really know how to get going. I got very interested in a French director called Bresson and I got in contact with him and showed all his films in London, as you couldn’t see them otherwise, and it just happened that as I was finishing university he was making a film. So, I went and worked with him in Paris for a year, and I came back and thought, “Well, I’m not very enterprising and I know that about myself, so I’ve got to go to film school.” I’ve got very clear views on why you should come to film school, and having come back to the UK after working with Bresson in France it took me a few years to get around to making a film to get me into the National Film School. I went there for several years, then left the National where I studied direction, tried to set things up and I just found I started to get work script reading and got more and more interested in writing. So, I started to write, and do some teaching around that and in fact, Sophia introduced me here at LFS. I was a mentor at some point around 2003-4, just before she went away (to Singapore) and I think I probably inherited her feature development group. I took an opportunity that was too good to say no to, which was to replace Sophia! And the rest is history. I teach here, a little bit elsewhere, and carry on writing as well.

S.M: This is the first year that you’ve both taken over from Brian Dunnigan, who’d headed the MA Screenwriting program for 12 years. Why did you decide to share the role? 

J.H: We’ve both worked here for a number of years and feel very loyal to the place. We’re very interested in the way the school works – there aren’t many conservatoire film schools left. We worked with Brian but also with a very good group of other visiting lecturers, and we felt there was something really powerful about that group. When the opportunity came up because Brian was leaving, and the school was looking for a new head of screenwriting, we thought it would be a great opportunity to step up and do something different, slightly change our focus. Job sharing allows us both to share the challenges of doing this job which is great, but also to carry on doing other things so that we’re out in the industry as well.

S.W: I completely agree. I think that from our time here, at the school, we’ve got a commitment to it. We think it works really well, and we’ve got a great core of tutors. And so, when Brian left, there was the risk of somebody new coming in and changing it, or whether we could step up and protect what we have and continue it. And so, I think that for both of us that was a big part of it – trying to continue this great legacy and this great team, and make it as good as it could be. The job share, I think, is really important because this is such an industry facing course, and it allows us to keep links with the industry and with outsiders. There’s a lot of work to do here, and being full time it’s possible just to focus very much on the teaching and the students, which is important, but at the end of the year they do have to go out into the industry. Our connection with the industry allows us to be mindful of that at all times – that not only are we teaching students to be as good writers as they can be, but in a year’s time they’ve got to go out into the industry. We have to make them aware of and prepare them for it, and this job share offers, I think, the best opportunity to do that.

S.M: Has it been a case of taking the baton from Brian and carrying on more or less the same, or are changes afoot?

J.H: As we said, we’ve always felt there’s something very special about the structure of the course and about this school, and so you want to preserve a lot of what’s going on. But we’ve changed a number of things. We’ve got some new tutors involved, because we’re not now doing so much of the frontline teaching ourselves. We do the Work and Research Journal in a slightly different way than has been the case in the past, although funnily enough in a way that’s an evolution that’s in keeping with the rest of what we’re doing. We’re now doing the journal in group sessions, which of course replicates the very powerful feature development group model, and it seems to be working well. It’s a change but it’s in keeping with what’s been going on. But there haven’t been any major ruptures with the past.

S.W: I don’t think there needed to be. The way that the course was run was excellent and incredibly strong. With the two of us, it now means that there’s a little bit of fresh energy, because I would say that we are aware of different challenges facing the course and the industry. So, we have to be mindful about how we’re going to deal with those. One of the challenges that we’re dealing with is, of course, the popularity of writing for mediums outside of the big screen – for television and other areas. And whereas our focus is very specifically on writing a feature script, we’ve also got to see how we can address a changing industry and make sure that our writers have the skills that can transfer into these other areas, while still ensuring that we have given them the best teaching possible. So, while there are no major changes, we are very aware of new challenges and spending a lot of time thinking, “How can we tweak areas here and there to make sure we can face these challenges?”

S.M: Having both worked and studied in a variety of different film school environments around the world, what do you think is special about London Film School?

J.H: In terms of the school, the non-specialisation is really powerful, having graduated from the National myself where you specialise right from the beginning, I think it’s a really interesting comparison. You see people who embrace it and make a strong decision to come here because they really want to experience that whole range of roles involved in making a film. On this course in particular, I think the thing that’s impressive is how collaborative people are. Students are developing their own ideas, about which they are passionate, but there’s a very powerful sense of collective purpose and that they can all flourish equally and so therefore there’s real benefit in supporting one another. Not in a complacent way, because support is often by giving robust challenges, but I think that’s really powerful, that sense of collective identity. They make very different work, but there’s a real sense that they’re a group. They stick together and help one another. It’s impressive.

S.W: Just to go off that, of course, it’s a one-year course. All the other courses I’ve been on have been over two years, so this is incredibly intense and much tighter, by virtue of being one year. We do encourage a lot of that learning and development to come from fellow students, not just from the tutors. Compared to the other film schools I’ve been at, which worked incredibly well for what they did, I think that the way that this course is organised and how we work within small groups and the really great student to teacher ratio allows everybody to be incredibly supportive of each other. It forces a strong community during the year that they are studying here, and it also creates a very creative environment where they are getting feedback, not just from tutors, but from each other. They understand that that’s what they’re supposed to do. So, I think that’s one of the real strengths for writing here. Writing is such a solitary profession, I think it’s fantastic that they start their learning in understanding that, actually, it can be more collaborative. You can get support from others. This is a different way of doing it, it’s not just about locking yourself in a dark room and writing, it’s actually about being supported by other people. That’s a very strong ethos of the school and one of the things that makes it unique.

S.M: How does the school prepare people for life after film school?

J.H: You’ve got to prepare people for moving out and working independently, and it’s a real challenge. We send them out, hopefully, with the capacity to generate good ideas, a lot of powerful transferrable skills as writers, a set of relationships with other writers, the people who teach them and the filmmakers up the road. And, of course, the film industry in London, so a world of agents, producers, other writers who hopefully come through the school and who they meet on their journey through here. The thing that’s impressive in comparison with when I was at film school is that students also come with a lot more enterprise. We don’t have to work that hard to talk to them about preparing for life after film school. I was talking to some of the current cohort, who are only four weeks in, and they’re already thinking about that. They’re more and more proactive and thinking about how they’re going to make themselves employable, without compromising the educational and creative work that they’re doing here. I think that’s impressive.

S.W: It’s always a challenge, preparing students for the industry, and we can talk about the schedule that we have here, the industry guests that we bring in and the fact that all of the tutors are visiting lecturers who work in the industry. So, every bit of their teaching is informed with their industry experience. The students are surrounded by, and their teaching is done by, industry people. For all film schools, leaving is challenging. It’s like being kicked out of the nest, but we provide them with the tools and the skills to get out there and to fly! The other challenge is always to provide them with the confidence to believe that they have those skills.

J.H: We’ve just done a big piece of work on tracking graduates over the last four or five years, and you see a number of trends. A lot of graduates leave, and they probably do other work and build up a portfolio of films, working with filmmakers up the road. Ben Cleary’s is an example of somebody who went out, made a short film and won an Oscar. Alejandro Stepenberg from a couple of years ago I think has about seven or eight graduation film credits, people he’s kept in contact with and is travelling the world, making short films with people. Other people have found themselves doing script editing, we’ve got students from three or four years ago who have got show running jobs in children’s animation series … A whole different range of ways that people find their ways into employment, which reflect their creative preferences, their personalities, their desire to be in a job or working freelance. I think we send them out with the creative and technical capacities, and then they generate and we nurture that sense of enterprise that means most of them find work within the industry. They then have to negotiate where that goes longer term. 

S.W: I think that point about having the film students over the road and the ability to work on graduation films is really important, because it’s a step into the industry. That allows them to stay connected for some time. It’s like a lovely transition period where they can work on student films at a high level while still being slightly supported. As I say, because we’ve only got one year, we think our relationship with our grads and our alumni is really important, and how they can support each other. That’s something that we are looking to improve, because so much of supporting people into the industry is the alumni who have gone before. They’re the ones that can help give them a softer landing and a leg up!

S.M: A big part of your job is student enrolment. What kind of things are you looking for in potential students?

S.W: In the interview, I’m looking for somebody who wants to engage with telling stories. Somebody who has some sort of visual sense, somebody who’s interested in people and also has something to say. Someone who has a passion for film and connects to it in an emotional way, rather than just an intellectual way. There’s not one type of student we’re looking for - one of the great things about this course is that it’s incredibly diverse and we have very different people. I think definitely a passion for film and stories, and a desire to play with them. That is something that I always stress in interviews, that they’re open to feedback and ideas and coming up with ideas and sparking conversation. Because, that’s so much about how we teach here – we’re teaching in small groups, so it’s about what they’re giving to that group and what they get back. Anyone with those types of qualities is definitely what we’re looking for here.

J.H: I’d say the same. For me, at interview and once they’re here, it’s about this balance between core point of view, where you feel there’s something about them and that they’re interested in the world, and then around that, in orbit, is that flexibility that Sophia’s talking about. That willingness to balance that sense of real purpose with a willingness to explore the different ways in which you might develop it.

S.M: Once someone’s been accepted onto the course, what advice would you give them to best prepare for their year here?

J.H: What I wouldn’t do is sit and read a load of screenwriting manuals, but I would try and watch a lot of films. Hopefully anyone applying would already be watching a lot of films, but it’d be great if they went and read a bunch of screenplays, that’s also very useful. And of course, keep writing. Keep writing as part of a process. Don’t think you’re getting ahead of the game and nailing your first term’s work – just immerse yourself in a world in which writing becomes a daily practice, which is one of the key parts of the course, to be doing it all the time. 

S.W: I would encourage anybody who’s gone through the interview and been given a place to continue that sense of wonder and interest and appetite. I would also stress that coming onto the course is not a time for them to then have to give up any creative thinking, thinking that we will provide lots of answers. Not at all. You really have to come here with an appetite to explore for yourself, and to question and wonder about things. So, you should never think of the interview as, “Phew, I’ve passed that, everything’s fine!” Rather, that work of questioning ideas, what you’re interested in and questioning yourself should continue after the interview and throughout the course. It’s about creating that writing practice. You learn how to write through the practice of writing, and we don’t create perfect writers at the end of the course but rather those who know how to develop and to grow.

S.M: What inspiration do you take from being around students?

S.W: What is great about students is that they think anything is possible. They think that the industry can be changed and that it’s an important place where you can change the world and present incredibly powerful messages and themes and make important stories. When you work in the industry for a long time it can often feel like it’s about money and the economics and everything else, so students give you a moment to breathe fresh air and think, actually, this is what the industry is. It’s a place for art, for exploring ideas and universal questions. Students are the purest fuel for the industry and it’s great to be around them because they have those fresh ideas and that passion that we need.

J.H: Being around students makes me realise how important and worthwhile it is to teach. And you’re right, they do come with enormous energy and enthusiasm, determined to break down the walls. It’s exciting to be part of that and to help focus it.

S.M: It does seem to be part of the industry, that people get to a point where they want to give something back in terms of sharing knowledge.

S.W: Yes, whether it’s a little bit of mentoring or full-time teaching, I think that is definitely built into it. Even within the formal structure of film schools there’s always somebody who is more of a mentor who really is inspiring. I think we all have mentors, within film schools and also within the industry, who have done an awful lot to help us and shape our own passion for film. It’s a responsibility to pass it on to others, so you’re right, teaching is an opportunity to do that.

S.M: Jonathan, you mentioned before that you went to film school after returning from working with Bresson in Paris because you felt you weren’t very enterprising. There’s an ongoing debate about whether writers and film makers need to go to film school or not – what’s your opinion on that?

J.H: For me it was an incredible experience and I loved going there, and I don’t think I would have found my way into being a filmmaker had I not done it. But you have to make a strong choice and have strong reasons to do it. Screenwriting is a little different. Writing is solitary, and if you’re going to do the equivalent of going and doing your first feature, which is to sit at home and write it, it’s very hard to do that first time. I think that at film school, you’re putting yourself in a community of writers for a year with all the benefits that come from that. There aren’t many people, starting out, who would be more productive in a year sitting at home or sitting in a garret in Paris, even, than they would be coming here. I think you learn a lot and you’re encouraged to be very productive.

S.W: I think it’s something that you should think about seriously. Going to a film school is only the start of getting yourself into the film industry. You have to think long and hard about what you want to get out of it and what you expect to do with it afterwards. It immediately puts you into a creative environment that will sustain and inspire you and allow you to continue being creative during the following years. If you don’t have that it’s very easy to slip out of the industry. It also gives you, very quickly, the tools and the skills you need to problem solve when you’re dealing with either filmmaking issues or story issues. You’re given this information upfront in very clear ways. Also, within a film school environment you’re encouraged to work on areas where you are weak, in a way that you might not when you’re working on your own. The other thing I will say about film school, as much as I loved my training at the BBC, film schools are one of the last places where you are allowed to dream and break rules and think as an artist. And you do not get that within industry training. Film schools are the only place, I think, where you are given the time, and the freedom, and the support to do that. That’s where artists come from, and what film schools support.

#screenwriting #filmmaking #bresson #script editing #script reading #bbc #tisch #ealing studios #16mm #West Sussex College of Art and Design #ben cleary #alejandro stepenberg #filmschool #teaching #filmindustry

[thelondonfilmschool]

“LFS imbued me with a sense of passion and wonder for filmmaking that I’ve carried with me.” - LFS Alumnus Yiannis Manolopoulos

Interview by Sophie McVeigh | Photo by Paul Stephenson

Greek cinematographer Yiannis Manolopoulos graduated from London Film School three years ago and has since forged a flourishing career in the industry, with his work on an LFS graduation film recently selected by the British Society of Cinematographers Emerging Photographers event. We talked to him about life in London, what it takes to be a success in the industry, and what filmmaking has in common with military service …

Sophie McVeigh: Could you tell me a little bit about your background before LFS?

Yiannis Manolopoulos: I’m from Athens and my first degree was in Philosophy and Economics, so it had nothing to do with filmmaking. I always wanted to do filmmaking, but for different reasons I never took that route. After I did my undergrad in York, here in the UK, I went back to Greece and went into the army because it’s mandatory there. Then I did a Masters - I wanted to do filmmaking but for several reasons that didn’t end up being so. I went to NYU and did Project Management, then I went back to Greece and I was working in a publishing house but filmmaking was always eating me away. So there came a point where I realised that I had to do it. I started doing some classes in a school in Greece, I did some directing classes, some cinematography classes, I did some shorts. And then I decided I needed to do it properly. So, I applied to LFS, which is known as one of the best filmmaking schools.

S.M: Was your focus always on cinematography?

Y.M: Yes, from Term 1 really, it was. I was always interested in photography and the visual aspect of storytelling – how to use symbolism, how to use colour and light to tell a story and create emotion. From the beginning I was always geared towards camera and light. I think that just came from films, watching films as a kid, going to the cinema. I was a kid of the 80’s, so I was in the VHS revolution. Besides having cinema on the weekends, my brother and I would rent five or six films and stay in for entire days and watch them back to back. I was always in love with film.

S.M: You graduated in 2014.

Y.M: Officially, yes. I graduated as a cinematographer. I shot my first grad film at the end of the 5th term which was the end of the second year in 2012, but then I kept shooting grad films.

S.M: Everybody needs the cinematographer?

Y.M: Yeah, it’s a good place to be! You have so many directors and people wanted to work with me and I was happy to shoot different things. So, I kept shooting grad films until almost a year and a half later and I submitted a portfolio of many films. I graduated in 2014.

S.M: Was it always your plan to stay in London after you graduated?

Y.M: Not really, I didn’t have that specific goal in mind, it was just learning the craft and doing it, basically. I just wanted to go wherever the projects and the work is. I mean, that’s one of the things that I got from LFS, it’s like a network. Coming out and graduating and being an alumnus, I’ve got people that I keep working with, like directors that were in my term or a few terms above or below, and we do projects together again and again. It tends to gravitate around London and the UK and around the school because of those connections.

S.M: Is there any other reason why you think London is a good place to be for the kind of work you’re doing?

Y.M: It’s also the industry. In Europe I think it’s the biggest and the more voluminous in terms of jobs, job availability and demand.  And the language element, for me, because I speak English and Greek so it’s easy for me to work here versus going to, say, France or somewhere. I’ve been here permanently since 2010, it’s been seven years now.

S.M: Can you tell me about your career since graduation?

Y.M: During the last year of my being at LFS, because I love operating so much and I thought it would be a good development for me as an operator, I did some Steadicam courses and became a Steadicam operator. My career has taken two parallel paths, basically. I work both as a Director of Photography, mostly on drama and I’ve done a few commercials and music videos, and then I work a lot as a Steadicam operator as well. Being a DOP, you are basically responsible for the image of the projects, that being light, camera and frame. So that has a more directorial and over-arching responsibility over the project, and being a Steadicam operator is basically operating on a specific kind of rig, it’s a speciality kind of operating. You would be hired in by other DOPs to do those speciality shots. In terms of career, I’ve been fortunate enough to have that Steadicam angle to be able to keep shooting more and more projects, and then be able to do more passion projects. I want to do drama and my goal is to do features. That way I can be more involved in low-budget or no- budget shorts and keep shooting and developing my craft, and at the same time I’ve got some connections so that I can do more paid projects and commercials. I’m fortunate enough to have some of my work being recognised. I had the Panalux award (Yiannis was the recipient of the LFS 2014 PANALUX award for Cinematography) and this year I’ve been selected to be BAFTA crew. That means you’re part of a network of filmmakers, be that directors, producers, crew, camera crew, sound crew, who collaborate and share knowledge. There are different events and networking events that we attend, there are different kinds of workshops. I’ve been asked to sit in on one-on-one meetings with students and talk to them about cinematography, and also I’ve been in workshops taking advice from seasoned cinematographers. It’s a kind of community to help you move along. It’s been very rewarding so far. And recently I’ve been selected for the BSC Emerging Cinematographers panel, which was a great honour. Actually, it was with a grad film from LFS that I shot, so that’s great. In terms of career I’m inching towards my goal because I’ve been asked to shoot a feature as a DOP at the UK unit of a film called Utopia that shot in Afghanistan and India. I was very fortunate enough to be part of this very good production which got picked by the Afghani government to be submitted for the foreign Oscars submission. And then I’ve also been involved in a few other feature projects as an operator. The most notable would be Notes on Blindness, which is a very nice documentary which was BAFTA nominated, and then it won the Cameraimage Frog for Best Cinematography.

S.M: Does being involved in something that was long-listed for an Oscar open up a lot of opportunities?

Y.M: It’s a good thing to mention, to get your foot in the door and get people to pay more attention. In general, I find that the industry is very saturated. There’s a lot of people doing the same thing and it’s an over-abundance of cinematographers and camera people, and at the same time we also have this culture of distraction and there’s a low focus point. When you get people to see or talk about your work, usually you get 10 or 20 seconds to give your show reel and your website. So, having something like that to put up front and having some awards hopefully gets producers and directors or any future collaborators to pay more attention to what your work is. Hopefully it rises more to the top among the multitude of amazing work that is out there.

S.M: So, in this saturated environment, what advice would you have for a student leaving LFS who wants to be a successful cinematographer?

Y.M: I would say, I mean I think it’s the only way to do it but at the same time it’s kind of counterintuitive advice – if you want to get into an industry you have to have good material. Basically, you have to do good work. That’s the only thing that should matter to you, that you always deliver the best possible result and service. It’s not only about the film being good, it’s also about your attitude on set – how you work with directors and producers, how you behave. That all counts, because, as everybody knows at LFS, it’s long hours, it’s working very closely with people, so it matters, your people management and how you carry yourself on set. Always try and do your best because you’re always remembered by your last project. The industry works in a way where there are no interviews, there is no sending CV’s or going through the normal process that usually gets you a job. The way you get a job is either someone knows you and knows your work, or you get mentioned by someone for your work. The only way for one of those two things to happen is that the last thing you did was really good, so people will remember it. You always have to be at your best. That means, I think, shooting as much as you can. You might aspire to get to a level but you always do work and it never really reaches it – you always feel you’re lacking. That, I think, is the process – you keep shooting and you keep doing it. There’s a great quote by Ira Glass (host and producer of This American Life) that says more or less that. In your creative life there’s a phase where your work never reaches your expectations. And you just need to keep grinding away, and at some point your skill level and the quality of your production will reach your aspirations. So, you just have to keep shooting. I said it’s a bit counterintuitive because that means that you have to get involved with a lot of low-budget or no- money projects which sometimes lead you to compromise, because you have these aspirations but then there’s no budget because it’s an expensive art, filmmaking. There’s no budget for the right equipment, or the right amount of time, the right locations to get everything you need right! So, it’s a kind of push and pull – trying to do good work with no resources and trying to rise to the top so that you can have the resources and do the work that you want to do.

S.M: You’re always relying on someone else’s vision for the project as well.

Y.M: Yes, which in another sense, for me, is the great part about it because I jump from project to project and I get to share different visions and talk with directors that have different ways of thinking and working. And then you translate that through your own filter into a visual language. So, you always find something new. It’s a craft that makes you grow every time because it’s new challenges every time and new ways of approaching things. So, I would say don’t get discouraged and just keep shooting. And it will get better, I hope!

S.M: You’ve worked on a lot of international projects – was that something that was always important to you in terms of sharing different visions, and was that part of your reason for coming to LFS?

Y.M: It’s something I cherish and that I really embrace. I look at a project more favourably if there’s travel and it’s international because you get to see different cultures, different people, different ways of thinking. Different light, which I’ve found is very interesting. I’ve shot in Iran, I’ve shot in Lebanon, in Greece and Italy. The light is different every time, and it’s a great surprise. But that was not the goal, really, and that was not one of my main prerequisites for coming to LFS. My main reason was the interdisciplinary nature of it. Because I came from a non-filmmaking and non-photographic background, I found it very worthwhile that I was able to go through all the steps and assume an editor’s role, a director’s role, a sound person’s role, and understand what the process is throughout. I think that’s made me a better collaborator now because I can understand all the departments and how they work, and I can talk better with everyone. That was the main reason – it was less of a steep learning curve into filmmaking. Although, having said that, it was still very intense coming in and them just throwing everything at you! But it’s great.

S.M: What kind of qualities do you need to do your job?

Y.M: Another nice quote I read on a website, which a gaffer had put up, was that to always have work in filmmaking you have to have two out of three things: be on time, be good at what you do and be fun to work with. So, if you have at least two out of three you’ll always be employed. Filmmaking has the kind of structure that you find in the military – you have this kind of pyramid of responsibility, and it has long hours and this group mentality where everybody works together. And I think punctuality is an important thing to take out it. If you’re always on time and reliable, that’s really good. That’s one thing, the other is be good at what you do – love it, have passion for it and give everything to it. And the third is, I think we mentioned it – 12 hours in a hot studio with everyone, if you’re grumpy or you’re particular … you have to have good people skills and give leeway to relationships so that you’re fun to work with.

S.M: Did your time in the army help you with that?

Y.M: I like to think people skills and punctuality are things I had anyway! (laughs)

S.M: What projects are coming up for you in the near future?

Y.M: At the moment it’s a busy November. I have two short films I’m prepping – one is an LFS graduation film, actually. People from LFS know me and have seen my work and keep coming back, which I’m very fortunate to have. Another is a short film with another director I’ve met. I have a music video which I’m doing Steadicam on. I have a content commercial which I’m DOPing. And then I’m also doing four days on a feature which has some pick-ups – I did some B Camera for a low-budget feature, they’ve done assembly and they need some pick-ups. The original DOP is back in the States where he’s from and can’t come so they asked me to do it. That’s what a busy month looks like. From month to month it really changes. It’s been quite a busy summer but there are months where you could have just one job or a couple of Steadicam dailies, and then a month like this which is kind of crazy.

S.M: Do you find you have to say yes to everything because you don’t know when it’s going to be a quiet month?

Y.M: Not really, for me it always comes down to the content. It starts with the script and the story or what the commercial is, what it’s about and how the treatment is and what we’re going to shoot. I have to be invested somehow in that - either I love the story or the subject matter, or I’m attracted to the vision or find that visually I can give something. If there’s nothing in the material that I can relate to then I can’t really adhere to what I said before and actually make it good. I have to be invested in it. It’s also important to have good working relationships, so if it’s a director or producer that I know I can work well with, that’s also very good. There’s been projects that I’ve turned down because I just couldn’t relate to the material, or sometimes I could relate to it but because the calendar was full I knew that I couldn’t give my best, so I would have to pass.

S.M: If you were to give advice to a student thinking of coming to LFS, why would you recommend the course?

Y.M: I think it’s the infectious culture of passion for film that’s the most important thing. Coming in, we would work very long hours and everything else in my life during those two years was in the back of my mind. The forefront was, “What project are we shooting, how are we doing this?” That’s all in the process of learning, and it leads you to discover new things – technical things, or theoretical things or creative things. And you discover things about yourself while you’re working with others. Being in the space with everyone having this kind of mentality imbued me with a sense of passion and wonder for filmmaking that I think I’ve carried through with me.

You can follow Yiannis’s work at http://www.yiannismanolopoulos.com/.

Yiannis is from Athens, Greece. His first feature film as a Director of Photography, "Utopia", was longlisted for the 88th Academy awards, as the 2016 Afghanistan foreign film submission. He is a member of Bafta Crew as well as a member of the Association of Steadicam Operators. His work was recently selected for the BSC Emerging Cinematographers (https://bscine.com/news?id=227)

#filmmaking #utopia #athens #iran #bsc #cinematography #cinematographer #filmtalent #filmstudies #londonfilmschool #bafta #baftacrew #steadicam #passionforfilm #gaffer #international #academy awards #filmindustry #panalux #emerging photographers

[thelondonfilmschool]

Le Fort Des Fous

Written by Sophie McVeigh

In these turbulent, post-truth times that we live in, there is always the temptation to try to make sense of the world, to find order in the madness and to seek solace in clear, linear narratives, which is why Narimane Mari’s approach to filmmaking is so refreshing. She is entirely comfortable with not having the answers, and understands that there is no real difference between memory and imagination. “Many want to tell the truth, but it exists only within us, individually and collectively for certain facts, but nothing is clear, ever. I wanted to use this fact to create a movie where I can put this confusion of memories.”

Using archives from the early scientific expeditions and the so-called ‘taming campaigns’ led by French colonizers in North Africa in the 19th Century, Le Fort des Fous reflects on the cycles of violence that repeat themselves throughout history, the will to escape reality and, in particular, the notion of transgression against power as a form of freedom. Moving between a military academy in Algiers, where a group of adolescent Algerians act out the roles of patriotic French cadets, a utopian commune on Kythira island where an imaginary nomadic community flees the real word, and the Prosfygika refugee community in present-day Athens, the film treads a line between fact, fiction and memory before dispensing with the line altogether. We talked to the director before the film’s screening at LFS to find out what inspires her, and why she’ll be moving from colonial dominance to sexual desire in her next project.

Sophie McVeigh: Could you talk a bit about your background and your connection to the material?

Narimane Mari: I was a producer, since 2006 I think. Mostly political documentaries, very engaged, and then in 2007 I made my first movie. But it was more like a game, it was about my husband who is a painter and the museum asked for a film. Because I’m very close to him, I just took a camera and began to work and it was very playful. I didn’t decide at that moment to make movies.

S.M: So, you hadn’t studied film at all, you just picked up a camera?

N.M: Yes. And even for production I didn’t learn it. I've had field experience, I didn't go to normal school for very long either. I was born in Algeria, my mother is Spanish, my father Algerian. At 16 I went to France to be a photographer, a war photographer. But you needed a baccalauréat, I don’t have it and I don’t want to have it! I really didn’t want to go to school, I was very bored with the rooms, benches and the lockdown. I worked in different companies where people helped me to grow up and gave me a lot of knowledge in different ways. I began to produce because I saw my friends, who wanted to tell stories that they had in their minds or hearts, and they never found the tools for that or the people who wanted to follow them. They're directors with a world of their own. I did it because for me it’s not difficult to produce. You need courage and stamina, as with everything. I always do it with people I believe in, playing with seriousness and pleasure, but I produced good things, finally (laughs) that the establishment recognised and audiences recognised. I can defend now not so easy movies, because I have this etiquette. I began my first feature, Bloody Beans, in 2013, because I wanted to open up other narrative paths on subjects of history. Many want to tell the truth, but it exists only within us, individually and collectively for certain facts, but nothing is clear, ever. I wanted to use this fact to create a movie where I could put this confusion of memories… And it gives you a lot of tools for your imagination because you must transgress the facts. You have to remember what they told you – your mother, your father, your neighbourhood, the phantasmagoria of the enemy – who is it, why am I scared and all that. What it means to be political, to make revolution, what it means to be free. Algeria is now a ‘free’ country, but it’s not a free country. And I have to manage all this information. It created something very strange.

S.M: Could you explain the structure of Le Fort des Fous – it’s in three parts, but I was wondering what was behind the choice to set them where you did?

N.M: I used the three parts because I knew that I could not totally connect all this confusion that I talk about. But now I’m more talking about society at the end. The end of the movie is the reality of our society now. I wanted to connect all times together, all levels of emotion that we have inside us, like the past, like a phantasmagoria of the past. I used colonialism because I wanted to talk about power and domination, and in colonialism I have all the material for that. I didn’t have to invent it, I just had to create a form around this. I made some connection with Sarkozy’s speech that he made in 2007 in Dakar, that it’s exactly the same mindset as 1860. In the first part, it’s a military training academy but for scientists. It was to give soldiers a good mind for colonialism – “Learn science to make you believe in the "nobility" of domination and also learn how to kill.” Indoctrination. In the second part, it’s like we all have a dream, a childhood dream of a utopian society, a dream that we can live together. A dream that we can rewrite our history. But when you go outside of society you can not act for it.

S.M: And that part is set on a Greek island.

N.M: On Kythira, yes. And then at this moment, just before shooting this utopian society that I created, I met people in a squat in Athens, a very strong community where there were refugees from 1920, Greek people that live there because of the (financial) crisis, the new refugees. They speak eight or ten languages. They make food for everybody, they make bread, they have a school, they try to help each other. They act against the system and they really break their balls because they are still here and they have simple but concrete proposals for the refugees and a mode of survival that allows us to resist what we've been forced to do. They are squatters, but they don’t have any other possibility. I could not stop the movie there when I met these people. I did an interview – I stayed with one of the guys and then I met a political lawyer and she’s fantastic. She belongs to another social environment, but they think exactly the same. The original intention was to have another final act – the end of the world. I also changed the second act because, originally, I wanted to make this community in the desert in Algeria, but there was some trouble with the political situation there so I decided to go to Kythira. And it was nice because it was a fairy-tale island which also carries big dreams.

S.M: The themes of the film revolve around domination and transgression. Is that something that was always in you, growing up in an ex-colony like Algeria?

N.M: I think there are two things. Maybe because, yes, this country gives you this, but also it’s a very wild society, in a good way. It means that I was not educated really. I was like an animal on the street, I lived and loved to live on the streets and in nature. I didn’t care about rules, I even said until I was 15 that I was a boy so I could stay outside. Then when I came to Europe I felt locked up in the rules. I couldn’t move really, because I didn’t understand. In France even if you go to buy bread you must respect the order of arrival, in Algeria, you let the one who needs it most or who is the weakest pass through. If people come and they want bread they take bread, and I love this! Because I think that it’s more natural. We don’t try to hide things. It’s not to make us savage, but clear people, maybe. Confusion is more assumed. And I think that I work on this, I always make work about confusion because I accept it. I try, in my work, always to transgress the narrative, to transgress the ‘what is it.’ I want the audience to take a part of their own pleasure to have a trip. It’s very important to feel free to look and to understand or not understand.

S.M: So, you’re asking the audience to accept not having the answer?

N.M: Yes, and it’s not easy for the audience, or rather for what the market thinks of the public. I have problems broadcasting it but not in festivals because that’s the place where we can express our own way. This was the place that they recognised it. There are a few people who look at what I’m doing and they help me to go further and deeper in what I’m doing. But yes, it’s not easy in the market, but I really don’t care about that. I’ve found a way to live without too much money and have enough to not live in a way that I have to respect rules that I cannot respect.

S.M: You said that your first film, Bloody Beans, was also about the French occupation of Algeria, and that you made this second film because it wasn’t finished for you. Do you feel more of a sense that the subject might be finished for you now?

N.M: Totally, I’m going to make my next movie about desire and sex. Even if it's also a political question about domination and what they inject into us as ideas - what is a woman, what is a man … We are totally directed by a lot of things and we have to go deeper to create the meaning of desire, forget this stupid place where we are. A lot of people hate the word confusion, they’re totally scared of it. But it’s the most beautiful place to be because it’s the place where we are, we cannot help it. A lot of people say to me, “There is no line in your movie!” I say, “Do you have a line in life?” We are not this. And in my work I express that, but I think that in the first film it’s more about liberation. I used colonialism because I had to bring to these children the power and the desire to want to be free. Because, I don’t know if you know the story (of Bloody Beans) but they’re beginning the revolution by stealing food from the military. These kids are humiliated because they eat beans and they fart. And that’s why they begin to fight, and to want to take something back. “Give me the food that you eat, it’s also my food!” And it’s very simple, the desire to just react. Just the humiliation. It’s not necessary to be engaged in left, right, or ultra-gauchiste (extreme left) or … It’s this desire to be on an equal level to other people.

S.M: In the first part of Le Fort des Fous you used non-professional actors that you found on Facebook or in the street to play the soldiers, is that correct?

N.M: Yes - I really love this, I prefer it because when you have this goal in this kind of movie you meet people that really want it, like an adventure. Then they give a lot. They know that they have to spend one month with you, with other people that they don’t know. It’s a very important moment for each of us. And I met them quickly, like 15 minutes. And we wanted the same things and we understood where we were. Even if we have such different stories. We all respected each other and it was fantastic. With the new one about sex I’m going to work also with non-actors. I really want to. When they have this desire, they have and take a lot of freedom. And I like to create with them.

S.M: Where would you say the film lies between fiction and non-fiction?

N.M: As I told you before, I’m working now on the question of the real. I think that we cannot escape from the fact that we’re all full of imagination, full of true or untrue memories, and we don’t have to care about what is true or not, because it’s a part of our construction. And I think that, even for the movies that I do, I never think that it’s fiction or a documentary, true or not true. I mean that I cannot … In the movie I go very far with the imaginary or symbolism but it’s more than reality - you are very far from reality but it’s exactly what we believe. With cinema, I have this fantastic opportunity to connect all this. I take a lot of freedom but never enough to lose the audience.

S.M: In the film, one of your characters says that “peace is for those with security.” How would you apply that to the current global situation?

N.M: We still continue to fight in different ways. I think that we just have to be a full presence, it’s the only thing that we can do, to be present. Only for this, I don’t make movies for the future or to have a name or all that, I want to connect – if I can find a place, and I have found it – what we are I’m here I’m not going to kill myself. Life is crazy things, I’m inside all these things and I have to respect these things and hear it even if it’s a bad person, good person, I have to hear it, deal with it and live with it. I cannot just say, “OK, I’ll just make fiction”. This is the thing I’m working on, and I don’t even have to think about it now because I have the place in movies to do it. When you don’t have a place to give space for that, maybe it’s disturbing, but when you have it, it's fantastic.

Le Fort des Fous had its world premiere at The Locarno Film Festival, and also screened at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and New York film festival. It was released in the UK on October 8th.

Narimane Mari

Mari’s filmography as a director includes Prologue (2007) and Bloody Beans (2013), her first feature film, which has been shown in more than 50 international festivals and museums.  She also directed a project for Hors Pistes at the Centre Pompidou, Paris: La Vie Courante, and produced Roundabout In My Head (2015) and multi-award winning documentaries.

#filmmaking screenwriting filmstudies narimanemari lefortdesfous unifrance londonfilmstudies

[thelondonfilmschool]

A Fantastic Man

Interview by Sophie McVeigh

Photos by Xiao Tang, Andrea Garcia, Christina Morelli 

Friday night was the UK premiere of A Fantastic Woman, directed by Sebastián Lelio and co-written by our very own recent MAS graduate, Gonzalo Maza. The screenwriting cohort were out in force to support their ‘hombre fantástico’ at the packed-out Odeon Leicester Square, where the film was chosen as BFI Flare’s special presentation.

“It was a very inspiring and proud moment for all of us,” said Andrea García, who studied alongside Gonzalo at the London Film School. “Being able to share that moment after all we’ve been through together was quite special. We grew really close during the MA and I feel like every achievement is a celebration for all of us.”

“What a man, it’s the closest I’ll ever get to a real celebrity!” laughed fellow screenwriting graduate Xiao Tang as she took pictures of Gonzalo on the red carpet and proudly posted them on social media. “It’s also a great reminder that you can be talented and hardworking and achieve so much and remain humble.”

Having seen the film at the Berlin Film Festival where it won the Silver Bear for best Screenplay (go, Gonzalo, go!), the team behind BFI’s FLARE (London’s LGBT Film Festival) knew they had to bring it to London, but even its writer looked surprised to be standing on the stage of the largest single-screen cinema in the UK, addressing an audience of nearly 1600 people on the coveted first Friday night of the festival.

The presentation began with an introduction from the BFI’s Tricia Tuttle, with Gonzalo joined on stage by the film’s compelling star, Daniela Vega, and its British composer, Matthew Herbert. A letter was read out from Director Sebastián Lelio, who is currently promoting Disobedience, his first English-language film, in which he said, ‘I want to say thank you to everyone in the audience – if there is anyone in the audience!’ He needn’t have worried. It was a testament to the writing, the director, the performances, the festival itself and the times we live in that a Spanish-language film about a transgender woman confronting prejudice after the death of her much older lover should occupy such a prime-time slot and draw such an adoring crowd. The Evening Standard’s Nick Roddick, choosing the film as his Pick of the Day, said “Prepare to cheer tonight.” And cheer we did.

Once the cheering had died down, the trio came back on stage for a short Q&A. “It’s a film with a lot of energy, but it’s also very tender as well”, said Tricia, asking Gonzalo where the idea originated from and what his emotional connection to the story was. Gonzalo spoke about the theme of trying to say goodbye to someone that you love: “When that happens in your life, it’s such a huge thing, and such an emptiness inside you. I was personally related with that, when my father passed away. We thought that, when that happens, that you need to find a way to say goodbye.”

The film mixes almost painful realism with some quite dream-like sequences - most notably in a nightclub scene when Marina, Vega’s character, goes from isolation to sexuality to a dazzling fantasy dance number. Tricia asked Gonzalo how much of that was there in the original script. “That’s certainly Sebastián”, answered the ever-gracious Gonzalo. “He was very concerned that, since we were making a film about a transgender character, that it could be a really good chance to make a transgender film, in a way – mixing genres. You can draw connections with many other films and the history of filmmaking, also, and that’s very Sebastián. He was very concerned about that when we were writing it.”

In his letter to the audience, Lelio called Gonzalo his “dear friend and co-writer” and stated that, with him on stage, the film was “really well represented, it’s in great hands.” Indie Wire recently named two Maza/Lelio films in its ‘Top 25 Best Female Performances of the 21st Century’ - so what is it that makes their female characters so compelling? In A Fantastic Woman, certainly, it is the mixture of heartbreak, humiliation, strength and defiance that makes it impossible to look away from Vega’s performance. Like the eponymous Gloria, Maza imbues his female characters with genuine nuance and real flaws that make their struggles feel universal, whether they be trans twenty-somethings or lonely middle-aged divorcees.

Closing the Q&A, Daniela made a beautiful speech in which she said that art had saved her life and that she believed in its power to save the lives of others. As the audience applause died down and we filtered out into the lobby, some of us still sniffing back tears, we managed to grab a fan-pic with the man of the hour.  As we gushed over the film, Gonzalo blushed. “People say the most beautiful things about A Fantastic Woman. I’m a lucky guy.”

See what we mean? Still humble. Congratulations to Gonzalo and the whole team behind this life-affirming film – don’t miss it when it goes on full release in March 2018!

Watch the trailer here: http://bit.ly/2gdiuiB

#silverbear #berlinale #bfi london film festival #bfi flare #londonfilmfestival #londonfilmschool #filmstudies #filmmaking #screenwriting #storytelling #gloria #a fantastic woman #sebastian lelio #daniela vega #odeon leicester square #una mujer fantastica #gonzalo maza #lgbtq #filmtalent #female performances

[thelondonfilmschool]

London Film School’s Matthew Button on the ‘bonkers’ experience of LOVING VINCENT

Part Two

Interview by Sophie McVeigh, Photos by Matthew Button

Missed Part One? Catch up here: http://bit.ly/2wBhLec

We caught up with Matthew Button to find out about his background before the London Film School and what he loves about working here …

S.M: What’s your role at LFS and how long have you been here?

M:B: “I’m Head of Production design here at LFS. I have been here since January this year, so I haven’t even done a full year yet. I was a freelance Production Designer right up until then - I actually finished a project, I think, on the 23rd December and then started here in the January so it’s been very much back to back. I’ve been a freelancer in the film industry since about 1998, and worked my way up the ladder. My role here is very satisfying, it’s a practical course, so I’m here to enable the students to realise their production design visions. I start off in the first term giving them a lecture on understanding what production design is, how important it is and how, it’s everything that the camera lens ‘soaks up’. We are responsible for everything in vision, beyond the actors and the costumes they’re wearing, basically everything that lens points at comes down to production design. I really get them to think about that and consider everything that that entails.

Then in term two, I give them a little excerpt of a kind of fun, Hollywood type script, take them to a prop house and say, “you need you to put yourself into the head of a production designer and set decorator”. I want you to go around here and start to really think about all the things you’ll be looking at and sourcing, think if the periods right and how props and dressing are going to be used.” Really, just getting them to start thinking. Its t also a good basis, because when they get into their terms four and five, they actually start making practical films here at the college where they are going to use prop houses and doing set builds, along with location work. It’s a good basis for them to really understand all the remits and roles and responsibilities of production design. In term three we have less contact with the students because they’re mainly involved with documentary film making, but we do a practical one-day course in drafting and model-making, which is really good opportunity for setting them up for what they’re going to be doing in term four and five There, the elected people will actually have to be build a set, using stock scenery from the college. They have to produce a white card model and a floor plan and follow the process from conception to realisation.

We have a very ‘open-door’ policy in Production Design, where we try to help all students. If any students have a particular interest in production design, they can come to us at any time, even right through to the students who are doing their grad films and beyond. I’ve had some graduate students who come back here, even ones working on films now, asking advice. It’s really a support network, for all students right from Term one to the point they graduate and beyond. We’ve got a very supportive Head of Studies, Gisli Snaer, who’s been brilliant and he enabled me to go and work this summer on a feature film. I was able to go and do a Simon Pegg and Nick Frost film over the summer which was great experience, what was really good was that I managed to take some LFS students onto that project, one of which was a girl who’s now graduated. She has gone on to design her first feature, which is shooting now.  I am really lucky to have Carmel here also here in the department. She is very experienced and has been a great support to me in my new role.”

S.M: What made you want to go into teaching after so many years of freelance?

M.B: “I graduated as a Fine Artist, I didn’t study film. I started off my professional career doing sculpture and sculpture restoration. I fell into film work – I’ve always felt a little bit guilty about that, knowing how hard some students have to fight to get into the industry, it actually worked quite easily for me. I felt like a ‘twig in a river’, it just kind of swept me along! Strangely while I was doing the sculpture restoration work I’d always had an interest in teaching so I went and did a teaching certificate qualification and did a bit of part time teaching – arts workshops etc. In conjunction with my later film work some of my colleagues and I set up a Limited company called ‘Creative Arts in Film’, where we’d take young people, mentor then, do talks and try to get them into work. So, although this is the first time I have gone into full time teaching, I have had experience of it before.” 

S.M: Is there anything that you learnt from your experience on Loving Vincent that you’ve brought back here to your teaching at LFS?

M.B: “One thing it’s really made me reiterate is that detail is everything. That the Art Department is only ever as good as the weakest link, you can go to great lengths to produce something, but if there’s one ‘chink ‘in that armour, and that ‘chink’ is exposed, you might as well have not bothered with everything else. I think that because it had to be so meticulous. The Directors were so adamant that every tiny detail had to be right, it forced me to really think about every detail. This is something I definitely reiterate to the students on a regular basis, that your exacting quality control is everything in the art department and that you must think about every tiny detail. Because if you don’t, the illusion is over.”

S.M: What do you love about working here, and what do you think is unique about the course?

M.B: “I got into teaching for many reasons. I have a young family and a strong sense of home, the film industry is absolutely incredible but it got to a point where it was trying to take me all over the world and trying to take me away from my home life. I felt that I’d got that balance completely wrong. Because of that, in some strange way, I felt a little bit that maybe the ‘fire had gone from my belly’. I began to occasionally resent the hours and resent the fact that I might have to go to Morocco for two months and be away from loved ones. What I’ve actually found is that being here at the college here and sensing the enthusiasm of the students has re-lit that fire, and it’s infectious. It’s incredibly satisfying when you can sense that enthusiasm in the students and feel that you might have had something to do with it.”

S.M: You’ve been at LFS for almost a year, what are your plans for the department?

M.B: “One of the advantages of recently coming out of the industry is that I’ve still got a few industry contacts, I recently managed to organise a set visit onto a Wes Anderson film and take some students, which was great opportunity. We’ve managed to introduce a few new things trying to put students in touch with what’s happening out there in the professional ‘film making’ world. It helps contextualise what they’re learning here in a bigger, wider environment. During the summer recess I was able to take some students onto a big film set, it was great to show them that of scale of filmmaking. It’s also good to get across the fact that it’s exactly the same problems as they face here, not enough budget, not enough time and not enough people. It’s exactly the same, just on a bigger scale. The expectations are bigger. It’s incredibly satisfying when you do find students that have got real passion for film making and a privilege to help nurture that.”

#wesanderson #filmmaking #sculpture #filmindustry #fineart #filmeducation #arteducation #gislisnaer #lovingvincent #londonfilmschool #matthewbutton #academyaward #productiondesign #artdepartment #filmstudies #studyfilm #filmteachers

[thelondonfilmschool]

London Film School’s Matthew Button on the ‘bonkers’ experience of LOVING VINCENT - Part One

Interview by Sophie McVeigh, Photos by Matthew Button

As labours of love go, it’s hard to think of one that’s more laborious. Originally conceived as a short film by director Dorota Kobiela, six years and over 65,000 hand-painted frames later comes the mind-boggling achievement that is Loving Vincent, the world’s first fully-painted feature film. It has to be seen to believed, but we were given a unique insight into the process by our very own Head of Production Design, Matthew Button, who headed the production design on the project. It has been referred to variously as ‘miraculous’, ‘truly insane’ and ‘this century’s best animated film’ - if you thought your set build was complicated, wait until you hear about this one …  

Sophie McVeigh: Could you tell us a bit about the film, for those who don’t know anything about it?

Matthew Button: “Well, it’s probably the most bonkers film that anybody’s ever undertaken. The director, a lady called Dorota from Poland, and her co-director/co-producer is also her partner in life, called Hugh Welchman, and they had an avid interest in the work of Van Gogh. Dorota is a fine artist and a film maker in her own right, and Hugh is a film director and producer – he got the Oscar for Peter and the Wolf, the animation. So, they undertook this crazy project. It was first envisaged as a short, to create a short film about Van Gogh as a painted animation. So, basically, every frame was a hand-rendered painting on a canvas. And the idea, which was so interesting that it took off, they actually decided to develop it into a feature film. So, they started developing a feature film script. And I think what they were quite interested in – lots of people knew about Van Gogh’s work but not that many people maybe knew about his journey, the fact that he never sold a painting during his lifetime, and also the circumstances of his death, which is a bit of a murder mystery to some extent. So, the film they did is not necessarily exploring his work, it’s exploring his life and his death. There’s a bit of a thriller element to it, because I didn’t really realise but there was a lot of mystery about how he died, whether he committed suicide or whether he was shot. So, there’s a lot of interesting characters, there’s a lot of people who were jealous of his work … Dr Gachet, who was somebody who was incredibly envious and fancied himself as a painter, was actually a military surgeon and, yet, he failed to treat Van Gogh when he had this gunshot and let him die of his wounds. So, there are some really strange intrigues going on there. And the film’s in two parts – it’s got a black and white, almost realist painted rendering, which is the flashback scenes featuring Van Gogh himself. But then there’s also this character, the postman’s son who was a friend of Van Gogh’s, who goes back to try and find out a little bit about his life and death, and that’s rendered in the style of his work. So, there’s two very different looks to the film. There’s a contemporary murder mystery going and on, and also the flashbacks.”

S.M: Can you explain how the animation process worked?

M.B: “They produced, I believe, 65,000 original paintings on canvas, which was a crazy undertaking. They worked out that if they laid them next to each other it would cover an area of Greater London; this gives you an idea of the kind of epic undertaking! They had about 150 painters, painting full-time in Poland, producing these works. My involvement was to provide the sets and props for the live action work. This was shot and then projected onto canvases. The Artists would then paint over the live action work in the style of Van Gogh’s paintings frame by frame. My job as Production Designer, which was a real challenge was to recreate sets from his paintings that we’d then film with live action actors. These would then get rendered, and then projected onto these PAWS (Painting Animation Work Stations) where the painters would over-paint the images frame by frame.”

S.M: Did it all go to plan or were there any challenges along the way?

M.B: “It did go to plan – I was just saying to somebody earlier today, I feel a little bit of a charlatan in so much as my work was very, very hard work, but I probably had about two months of very hard work on this project, whereas for many people involved it was ‘years’ worth of work, an epic undertaking. My end of it was really, really challenging. What we initially envisaged was going to be a lot of green screen sets that could be reconfigured almost like building blocks soon changed. What we quickly realised was that the more I could give them, the quicker the process, and the more effective it would be. The project was sold to me initially like, “Matt, we just need you to come and organise a few basic hand props and organise getting some green screen scenery elements built”.

What was initially on the face of it a quite a pedestrian undertaking, suddenly became a real challenge. Matching sets and props to paintings. No objects still existed so everything was a ‘make’. I ended up recreating cafes, train carriages and fields of wheat!!”

S.M: Were you a Van Gogh fan before you started working on the film?

M.B: “Not necessarily, I love his work but would never have said I was a Van Gogh ‘fan’, however I think the process of working on ‘Loving Vincent’ has probably changed me in some way. I have an amazing respect for his work and I think there’s such sadness to his story, he had such a vision and a tale to tell and it was such a waste that he never reaped any of the rewards in his lifetime. He had an incredibly tortured life, and his early demise was a tragedy.”

S.M: Is there anything particular about his work that you think works in this format?

M.B: “Well, strangely, I think his work’s has really lent itself to this form of animation. It’s nothing he could have ever envisaged being done but it’s worked incredibly well. It’s an absolute visual feast. The palette he used is so rich and sumptuous and there is nothing dour at all about his work. The directors have at times juxtaposed his ‘pallete’ to deal with quite disturbing material such as his ‘bloody ‘ death. This proves shocking to the viewer.”

S.M: Would you take on the challenge again, knowing what you know now?

M.B: “I absolutely would do it again, but I also know for a fact the directors would never undertake this again! They said it’s the most un-financially sound way to make a film!! (laughs) It’s absolutely bonkers and I don’t think anybody will ever do it again; it makes it all the more interesting and such privilege to be involved. I truly believe it’s unique and this is the only time it will ever be done.”

S.M: If it was to be done again, are there any other artists that you think would work?

M.B: “I don’t know… it’s a bit of a difficult one. As I say, I just think, because his work has lent itself so well to that rendering, I couldn’t think of anybody else who’d work. I just think, what’s nice about him is that it’s got the whole landscape element, the figurative elements, the still life elements, he was so eclectic that as a film it really, really works because it’s got all those mediums you almost want. You’ve got the ‘landscapes, you’ve got your cutaway shots (still life’s’) and you’ve got your ‘real drama’. It’s almost like he’s laid it out for you, as if he’s been thinking about the way you’d make a film through his paintings, which is quite uncanny really.”

S.M: Have you seen the finished film yet?

M.B: “I haven’t, I get to see it on Monday night. The premiere is at The National Gallery – they’ve got a screening where people can go and see it that amazing environment. They managed to secure a very good cast for it – it’s got Helen McCrory, Aiden Turner who plays Poldark, Saoirsie Ronan, Jerome Flynne, Douglas Booth, Chris O’Dowd.”

S.M: Will they all be at the premiere?

M.B: “Well, I hope so, we’ll see. But they were all on set when I was there and they were all lovely. It was such a strange thing for them to get involved in, it was really good esprit de corps because nobody was paid particularly well and everybody just did it because they wanted to including my whole department, we worked crazy hours and absolutely went way beyond what you’d normally be expected to do, but it was just such a unique thing to be involved in.

Unique is certainly the word for it. Just watching the trailer, you’re left with a sense of sadness that Van Gogh is no longer around to see the mammoth amounts of time and effort that have gone into bringing his story to life. But more than that, there’s a sense of joy and awe that there are filmmakers like this in the world, willing to dedicate years of their lives to making the impossible happen. And all for the love of Vincent.”

You can find out more about the fascinating process of making this film and the motivation behind its inception in this Making Of video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE9Q_7bfHsM

#filmmaking #screenwriting #productiondesign #londonfilmschool #lovingvincent #vangogh #artists #painter #poldark #drgachet #matthewbutton #filmeducation #dorota #hugh welchman #peterandthewolf #academyaward

[thelondonfilmschool]

Resources for Screenwriters

Written by Sophie McVeigh

As with any career or creative pursuit that’s worth following, the internet is overflowing with websites related to the art of screenwriting. Some are indispensable and some are, well … you’re never getting those 15 seconds back. To help you navigate through the swamp, we quizzed students, past and present, to find the sites with a permanent place on their bookmark bar.

Reading scripts

All writers are readers, as they say, and that’s just as true for screenplays as it is for novelists. There is simply no better way to learn about the craft than by studying the greats, and the brilliant thing is, if a screenplay is well-written, you’ll romp through it in about the same time as it takes to watch the movie. Below are the web’s best resources for finding free screenplays.

The Internet Movie Script Database claims to be ‘the web’s largest movies script resource’ and I have no reason not believe them. With everything from Evil Dead to La La Land, avoid the misleading ‘download here!’ banners and scroll down to the tiny ‘read script’ blue hyperlink.

http://www.imsdb.com/

Drew’s Script–o–Rama has been a labour of love since 1995 (‘Val Kilmer used to be Batman back then!’), and although it’s a little bit more like digging through a vintage store, there are obscure gems to be found if you’re willing to persevere. The selection is huge, including retro TV scripts that you won’t find anywhere else. Bewitched, anyone?  

http://www.script-o-rama.com/

Simply Scripts is extremely easy to navigate, not plagued by ads and includes bang up to date TV scripts such as Glow and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as anime, radio, musicals and unproduced scripts, for when you feel like practising those report writing skills.

http://www.simplyscripts.com

Podcasts

Live at the end of the Hammersmith and City line? Just joined a gym but can’t motivate yourself to go? What better way to while away the time than by listening to one of these inspiring, informative and entertaining podcasts, collected together by Scrip Reader Pro? My personal favourite is Jeff Goldsmith’s Q&A, featuring some of the world’s best screenwriters. His passion for the subject is infectious, and they’re also a great place to mine for quotes for the Work and Research Journal.

https://www.scriptreaderpro.com/screenwriting-podcasts-2/

Screenwriting Competitions

There’s nothing like getting through to the final stages or even winning something to boost your confidence. Don’t be put off by the large number of applicants - after all, you made it into one of the world’s best film schools, and our recent graduates are currently shortlisted in some of the world’s most prestigious screenplay competitions.

Movie Bytes provides a comprehensive list of screenwriting competitions from all over the world, which you can be search by genre, closing date, rating or entry fee.

https://www.moviebytes.com/index.cfm

If you want to jump straight in at the deep end, Hollywood film executive Stephanie Palmer, in her blog Good in a Room, cuts the wheat from the chaff with her list of the only 13 screenwriting competitions worth entering. They’re mostly American, obvs, but you don’t have to be to enter them.

https://goodinaroom.com/blog/screenwriting-contests/

Opportunities

The BBC Writers’ Room provides links to schemes, workshops and opportunities for writers all over the country, such as the Caroline Aherne Bursary for Funny Northern Women and the Gaelic Comedy Sketch Writing Initiative. If you are neither Gaelic, Northern nor funny, fear not – the BBC Script Room also accepts submissions for drama scripts at various points throughout the year, and the site includes a wealth of advice and interviews with industry professionals.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/

In a similar vein, Channel 4’s 4Talent site provides links to training and graduate schemes such as 4Screenwriting, while BAFTA, Creative England and Creative Skillset’s websites all provide a huge number of links to careers opportunities, competitions and development schemes for those wanting to get into the Film and Television Industries. Talent Lab is a scheme for BAME (Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority) creatives working in film and multiple other platforms, aimed at ‘discovering new stories from Britain’s emerging multicultural talent.’

http://4talent.channel4.com/about-us

http://www.bafta.org/supporting-talent

http://www.creativeengland.co.uk/film-and-tv

http://creativeskillset.org/who_we_help

http://www.b3media.net/talentlab/

Networking

As we all know, working in film and TV is about making connections and finding the right people to collaborate with, which is why, along with the relationships you’re forging at LFS, it’s important to get out there and start meeting people in the industry.

Raindance’s Boozin’ and Schmoozin’ is a laid-back affair for those new to this networking lark who might need a small wine to take the edge off. Monthly events, for both film makers and film lovers, are £5 on the door or free to Raindance members.

https://www.raindance.org/courses/boozin-n-schmoozin-networking/

Women in Film and Television UK, mindful of the fact that women make up a measly 13% of writers in film and TV and only half that when it comes to directing, organise a range of networking events throughout the year, as well as workshops, seminars, panel discussions and screenings, all aimed at getting more women into the industry.

https://wftv.org.uk/events/

And if you already have some professional credits to your name, you can apply to join Bafta Crew, a ‘professional network and masterclass programme connecting emerging talent to BAFTA-winners and nominees’.

http://www.bafta.org/supporting-talent/bafta-crew

Feedback

Feeling brave enough to put your screenplays out into the world and want to be sure your Feature Development Group aren’t just being kind? Prepare yourself for the art of accepting constructive criticism by posting your script on https://blcklst.com/

Magazines/General

If you’re just searching for inspirational interviews, wondering what film to watch next or need some specific guidance on subjects like the comedic point of view, the art of writing horror or even formatting telephone conversations, these are your go-to websites.

https://screencraft.org/

https://thescriptlab.com/

http://www.scriptmag.com/

http://www.euroscript.co.uk/

And, finally …

If you’re truly stuck for inspiration, or you just want Paul Haggis to like one of your Instagram posts (hint: #screenwriting), then why not try https://www.pinterest.co.uk/screencraft/screenwriting-inspiration/ ?

Have you found any websites that interest you, inspire you or just stop you from getting bored on the bus? Post below and share the love!

Coming soon: Resources for Filmmakers

#screenwriting #londonfilmschool #filmmaking #storytelling #resources for writers #screencraft #imdb #magazines #womeninfilmandtv #networking #bbcwritersroom #baftacrew #bafta #podcasts

[thelondonfilmschool]

What I wish I'd Known

By Sophie McVeigh

Samuel Johnson may have been right when he said that 'when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life', but that doesn't mean it's without its challenges, and when you move to a big, bustling capital city, it's easy to feel like everybody knows exactly what they're doing except you. With this in mind, we spoke to students past and present to find out what pearls of wisdom they could pass on – about London, about the UK and the London Film School (LFS) itself – to help make the transition that little bit easier.

Head Space

Not everybody finds it easy to work at home, what with the fridge always there to distract you and those cupboards that suddenly need reorganising. Thankfully there are some great spots not too far from school where you can get your homework head on. All of London’s public libraries are free to join and have free WIFI - Charing Cross, Westminster and Holborn are the nearest to school, while the British Library near St Pancras is a great place to feel inspired. A short and Instagram-friendly walk across the river will take you to the BFI library, which is not only peaceful and free to use, but also crammed with so many books on film that the Work and Research Journal will practically write itself.

(Jonathan O’Donnell)

https://www.gov.uk/local-library-services

Photo Credit: Working on the WRJ at the BFI Library, Christina Morelli

Speaking of the Work and Research Journal...

We're at film school, so it's tempting to want to focus ALL our time on our films, but they're not kidding when they tell you not to leave the journal the last minute. Make notes as you go along and your life will be a whole lot easier when it comes to the deadline. Personally, whenever something came up in class that I thought I could use, I wrote a massive WRJ!!! next to it so it was easier to find later in my notes. People get frustrated with the journal when they leave it until the Thursday before it's due, but if you use it as a space for reflection on what you've learnt it can end up being pretty … enjoyable? OK, I won't say enjoyable. Useful though. It's definitely useful.

(Ulla Prida)

Photo Credit: Choose a quiet time for those free BFI tickets, Jackie Mahoney

Free Films!

Also while you’re at the BFI, don’t forget to take advantage of the free cinema access for LFS students. You’ll need your LFS badge, and to get there a good half an hour early to secure seats, but as long as the showing isn’t sold out they’ll be happy to let you in. Hang around at non-peak times and you’re sure to bag a seat. Horror fans, don’t miss the current Stephen King season to celebrate the author’s 70th birthday.

Cheap films!

If that's still not enough silver screen for you, Odeon does a £17.99 per month ‘Limitless’ cinema pass (£19.99 if you include central London), which, if you went everyday, would work out as 58p per film - for trivia fans, that's the equivalent of going to the cinema in 1975. Speaking of bargains, for the annual membership of £7.50, the Prince Charles Cinema just off Leicester Square does weekly £1 members screenings, randomly chosen from a program which includes anything from the latest releases to classic musicals.

http://www.odeon.co.uk/limitless/

https://princecharlescinema.com

(Xiao Tang)

Photo Credit: Don’t forget to make the most of those student discounts, Ulla Prida

Cheap everything!

The National Union of Students (NUS) extra card will get you discounts on everything from pizza to Apple products, and even your supermarket bill. The Unidays app does a similar thing without the £12 annual fee, while the Student Oyster card gets you a third off London transport. Since London has one of the most expensive underground networks in the world, you might want to think about this. If you’re planning on travelling much outside of London, the Young Person’s Railcard also gets you a third off tickets. And don’t miss Amazon Prime’s 6 months free for students.

https://cards.nusextra.co.uk

https://www.myunidays.com

https://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/adult-discounts-and-concessions/18-student

https://www.16-25railcard.co.uk/

https://goo.gl/9UcZ86

Money in the bank

Now that you've made all those savings you're going to need somewhere to keep them. It can take a while to get an appointment to set up a bank account, so you should start trying as early as possible - the further out from zone one (Central London) you go, the quicker it is. You'll need to take a letter confirming your enrolment at the school, signed by LFS. The vast majority of UK banks don't charge you to hold an account and actually give you stuff to attract your custom, so it's worth shopping around for the best deal. The major ones like Barclays, Lloyds, Santander and HSBC are currently offering incentives such as free NUS cards, Young Person's Railcards (see above) and Amazon gift vouchers, as well as the standard interest-free overdraft. Be careful with these though and read the small print – most are only free while you're studying, and you'll be charged interest if you're still in it when you graduate.

Photo Credit: Hidden squares for a picnic near LFS, Jackie Mahoney

Your health is your wealth

In order to get registered with your local GP ('general practitioner', or family doctor), you will need a piece of mail to prove where you live (since GPs serve their local area). Your first official appointment with the GP is then only to fill out the registration info, so if you actually need to start seeing a doctor sooner rather than later, try to make your first TWO appointments at the same time. There are urgent care centres around London where you can go without an appointment if you are having an immediate issue and can't wait for your doctor's appointment, and they do take your NHS insurance but you will need to have your NHS number. If you don't have it, your GP's office can provide it to you at the front desk. In the UK, healthcare is free at the point of delivery, and although we pay £8 per prescription, students can avoid this charge by filling out an HC2 certificate – see below for more information.

www.nhs.uk

https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/how-to-get-free-prescriptions-and-check-ups-at-the-dentist/

(Thanks to Braden LuBell for these words to the wise)

All work and no play ...

OK, so now you've got your money and your health covered, it's time to enjoy yourself. Time flies at graduate school and the best way to make the most of it is to throw yourself into whatever opportunities come your way. Whether it's the photography society, script clinic, the running club or volunteering for the SU, taking a break from your work while also widening your social circle is the best way to find people who share your passions that you want to work with. Talk to Emily Marquet, the Student Union's Community Liaison, or if something doesn't exist, start it yourself. Cheese appreciation society, anyone?

(Christina Morelli, joiner-inner extraordinaire)

Photo Credit: Barbecue in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Jackie Mahoney

And on the subject of food ...

The canteen is a great place to socialise, but sometimes after a morning in Cinema A you want to take those sandwiches outside for a bit of fresh air, Vitamin D and some down time. Of course, in Covent Garden you’ll find an abundance of café terraces, but they’re not always designed for the student budget. Thankfully, within 5 minutes of the school there are some beautiful courtyards to picnic in - some well-known (Neal’s Yard, St Martin’s Courtyard) and some more hidden - Ch.Ramphal Sangwan Park and The Phoenix Garden are two of my favourites. If you feel like stretching your legs even more, a ten-minute walk will take you to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, an unexpectedly lovely park right in the heart of the city, where they even let you barbecue if the mood takes you.

Language barriers

Don't feel bad if, when you arrive at the school, it feels like your English isn't quite as good as everyone else's. This is an international school and we're here to share our influences and inspiration, not our mastering of the present perfect. If you need help, ask, and if you find it difficult at first just trust that after a couple of terms of intense classes, film watching, discussion, socialising and set life you're going to be chattering away like John Oliver.

(Andrea Garcia)

You can stand under my ...

Umbrella. The most important piece of advice I can give you. Carry an umbrella at all times. You might be lucky enough to come from a country where the weather in the morning gives you some indication of what it will be for the rest of the day, or even the next half an hour, but London likes to keep you guessing.

(Sophie McVeigh, who needs to learn to follow her own advice)

What about you? What are your tips for getting the most out of life in London? Share below anything you think new (or current) students would find useful/life-saving.

  

#coventgarden #studentlife #filmmaking #studentfilms #barbecue #lincolninnfields #crownandanchor #londonfilmschool #bfi #studenttips #johnoliver #sophiemcveigh #languagebarriers #nus #studentunion #samueljohnson #tiredoflondon

[thelondonfilmschool]

Making a Scene

Article by Sophie McVeigh, photography by Cameron Ward

The London Film School (LFS) prides itself on the collaborative nature of its courses, and while that’s more often than not related to film making itself, recent graduates Shalini Adnani and George Bartlett are proof that opportunities are everywhere if you’re open to them.

Having met in the LFS dark room, they discovered not only a shared love of photography, but also a passion for seeing the screenplay as a literary form aside from the film making process. With this in mind, Shalini, a Chilean-Indian graduate of the Filmmaking programme with a background in publishing and George, a recent British graduate from last year’s screenwriting masters who had previously worked as a journalist, decided to create Scenes - a bi-annual screenwriting and photography journal (the first print-version of its kind) to showcase the talents of budding screenwriters and photographers, and to foster critical thinking around the themes of each issue. We caught up with them at the BFI for its launch.

Sophie McVeigh: Hi, George and Shalini. It’s great to be here with you at the launch of Scenes Journal. How did you two come to be working together and what was the inspiration behind the journal?

G.B: We met each other during a dark room class and found we had similar taste in films and wanted to work together as a screenwriter and film maker. Then we started discussing how we read screenplays and how it’s perhaps misunderstood as a piece of literature in and of itself. So we wanted to push it out to a wider audience and get people reading screenplays.

S.M: Had you worked on anything similar before? And what was the process of getting it off the ground?

S.A: We hadn’t really worked on anything similar together but I worked in publishing before and that was my background. So, I just love books, I love touching things, and I wanted it to be tangible for us. I think there was a motivation to get screenplays on paper, in a format that people would appreciate reading. And the process… the process was quite long, especially for the first one. It required curating quite a bit, reaching out to people, trying to get them interested, and I think one of the hardest bits was trying to get people to understand what we were doing. Because a lot of people don’t understand, or didn’t grasp the concept of, reading screenplays. But, slowly, as people understood what we were trying to do, they actually really enjoyed it, because we watch all these films, and we love certain films, but then to read them and to see how a director actually envisaged it is kind of special. It’s very special. So the process really involved a mixture of all kinds of things, talking to people, getting things together, and then getting a designer involved and bringing it all together in a way that would be cohesive.

S.M: The theme of the first issue is ‘Our Past’. What was behind the choice of that subject and what are some of the highlights of the first issue?

S.A: The reason we ended up going for the past, at first we were really attracted to the idea of talking about the self, actually, and the way that people in our generation are just looking inwards, and we’re obsessed with selfies and that kind of things. But, as it started progressing, we actually realised that for our first issue it was really important to start with the genesis of things and the beginning of things, and the past is really powerful for us. We are part of a generation that is constantly looking backwards, we’re obsessed with just, generally, the past, y’know.

G.B: Our culture has become obsessed with looking backwards but not learning from history, not learning from the past but gaining short term pleasure from reaching back to memories that gave us that pleasure. Things like vinyl and Instagram, that started as exactly that – filters to give a nostalgic feel. That’s what we’re interested in, and then perhaps by looking at and examining our past, we can try and learn something about what’s going on.

S.A: I think one of the biggest highlights is the interview with Gonzalo. Gonzalo Maza is the screenwriter of Gloria, A Fantastic Woman and The Year of the Tiger. It was really interesting for me to interview him. I think that, as people that go to film school and learn about film making in a very structured way, speaking to him broke down any of those rules. He was constantly talking about screenwriting as something that is very mysterious, that you don’t have answers to, that doesn’t have a structure, that shouldn’t be formulaic … And so the interview is definitely a highlight. I think another highlight is the piece that Sabrina Mahfouz wrote, who is a poet and a screenwriter but primarily a poet. I think that what she did was take the screenwriting format and experiment with it in a very literary and experimental way, which I think is what we really want to do: take the format and have people understand that in a different way. And a lot of the photo essays are really special.

G.B: It’s a screenwriting and photography journal. Even though we’d love personally to just have a book of screenplays, I understand that people need something visual, and at the end of the day cinema is a visual format. We’re not expecting people just to take it and go, oh yeah, that is literature, but to understand that as a screenwriter, to get it in the hands of a producer, in the hands of someone with money, it has to be literary. Cinema is a visual medium and in the screenplay the screenwriter has to understand the tools of the director. It can’t just read like a novel, it has to read, some would say, like a shot list and it has to evoke some sort of visual and emotional response. By pairing the screenplays loosely with the photo essays, that’s what we wanted to get across. And a lot of the photo essays are documentary form, some of them are set up. But they all, again, pertain to that theme of the past.

S.A: I think another highlight is the essay by Ekua Agha on Ousmane Sembène who, I didn’t know this, but he was what is so-called the father of African film making. I think that what he really did was challenge the European aesthetic of what film was and was one of the founders of third cinema, I suppose. And that to me was really special because I didn’t know who he was, I didn’t learn about him at film school, but this person that was really interested in the film maker brought him into my world and highlighted what I think is really important in film making.

S.M: You’re planning to release two issues a year – what can we expect from future issues and how can people get involved if they want to contribute?

G.B: The next issue we hope to be longer – I think the first issue runs at almost 130 pages, ideally it would be thicker, longer, more screenplays, more essays and more critical thinking about screenplays and the theme. The next issue is going to be on the theme of fractured societies, which kind of needs no explanation as to why it’s relevant now. So we’re looking for scripts from anybody, whether it’s your first screenplay or you know someone that is a talented or established screenwriter, get in touch with us. In an ideal world we’d have a system where people could send us stuff, even if it’s just an idea, and we’ll work with them to develop that script.  

S.M: You’ve both graduated now. How did you find LFS as an environment for collaboration?

G.B: I think the fact that the screenwriting department is just over the road from film making one is really crucial and I’d encourage any student in either department at the school to take the time and the advantage of having that as an opportunity and to use it. 9:25-9.30. It’s been said a million times but film school has to do with what you’re willing to put in. The opportunity’s there, it just has to be taken.

S.M: Thank you very much for talking to us, we’ll let you get back to enjoying your launch party and congratulations on the first issue.

***EXCLUSIVE! LFS Students can get a 10% discount when they order online using code LFS10. Hurry, offer ends September 26th 2017! ***

Follow @scenesjournal  on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for regular updates:

https://www.facebook.com/scenesjournal

https://twitter.com/ScenesJournal

https://www.instagram.com/scnjournal/

Below is an extract from the interview with Gonzalo Maza, writer of the Silver Bear-winning Una Mujer Fantástica and recent graduate of the MA Screenwriting at LFS. To read the rest of the article and a journal’s worth of other inspiring, thought-provoking new work, go to https://www.scenesjournal.com/ to order your copy and find out how to submit your work.

You can also buy Scenes from the BFI library and bookstore and Magculture (270 St John Street, Clerkenwell, London, EC1V 4PE). 

EXTRACT FROM ‘INTERVIEW WITH A SCREENWRITER’ NO. 1

GONZALO MAZA

Article by Shalini Adnani, photography by Cameron Ward

Gonzalo Maza likes women — especially complex ones. Both Gloria and his latest film, Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman), for which he was awarded Best Screenplay at Berlinale, celebrate female endurance and resilience. So it was no surprise that Gonzalo, when I met him at the dimly-lit cafe at the London Film School, proposed, apologetically, that I lead the way, as long as I fed him. The cash machine had just swallowed his card, he was one week late on a deadline, and, with no cash or accessible money in his pocket, he was back to being a penniless screenwriter from his younger years. It was the least I could do for him in his frazzled state, which I soon came to realise was a constant for this prolific screenwriter who is always fighting against the next deadline. To talk of Gonzalo Maza’s life and work is to speak of a man who is on a quest to understand the human condition and is willing to risk reason in doing so. In his eternal mission, one still sees a teenager in the forty-two year old who exclaims he loves “the contradictions of melancholy and cheery beats of Britpop” — a juxtaposition that runs through his work.

Born in Valparaiso, Chile, a port city not far from Santiago, he spent most of his childhood in a beach town nearby, Viña del Mar. A cinephile since he can remember, Gonzalo’s first job was working as a VHS store clerk for his mother’s store, but it wasn’t until an exchange program at the University of Texas that his hope of pursuing screenwriting was solidified. Since his powerful collaboration with the Chilean director and good friend, Sebastián Lelio, Gonzalo has decided to pursue a Masters in Screenwriting at the London Film School, and a PhD exploring the use of current events in screenwriting.

I first encountered Gonzalo’s work in my early twenties when I was back in my hometown, Santiago, and experiencing what some refer to as post-graduation existentialism. I walked into the national cinema buried underneath La Moneda, the national palace, to watch El Año del Tigre (The Year of the Tiger), the only feature film Gonzalo has been the sole writer for. I left the cinema that day deciding I wanted to tell stories that were simple and poignant, and since then have observed Gonzalo’s work and knack for tragicomedy with great admiration. I sat down with Gonzalo in a quiet courtyard in Central London to have a chat.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I wrote a short story once and showed it to a teacher. He didn’t like it. He wanted to change the end. Then I showed it to my father, he didn’t like it either, or he didn’t totally understand it. So I ended up dedicating myself to math, but I always liked journalism — I wrote for a school paper, I had a column, I took workshops and so on and I was also part of a theatre group. When I joined the theatre group, I wanted to be an actor but I quickly realised I had no talent for that - which was very liberating. But one day I wrote a play. This was all when I was about 12. I wrote the play in one evening, showed it to my professor, he liked it — it was very funny. So we got together as a class to make it play happen. We went on to win some awards and went to a national theatre competition.

That was my only ‘dramatic’ event. Then I just dedicated myself to journalism, studied it and continued on that career path. Until 1999 when I did a year abroad at the University of Texas where I took lots of film classes. In this class, I realised that I really liked this medium, and it was what I wanted to do, but I had no idea how to go about it. I had a friend who worked for TV in Chile, so I started writing for TV where I learned lots about docudrama and melodrama. I worked on one TV series that would take real-life events and sort of have a talk show. They would take articles written in magazines and create fictionalised cases on them. That was a really good learning process for me, because they had pretty low expectations and it gave me more liberty. No one ever told me I was any good, but that was my melodrama school—in its purest form, very Latin American. Then I quit journalism completely and joined a production company that did television for children. 

I was a producer on this show and wrote various episodes. This is when I met Sebastián Lelio, who was finishing up his first feature film, and I wanted to know if he wanted a screenwriter. He didn’t want a screenwriter, but at the same time he needed one because he didn’t really know how to take on some elements of writing. I told him I wasn’t a screenwriter with much experience but thought we could get together to work on certain things and bounce ideas around and talk. So, we would get together and just talk about films.

What kind of stories or characters are you attracted to?

There are two things I am very attracted to. One being people who try to seem strong, externally, but are weak or emotional at heart. I think people hide emotion a lot. That get’s me excited - people who hide their feelings. And what excites me even more is when a person who hides their feelings, knows how to hide them really well. Those kind of characters are very touching to me. And I always find myself gravitating towards that. Even though we don’t know where that pain comes from, I like the mix those characters create. 

I like Britpop a lot, the basis for which is sad lyrics set against upbeat melodies. I think my spirit towards life is absolutely happiness, but in my interior I’m a very sad person. And that — which happens to me, happens to everyone. 

So, I tend to do two things if I am stuck. One is if the character is a man, I turn him into a woman and he becomes infinitely better and more interesting. If they are kind of flat, I just turn them into women and they automatically have problems or just come into being and have more shape. Or I go back to this premise of people who hide their feelings. In fact, at the moment I am editing a film I wrote and directed, my first feature I’ve directed, where that is the main conflict I’m tackling. How do you show that construct of happiness and sadness at the same time? It’s generally easier to do something like this through comedy rather than drama. I’m more attracted to comedy. I don’t know if my comedy is that funny, but I still laugh at it. I think I also belong to the school of anti-male. 

What do you mean by anti-male?

I guess it has to do with my upbringing. I went to an all boys school and hated it, I thought it was very prosaic and primitive. I just found it very primitive. I just don’t find men very interesting. What I find interesting is their blindness and not being capable of seeing themselves as they actually are. But I just find women more interesting. I’ve always listened to women, everywhere I go I want to talk to them, it’s the world I want to know and understand. I think they are funnier and entertaining and I admire them. In college, I would be in love with a girl and in my eternal insecurities and fear, I never told them anything. So I always liked being the friend that was close and could hear everything they had to say, rather than confess my love which wouldn’t amount to anything, they would reject me and I would just be miserable. And on top of that, I wouldn’t be able to hear the stories anymore. So, I preferred staying with the experiences these women would give me.

The character of Gloria is very much like the actress who played her, did you have her in mind before you started writing?

We started writing Gloria when we found this character of our ‘mothers’, just this world of our mothers that no one pays attention to, or falls into the background in life. A woman of a certain age, she’s an old lady; she has no more meaning in her life, and therefore is neurotic, and therefore, is everything we complain about. Someone that complains, is bitter. So we saw that and realized how unjust it was to view certain women this way, as a society. So based on that idea, we decided to make a film about our mothers, and then started investigating it until we found Paulina Garcia. I remember being in love with Paulina when I was younger, when she was acting at 18, but we eventually thought of her and started looking through her Facebook photographs. We realised we kept talking about her and had to ask her because the film, wouldn’t exist without her.  So she came over, and we pitched the idea to her. She liked it. So it was a kind of mix between an idea that we wanted to explore and Paulina who was the character and actress we imagined. A kind of character we thought only existed in Chile and had no idea it would be so universal. 

Did you specifically think about post-dictatorial Chile in your writing of Gloria?

I think that film and politics are inevitably intertwined. A film is political because it belongs to a time and place. And when you have a character in a specific space, it is a document of that time and place. We all live in political moments and we are a consequence of that. So that was something we took into account. Seeing the generational difference between our mothers and the students who were out in the streets protesting, it was a very strong contrast between Gloria’s generation who didn’t protest at all. They protested against the government but because of that it meant they were constantly thinking of others, especially if a family member was missing or killed, and they always put their needs in second place. These women were always putting themselves in the second place, never really having a moment for themselves, to liberate themselves, have their moment of glory. In that sense, the film is political. 

#berlinale #screenwriting #filmmaking #londonfilmschool #gonzalomaza #gloria #unamujerfantastica #filmfestival #mastersinfilm #masterscourse #magazine #lfsorguk #universityoftexas #photography #journal

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Q&A REVISITED - ‘Room’ with Lenny Abrahamson (Part 2)

After opening up his Q&A discussing the collaborations that had brought Emma Donoghue’s ROOM to the big screen, director Lenny Abrahamson fielded questions from the audience.  

In Part 2 of ROOM’s Q&A, hosted by The London Film School’s Sue Austen and Richard Kwietniowski, Abrahamson delved deeper into structure, on set chemistry and the effect an Oscar win can have on your career.

How did you get the two actors, the mother and son, to connect? 

About three weeks before we started shooting, we did a clever thing which was to get the room built reasonably far in advance so that it was almost finished when they arrived.  And that meant that they could hang out in the space. This other thing I did was to manufacture reasons for them to hang out together with nothing to do. So quite often, we did a little bit of rehearsing, but actually what I used to do was arrange rehearsal and turn up and say, "Do you know what? I’m so sorry but actually, there’s two calls that I have to do". And I ‘d go away and leave them for half an hour. Brie knew what I was doing, but Jake then just had this ‘unstressful’, dead time with her.  

The other thing that I thought was useful was that we got them to actually make some of the props that are in the room. So they did a lot of the craft stuff together. And just what you have to hope is … that they form something of a relationship - and they did. But the first few days were really hard trying to get Jake to relax. And we tried to shoot as much in order as we could because to make it easier for him to understand what’s happening. And in the scene where he barks at her because he doesn’t like the birthday cake, he didn’t want to shout at her at all, and he whispered to me, "I don’t want to shout at her, because shouting’s rude and I really like her”. So what we did was got the whole crew into a shouting competition and we just turned it into this ridiculous game.  

I was just wondering what you said in your letter to Emma [Donoghue]. 

I think Indiewire published it and it might still be there. My background was academic…and I knew that Emma was born in Dublin and she moved to Canada. So I sort of had a sense that I could talk to her person to person because we shared that background. I told her how I felt about the novel, why it was that I thought it achieved the effect that it did. I think what I was also trying to do was to say, "I understand this book". So it was like an essay really about the choices that she'd made.  And I talked to her about what I thought were the real themes of the novel, which was about the kind of claustrophobia of parenting as well as its joy, about the ways in which all of us have to emerge from some sort of protected shell of childhood fantasy into a much more brutal, dull and dangerous world. But how that’s accelerated and compressed in the case of Jack. 

I was aware that lots of people would be pitching on it, so I tried to anticipate other pitches and say why I thought they would be wrong. And she did in fact get a lot of pitches, which were saying, "let’s animate the interior stuff that the boy feels. Let’s use animation; let’s go magical on it". And I made an argument that I felt you could shoot this very much naturalistically and still somehow experience the interior of the child. And I admitted most of the things I didn’t know and that I felt would be really difficult. So I think I was pretty honest about what I thought the challenges were. 

I think the thing she got most from it was that I was very serious and very passionate about it. And I do think that authors really respond to the fact that somebody has put significant thought into it. Because a lot of the time, she said she would get letter saying "Oh, I love your novel, The Room" – even though it’s called ROOM. So [my letter] had the advantage of being a bit more substantial than that. 

Could you talk about this particular structure, like in WHAT RICHARD DID, in which there’s an incident in the middle that changes everything. 

If you sit in a pub with somebody and you talk to them, what is it that holds them on the bar stool next to you? It’s a through-line of articulate, connected, funny whatever type of conversation you’re having – nobody would say that there’s only one way to conduct a conversation between two human beings – and the idea that there is one way to tell a story is just total nonsense. So, while there is a great tradition of Hollywood screenwriting and there are some fantastic examples of it...I always say to people your responsibility to the audience is to hold them. There has to be a thread, you have to want to move forward. 

But I remember reading this ridiculous piece: ‘there always have to be conflict in a scene’. So if a writer was even uninspired enough to write a scene where a man walks up to a door, knocks on the door, somebody opens it and they walk in, and a director was foolish enough to shoot it, that should be cut out. Utter. Cobblers. I mean that could be the most tense thing you ever saw, if you’re anticipating what’s going to happen in that house. If you’re thinking "please don’t go in there". 

So I tend to like that two halves shape. There are different ways to resolve stories as well. We tend to revolve around the coming to a realisation of the protagonist. But that’s a very American psychologised way of thinking. And ROOM is like that more than anything else I’ve done. But I think there are so many other ways to find a formal, or musical, resolution to something. 

Is it possible to tell us a bit about the editing process? 

What I try to do across the process of making a film - I do all the thinking I can. I have multiple ideas of how I might shoot a scene. But I don’t become rigidly attached to anything. I always come with a plan on a given day, and it’s usually in my head. Because I prefer not to put up a storyboard and then everybody gets so invested in that storyboard. So I tend to approach the shoot with all the ideas ready, but prepared to change.  

And I do the same in the edit.  The editor is so wonderfully disrespectful of whatever it is that I thought I was doing. And he’ll open a scene in a way that I had not anticipated. So I think the editor is such a vital part of the process. And if, as the director, you can form a relationship with an editor that lasts, it’s an amazingly great resource. 

Has being nominated for an Oscar made it easier for you to get your next film made? 

Absolutely. I think there are a couple of ways in which it works. Because Brie got an Oscar, actors will want to work with directors that they feel might do films that are performance based and in which they will look good. So, financiers know that you will attract cast, which is the thing that they are most interested in. And it just means that we can talk to whatever actors we want and who knows how long that’s going to last. 

I think the thing that, for me, is the sort of the problem that goes with it, although it’s a good problem to have, is trying to decide what to make next. And I was joking with somebody recently that when I was starting out in making films in Ireland, I would look at people who had made something interesting in Europe and then gone to the States and made something big and glossy and I’d go, "I would never do that, what a sell-out." [But] it’s really easy to take the moral high ground when nobody is calling you to make a big film. It was very easy for me to do that at that point because the phone was decidedly not ringing. So when it does actually ring and you are given opportunities to do stuff, then you discover if you mean it. What is it that you really want to do?  

And how did you work with the production designer, especially at the beginning? 

That was the first time that I’d worked with Ethan [Tobman]. And I’d seen stuff that he’d done and I just thought that it was amazing. And then I met him.  A really good sign that you’ve met somebody that you can really work with is that you probably talk about loads of things outside of the specifics of design. So we talked about the film, the story and the process. Plus we were working in North America and we wanted somebody local. And he just had this amazing presentation which was over Skype, which isn’t ideal at all, but it was his enthusiasm and kind of clarity of thought about the experience of the kid. He felt [the room] had to be absolutely real, and that chimed with me. How do you think about the ways in which a life lived in a space affects it?  

I think the thing as well is that, sometimes, there are different people for different projects. And, while I can’t ever imagine myself working with a different editor, because we have such a particular synergy, I think there are definitely different cinematographers that I would work with, who have a different impulse, and it’s right for some things and not right for others - and the same with designers. 

Here’s another thing, a piece of advise to any directors - Just shut up. Because, certainly when I was young, I would be thinking, "I must demonstrate to this room or these actors or this designer or this DP, that I know absolutely everything, that I know exactly what I want, that this is my vision, splat! Now come and serve it’. And all you do if you do that is you shut down the creative conversation. So, with actors particularly, I’m much more likely to play dumb at the beginning of the day than I am to come in with all my ideas out on the table. And then watch what they do that you weren’t anticipating. So similarly with auditioning designers for ROOM, I thought I was going to miss something. I wanted somebody to come to me and show me something that I didn’t think of.

To read more Q&As hosted by The London Film School, visit our Q&A REVISITED series on the LFS Tumblr website.

#q and a revisited #Lenny abrahamson #room #pitching #structure #what richard did #editing #production design

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Q&A REVISITED - ‘Room’ with Lenny Abrahamson (Part 1)

While WHAT RICHARD DID and FRANK may have slowly brought director Lenny Abrahamson into the public’s consciousness after his low budget Irish films ADAM AND PAUL and GARAGE, there is no doubting that the Oscar winning ROOM was a game changer.  Inspired by several true stories, the film told the story of a woman and her young son, who were finally able to gain their freedom after years held captive in an enclosed space.  This allowed the boy to experience the outside world for the first time. 

Hosted by The London Film School’s Sue Austen and Richard Kwietniowski, the extremely busy director, writer and producer attended a screening and Q&A of his latest film in Cinema A, delivering an extremely informative talk on the process and intricacies of adapting Emma Donoghue’s novel.  Below are just some of the nuggets of wisdom Abrahamson had to offer.

I’d just like to start by asking you if you could just explain about how this particular film came to happen. 

I work with a company, based in Dublin and London, called Element Pictures. And very closely with the producer Ed Guiney, who I’ve known since we were kids, and this book was being talked about and I took a look at it, and I was instantly captivated by it. And felt that I had a sense of how you might make it into a film. I had made two films at that point – my first film ADAM AND PAUL – and second film, GARAGE, both low budget films, set in Ireland. They had lives on the festival circuit but they didn’t get any profile in the States, and so I wrote this long letter to Emma [Donoghue], which was my only way of really standing out from anyone else. I wrote this five-page letter, just explaining what I wanted to do and why I felt I should do it, talking to her about the novel as articulately as I could. And luckily it kind of seemed to strike a cord with her, but it took quite a while after that because – as I say – I’d only made two small films. The representatives that where selling the film rights to the novel were American and were cautioning her to wait and see. But luckily, she didn’t find anybody else whose pitch she liked and she kept saying, "I wish I could go with that Irish guy whose ideas I like so much.” 

Then, I made WHAT RICHARD DID, which had a bit more profile. Then I was about to make FRANK and suddenly there were A-list actors associated with that, and I think the people in the States said to [Emma], "You know that Irish director that you really like? Maybe you should talk to him". That’s when we met and that point we really knew that we were going to work together. 

It would be great to hear you talking about working with Jacob [Tremblay]. 

It was the most intense working relationship I’ve ever had. I have children and my little boy was about the same age as Jack in the film and, I think had I not had that experience of wrangling a child, it would been extremely difficult to make the film.  But it was brilliant because Jake is amazingly talented. Sometimes things are written around the idea of the child as a presence, maybe something like BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, where it’s her fierceness that the film spins around, and that’s one way of working with a kid, and that’s great because the child just has to be authentic and there. But in this case it’s a fully dramatic part. I mean he has to go through changes in scenes, to realise, see and react to things. Those are actor skills.  [Jake] has presence and a lot of the stuff there is stuff that we’ve nicked and shot when he might not have known that we were [filming]. Some of the very strong images of him just at rest. You know when you’re just studying his face. But when he first auditioned he was a little too trained. Or he seemed to be. But he’s such a natural actor that, actually after reading for probably twenty minutes with him the first time we met in person, I saw that he could dial down. 

He was amazing as was Brie. How did you come about casting her? 

I met three or four really brilliant young actors of her age. And then somebody in our office said, “Oh you should look at this thing called SHORT TERM 12 with this amazing young actor in it called Brie Larson.’  I watched it and she was absolutely amazing. We auditioned, but I think as soon as I met her I kind of knew. She doesn’t seem frail, Brie, as a woman. And there’s a danger. You want to feel that this was a real person who you could’ve met in any place - a real young woman about to start college. You don’t want to feel that you’re dealing with some especially sensitive complex, which is a tendency in filmmaking - to make your protagonist deep. It’s the sort of student film cliché of the person who sits alone in the bedsit, staring deeply just past the lens. But Brie is just a real person. That’s the first you get from her, as well as being a brilliant actor. And she felt like she had the kind of strength, also, to be able to withstand an experience like this.  

And obviously she won an Oscar for this. And you were nominated…and then, presumably, that whole circus thing... 

The circus started for us around Telluride, which is in September. And, in fact it’s becoming absurd. Because the Oscar race begins six months before the Oscars start, and I was on the road pretty much from September until February when the Oscars happened. And, I’ve done publicity for films before and I think it would be a week here, a week there. But in fact it was a full time job. And it’s all about publicity. There are loads of PR people, of experts who only specialise in the Oscars. That’s what they do, that’s their entire job. So the whole thing is like a political campaign. And you can make an amazing film but if you’re not, with the distributors, prepared to put the money in to run that campaign, nobody’s going to hear about the film. I very naively thought it was a meritocracy where if you made a very good film that then maybe some people would vote for it.  

Did you want to show us something? 

Yeah, I was going to talk a little bit about the room itself, and how we constructed it. Because one of the rules that we made was that the plane of focus would always be inside of the room. Because what we were trying to show is that, even a tiny, impoverished space like that, can, if it’s refracted through the mind of a kid, become a universe. So if we had cheated and made it actually bigger and used the camera to give ourselves a break, I thought we would not be doing it honourably.  

So this is Ethan [Tobman], who’s the designer. And what we started to talk a lot about was texture. I wanted it to be truthful…but I also wanted to give it that sort of density and richness. So Ethan did these drawings, and that is the layout that we pretty much eventually went with. And our fear was – could you sustain an hour of a film in this space that small? 

Now the other thing that we did [is] this idea of where the sun moves through the room. That room was built in a studio and each four-tile section of the wall was removable. We never let the camera be back beyond the edge of it. But it allowed the body of the camera to be out – and just the lens in when we wanted to do that. We had a huge big lighting rig around it. And that moved according to the sun path of that particular part of Ohio that we had decided to set it in. So we traced the sun path in the room and the different way the light worked through the day, and we stuck to that pretty truthfully. And Ethan was so obsessed with detail that he even aged, or bleached, the tiles across which the sun would’ve moved over the years.  

It was also important that the way in which Jack has scratched pictures into the cork changes as you go higher up. So when he would have been a tiny child, those drawings and scratches in the cork are one type of level of complexity. And as you go higher up, they change.  So for me, in the end, it felt like the biggest set I’d ever worked in, even though it was physically so small.  

Sometimes you put something in and [it] looks like a movie, and sometimes you put something in and believe that. And usually those things you believe are a bit, just, off.  That’s the other thing about set design - to throw in things that are wrong. That’s how places look right. If you design something too carefully, it doesn’t have the chaos that real places have. So to make sets feel real is a really interesting task and a lot of it is that kind of throwing the real, unpredictable detail at it.

Stay tuned for Part two of Lenny Abrahamson’s Q&A REVISITED, when questions from a curious audience delved deeper into collaborations, structure and the Oscar effect.

#q and a revisited #Room #Lenny Abrahamson #Frank #What Richard Did #Emma Donoghue #Brie Larson #Oscars #production design

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MEET THE PROFESSIONALS - Brian Dunnigan (Head of Screenwriting)

Photo Credit: Chi Yu

In the final of our MEET THE PROFESSIONALS series, interviewing LFS staff, lecturers and tutors for an insight into the working professionals that are the heartbeat of The London Film School, the spotlight falls on Brian Dunnigan, Head of Screenwriting.

Younger than its Filmmaking sibling, the MA Screenwriting programme has been under the careful watch of Dunnigan for 12 years as he built it up from scratch.  As it continues to grow, branching out into areas such as writing for TV, animation and video games, Dunnigan took a moment to reflect on how his passion for film and writing developed while travelling the world and how a background in Sociology gradually brought him into the role of teacher.

Sophie McVeigh (S.M): Could you describe your role at LFS and your involvement in the teaching of the different courses? Brian Dunnigan (B.D): My title is Head of Screenwriting, which means I’m responsible for supporting the development of writing and scripts across the school, although as course leader of the MA in Screenwriting, my main responsibility and most of my time is taken up with managing and teaching on the MA Screenwriting course. 

I think one of the developments that I’ll be exploring with Gisli [Snaer] now that we have a new Head of Academic Studies is looking at ways in which we can increase the relationship between the two courses, but currently there’s a number of things I do on the Filmmaking program. One is I have a team of tutors, some of whom also teach on Screenwriting, and they run a series of script workshops for the film makers. They get four in terms 2, 3 and 4. 

I’m also available on a one-to-one basis to talk to filmmakers about their scripts as they develop them. I run two or three classes every term – an introduction to scriptwriting for [the] first term, and I do a script to screen, where we look at an early and a later draft and then the actual film for a term 4 project. Beyond that I attend the end of term screenings, which is pretty much a whole week of comments on the films that have been made during the term. There’s often anywhere between 50 and 60 films.  My responsibilities, though, are principally as course leader of the MA Screenwriting, which has a whole set of tasks and responsibilities attached to it. 

S.M: You set up the MA in Screenwriting 12 years ago. Could you talk about the process behind it and the decision to do that? 

B.D: I had been practising as a freelance writer and supporting myself in different ways in order to continue to write for a good number of years before I came to The London Film School. I started running workshops before I came here at a number of universities around the south of England and some in international workshops. I first developed a program up in Leeds at The Northern Film School, and when I came back to London I was very much part time at the LFS for two or three years, really from about 2000. Alan Bernstein, the previous Head of Studies, brought me in. So I was running script workshops just for the filmmakers, because that was the only program. And historically that has been pretty much the only program that the London Film School has had. I happened to be on site when the school decided it needed to reimagine itself for the 21st Century. They brought in a new director – a producer called Ben Gibson – and it was decided that one of the changes that we ought to introduce to the school would be to have a writing program that insinuated its way into the Filmmaking course. I happened to be on site at that point as someone who had, not only experience of teaching, but also as a practitioner and had designed and redesigned the course up in Leeds. So I was asked if I would take that on and design that course, which I duly did. I had a template from Skillset, which included certain things that had to be included in the course, touching on the craft skills, the personal voice, the career context and so on. I also researched other courses in the UK, in the States and Europe. I talked to a number of script people and on that basis I began to design the program. It was based on my own experience, on research into other programs, along with input from Alan Bernstein and Ben Gibson at the time. We arrived at a design for the course which was then validated by the university that we had set up a relationship with at the time, which was London Metropolitan University.   

S.M: How has the course changed over the last 12 years? 

B.D: It’s just got better, of course! It’s the twelfth draft. Some changes are incremental. We’ve built the team that delivers the course. The core of that team has been around a while and they have a lot of experience. The management of the course has obviously also got better at responding to feedback from students over the years and refining what we’ve been doing. Since the course was set up, TV series writing has become a very exciting place for writers and directors to work in, and so we’ve introduced a strand into the Screenwriting program on that. We’ve also addressed the reality that when people go out there to try and write for the screen there are many more screens to write for. So we do run classes on writing for animation, video games, web series … We don’t go deeply into these but we give people a set of references and an idea about how they can take the story telling skills they’re learning on the program into other arenas.   

Also, over the years, the relationship between the Screenwriting program and the Film Making program has been built up so that there are a number of formal points where there’s a crossover, particularly the script editing of the Filmmaking scripts, which often then leads on to relationships where the writers are working with the film makers on graduation films. 

S.M: You’ve brought in some really interesting people to talk this term. How do you go about choosing and finding them?

B.D: By being charming. These are transferrable skills that you’ll be practising on the course! Networking is one way. If you’ve been around as long as I have you’ve got friends and contemporaries that you were at film school with or that you’ve met in the process of working who have become quite established and successful. So that’s one way. Another way is that you keep your eyes and ears open for the right kinds of people. Not every writer or director is good at communicating what they do, either. So I attend conferences and film festivals, I go to industry events, I’ve got a social life where I meet people from the industry. So I will encounter people and invite them in through that networking. It is absolutely a skill that you would hope a good course leader would have – attracting people onto the course – and that does require being interested and passionate and being able to communicate that and be able to know where to go and where to meet people. 

S.M: You mentioned that you also do some work internationally. 

B.D: Over the years I’ve run workshops in Ghana, Cuba and Norway. I’ve been invited out to Taiwan, currently, for a month to run a workshop. They’re all different depending on their requirements. I design something that is appropriate to their needs, the stage that they’re at, the kinds of writers they are, the culture and so on. That is very good for my teaching, and it also extends my set of experiences and references by exposing me to different cultures and different ways that people approach making films and telling stories. And sometimes story is not the most important thing.   

S.M: What was your background before teaching and what led you into education? 

B.D: I was at university in the 60s that tips into the 70s, so I was very much a child of that generation. I did Sociology and that gave me a real intellectual grasp of theory, and so one of my abiding interests is the relationship between theory and practice, the way in which I think you can be a better writer if you’re an intelligent one. That’s one of the qualities that we try and insinuate into the way we teach. We draw on a range of the Humanities and we believe that having a deeper understanding of who we are and where we are will inform your writing.   

So, coming from a sociological background, it really opened my eyes and got me very excited intellectually. When I was at university I edited the student newspaper. I wrote poems, I’ve always written over the years. After that I went travelling for a couple of years in North America with my guitar, and I was doing all the usual On the Road type of jobs – I was picking tobacco and I was a roofer. Before that, I made money by emptying garbage, I was a road sweeper and I was a department store Santa Claus. I was in America for two years, wandering around and travelling and having adventures and writing a bit about that. Then I came back to Edinburgh, where I was from, and I set myself up as a freelance writer. I had an idea for a history book, which became a book for school kids. I still get returns on it from Germany, actually! And then I used that material to set up a publishing company; I published maps and broadsheets out of copyright. Then I turned it into a dramatized life in the 17th century for educational radio, and that got me into radio. Radio’s a great medium for a writer. One minute you’d be talking in the pub about an idea, the next you’d be in the studio with a couple of coconuts and Robbie Coltrane back in 18th century Edinburgh. The idea for the book, which took me two years to research and was published, opened up an avenue into radio. My writing in radio was right across the range, to a point where I had a short story on Radio 3, my book had just been published and I was working with a filmmaker in Scotland who told me about film school.   

So, my life changed dramatically. I came down to London and I was at the National Film School, I wrote and directed a number of award-winning short films. Then I went out into the world and I was paid to develop and write feature scripts. Often they don’t get made, but I was in the swim and I was learning a lot, making contacts and building relationships. I started, as one way of supporting and contributing to the writing, doing workshops and maybe teaching one day a week. I suppose storytelling and writing and teaching all share a kind of urge to communicate. So that was always there, and of course on the teaching side you need to have performance skills. Not unlike a director, as well. These skills are all related and they all feed back into each other. If you talk to any of the tutors on the programme who are continuing to practice, they say that they just love coming in for a day or a half-day because it really reminds them how much they know, and they take it all back to their own work, refreshed somehow. So teaching’s always attracted me. It’s a two-way communication as well. ‘I teach, I learn’, says Pablo Casals. You learn a lot from encounters with other humans, who challenge what you are saying and offer a different angle on how you see things. And ultimately, what all this about, is an interest in who we are and where we are. It’s a portal into exploring our reality, and it’s exciting. I’ve always been curious, I’ve always read across the range of philosophy and psychology and art history and I find that all of that broad learning, which is very much a Scottish kind of approach to education.  I find film and storytelling is a perfect arena in which to bring these things all to bear because what else are we doing but trying to create humans in action, and to understand what they might be doing and why they might be pursuing what they’re pursuing? It’s a never ending study. So teaching was always there for me. It was in that direct line that fed my curiosity about life. 

Photo Credit: Chi Yu

S.M: Had an interest in film always been a constant in your life? 

B.D: It had been but I hadn’t always been fully aware of it. Remember, this is an era before TV. I grew up in a family without television until I was about ten, and then there was only one channel. Famously, people will tell you from my generation about the encounter with foreign film on tiny little black and white sets, extraordinary other worlds opening up. So they were always around for me, but growing up in a small country like Scotland where there was no film school, there was no particular film course, it wasn’t something you did. It was something they did in America, in Hollywood.   

So my encounter with the film maker, over a major exhibition that we devised which ended up being an official exhibition at the Edinburgh Festival called Scotch Myths, this man Murray Grigor, he told me about this film school in London. And I’d always fancied coming to London but I didn’t want to come unless I had something specific to do. And I thought, yes. I could take my skills in storytelling, my ability to work with people, and take it into writing and directing. So, that’s what took me to London and film making. Film had always been an interest but once I went to film school it really opened my mind. Film became a passion and I got interested in a deep way. 

S.M: What would you say is unique about the program at LFS? B.D: Clearly, what makes it distinctive compared to many courses is that it takes place in the context of a film school, not a university. Our strap line that we steal from Jean-Claude Carrière is that Screenwriting is Filmmaking. That is something that we put into practice here, because we are a film school where we make about 60 films every 12 weeks and the writers can’t help but be touched by that reality, that screenwriting is just a step towards making a film. It’s a process. So that’s one thing.   

I think the intensity of the course is another – it’s only really 10 months and we pack a lot into that time. A lot of writing, a lot of transferrable skills. I think the sense of community that we establish amongst the writers is certainly one of the things that I think’s important and that we achieve. The mentoring program is not something you find everywhere, and in fact you get a lot of one to one, small group feedback. And I think the responsiveness and the quality of the team of tutors that we have also adds to its quality. We believe that you’ll be a better writer if you’re an intelligent one, so whilst the emphasis is on the practice of writing, there is also a critical journal that we ask you to write, that is an account of what you’re learning. We do this in the belief that thinking about what you’re learning makes you someone who not only knows what the right choice is when you’re writing, but why. It makes you much more able to defend your work and your writing as you move out into the world.   

Another thing that is certainly singular on this course is the quality of written feedback that you get on all the work that you submit, sometimes 3 or 4 pages of detailed notes at every major stage of your development. This, both the work and research journal and the critical feedback from the assessors, is much admired and often talked about by the external examiners. 

S.M: There’s a huge variety of backgrounds amongst the students on the course. Is there anything in particular that you’re looking for when you interview potential students? B.D: You’re looking for people who have got a body of work related to screenwriting or filmmaking – that’s the entry level. But you’re looking for people who are open and curious as well, and who are ready to learn. That’s what it’s about. The course is very much about creating a space where people figure out what it is they need to learn to do what they want to do, rather than telling people so much. So it’s very much about questions rather than answers. Of course, there are a few answers – it’s great when you discover three act structure, but then it’s also a nightmare because it suddenly constrains your imagination. How do you play with that? That’s what you have to figure out through your practice. So we’re looking for people who are curious and open, and who have a passion for, and some knowledge of, film. People who can work with other people. Their ability to communicate. We’re looking for people who’ve got a kind of storytelling gene or some sense of the dramatic. It’s not something that you can necessarily teach, as such. People who are able to listen and pay attention. Having responsive, thoughtful people in the room is what builds the community and the trust and what accelerates everybody’s development.  Not everyone’s got all of these in the moment but these are some of the boxes you’ve got to tick, that’s what we’re looking for. 

S.M: Once someone has been accepted, what advice would you give them to best prepare themselves for their experience here. 

B.D: Enjoy the moment. There are a few moments in life that are really joyful and that are resonant with possibility and change, and getting into a post-graduate programme like this is very exciting. Then, follow up on the homework that I send. Have a look at the screenwriting books, but also at the other references that have nothing to do with screenwriting as such, to deepen and widen their film references. Go to websites and start reading feature screenplays so you get a sense of it, because it’s a very particular form. It’s not unlike a sonnet, or a haiku, or twelve-bar blues. It’s something that can be studied and it has a set of rules and certain principles that you can play off against once you understand what they are. And, of course, continue to write as a daily practice.

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