Whilst I'm talking about nice things that have happened recently I should mention the "THINK-SHOOT-DISTRIBUTE" scheme, which is easily one of the nicest and all round best. Now in it's fifth year TSD is a week long intensive seminar course designed form a massive kick up the arse for people like me who have reached a certain point with their filmmaking but now find it hard to take the next step.

There may be a couple of raised eyebrows (and a couple of delightedly smug grins) at the thought of me and Chris falling into this category. Indeed we got a slightly sceptical response from the organisers when we first applied. But the truth is it's been a hard couple of years since we made "Hallo Panda". it's a mistake to think, as some do, that getting to make a film through Cinema Extreme means an end to struggling, as is shown by our being joined on the course by fellow Extremists Gaelle Dennis and Johnny Barrington.

What the course also proved was that it's as much a mistake to imagine there is ever going to be an end to the struggle. Creatively a film marries the difficulties of drama with the challenges of visual art on a scale that usually forces massive amounts of creative collaboration, co-operation and understanding. Whilst financially each film is a small to medium sized business that will take an average of three years to produce a single product for a market that is deeply unpredictable. Thankfully though the other thing that every speaker had in common was a reassuring belief that though it's never easy, it never need be impossible either.


One of the best speakers was the immaculate Kate Leys, a story editor, a story obsessive and a useful blast of common sense about an industry steeped in depression. For starters I loved her debunking of the British usage of the term "development hell", a phrase I have been misusing all year, as I'm sure have you.

Kate points out that it's an American expression used specifically for when your script is optioned by a producer who is doing nothing with it, either because they are no good at their job or because they're deliberately trying to keep it off the market because it's so similar to another project they're already working on. Development Hell is when your script is not allowed to progress. However over here, where, lets face it, the purchasing of scripts to silence them is a luxury far beyond the wildest dreams of most producers, the term is generally synonymous with development. It means "Oh God someone is giving me tedious script notes and I can't put the damn thing to bed..." it means "I've not finished it yet".

This is a mistake. If, like me, you're writing a script and it keeps going wrong and you keep changing it and improving it and, amazingly, someone is giving you some money to help you with the process, you are not in Development Hell no matter how painful the process may be. You are just in development. It's what should happen. The mistake we make is in ever expecting the process to be quick and painless, to be a long weekend or a month in the country. Writing a film script takes time.

She was equally sanguine about the state of the British Film Industry. I'm ashamed to say I didn't actually realise that we're working in the third biggest film economy in the world. Nor the surprisingly high percentage of the population who regular go to the cinema. Nor the surprisingly high number of British qualifying films that fill our box-office charts. These stats are so surprising I've done gone and forgot 'em (sorry) but it's her argument not mine so take it up with her. My point is that it's delightfully refreshing to meet someone who puts forward a persuasive case against the extremes of death and hopelessness that usually pervade discussion of the state of british film. It's great to meet someone who has a message other than "we're all doomed..."


The one problem with TSD was that it clashed with the launch of the second round of Guiding Lights, the superb Skillset funded Mentoring Scheme through which Chris and I passed a couple of years ago, around the same time we did Cinema Extreme. Oh stop grinding your teeth! I know I've been lucky, though perhaps not in quite the way you imagine. It is not luck that brought Chris and I or any of the other brilliant participants (some really and truly quite quite brilliant) onto any of these schemes. That was down to hard work and being good. The luck comes in living in a country where our talent and dedication is in some way recognised as worth supporting, worth nurturing, even though we've not yet managed to write a feature script despite shunning short films to focus on the task two years ago.

It is never easy to make a film, it will never be easy to make one in the UK. The scale of our film industry, third biggest in the world or not, still means we cannot approach the task with the American attitude of throwing money at it. The US model of making ten films in the hope that one succeeds and funds the nine that don't isn't possible here. However with intelligent support and the kind of long term investment in talent that is now taking shape we can continue to make some remarkably good films... remarkably good like Hunger, remarkably good like Slumdog Millionaire and if it's anywhere near as good as the clip I've seen, the remarkably good Shifty.


Because I needed to earn money I spent some large chunks of last year working. As a result this year it felt like the important thing was to lock myself away and write, as you can see from the massive gaps on this blog! What I found though was, whilst I'm sure this did have some value and use for me, overall it didn't work. What worked far better was meeting other filmmakers and reconnecting with the outside world. That's where the inspiration is.

Recently my brother and I were lucky enough to be voted second place in the inaugural Thunder Clap award. To quote their press release...

"The British Thunderclap Award was set up to find and publicly recognise the director who, as voted by the British film audience, is producing the most innovative or interesting work in British independent film. Be it in features, shorts, documentaries or fiction, the award aims to reward the director who so clearly stamps his or her own individual identity, creativity and vision on an independent film, regardless of budget or professional standing."

So it's delightful to come second, but more delightful to come second to Chris Jones. Chris is, aside from being an award filmmaker, the author of The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook which for some years has been the one truly indispensable guide to film making that everyone who wants to make one should own. What's more it's the book that got my brother and me started so quite literally without Chris Jones we'd never have come second.

The Handbook takes you step by step through the process of making a film from script development through to DVD sales agreement. For our first few films it was a completely invaluable piece of kit, almost more important to us than the camera. I have read, re-read, re-read, copied out and come to terms with the advice within so many times that there are still parts I know by heart.

Living by the Handbook also gives the vicarious thrill of occasionally meeting the people, going to the places or using the services detailed within. Our first, our only, neg cut was by Jim Heffernan. Talking to him felt like being accepted into the real secret brotherhood of filmmaking. Finally being in all the places mentioned in the Handbook was like crossing some invisible line into adulthood. Being beaten into second place by Chris Jones feels like the best defeat I've ever had!

Thanks and congratulations to all those who braved the weather in coming out to the BFI on Monday. As usual, and the teeth of a storm, we were a sell out... or a give out I suppose since the event is free. Lucy and Joe both spoke with wit, insight and modesty about their work and I was, as usual, relieved to find that my eavesdropping of conversation in the bar proved that people had genuinely liked their stuff!

I never take that for granted. At a screening of my work I feel nervous but strangely bullish, when I'm screening other people's films - that's when I feel really scared. I suppose when I'm presenting mine and Chris' work I know in advance what the failings are and I've already agonised over them. Obviously I'm terrified that everyone will hate stuff but since I can see all the reasons why you might I guess it's less of a fear. Screening the work of other people who I think are great is nerve wracking in an entirely different way. It's like introducing your new girlfriend to your oldest friend. What if they don't get on? What if they now both think I'm a fool?

Well, thankfully, it seems that, this time at least, that didn't happen. There were even questions from the audience - good, solid, creative questions like "what are the creative themes that drive your work". So in the end I'm not only proud of the filmmakers, I'm proud of the audience too.

Thanks Shooters...

So it's a month ago, longer. I'm sat in Luton airport and have just found out that my flight has been delayed by an hour. I am flung once again onto the hard spike that is the real truth that underpins the theory of relativity. An hour is not a fixed unit but a form of currency, it has an exchange rate. An hour in bed is short change, an hour in bed with someone you love is scant minutes, an hour alone in Luton airport is the longest hour you will face.

A girl walks past hauling a suitcase almost twice her size. This is no exaggeration since she is tiny, a teenager, on her own, I force myself to stop looking at her, realising it's rude and probably intimidating for one so young all alone in Luton airport. Snail like she seems to carry her world on wheels as she disappears into the crowd.

I am flying to Jersey. Or rather, I am hoping to fly to Jersey at some point this morning. The hour passes second by second, each one astonishingly horrible to taste, an over-sweetened medicine full of synthetic fruit flavouring and the insane dazzle of lights that threaten me with a full english breakfast for only ten pounds. TEN POUNDS. I'm not in Jersey. I'm in Luton. You can't charge me TEN POUNDS for breakfast in Luton. Everything is expensive in this building, every second is expensive.


A man is smiling at me. I am in the holding pen, at the front of the queue to get onto the plane, my fellow travellers and I all lined in anticipation. From the front of the queue behind mine a man is smiling at me. Not nonchalantly like one might perhaps smile at someone who one doesn't know who one might have been accidentally staring at. Not, for instance, how I would smile, friendly and apologetic, at the small girl with the massive suitcase who, I now realise, is there at the far end of the queue for the Jersey flight. No, he is smiling at me as if he either knows me or is trying to sell me drugs.

I smile back in what I hope is a polite refusal of drugs and return my attention to the doors through which I can see the walk to the plane. I love the walk to a plane. I don't much care for flying, emotionally it upsets me, physically it tires me, psychologically it freaks me out and intellectually I disprove of it... but the walk to a plane, rich in anticipation and that starry sense that you are needed somewhere only a plane will take you, your shoes on that soft dark tarmac, that is as delicious as stepping into fresh snow.

Behind me two women are talking about perfume. Their conversation is all I can hear. I have to admit that perfume is not something I regularly think about, it is, I realise, as I listen to their passionate comparison of their favourite scents, my loss. I turn to try and see who they are - the small man is still trying to catch my eye. I turn back to the walk. Soon I'll be doing the walk.


Sat on the plane a hand is thrust my way... "Excuse me..." I look up, it's the smiling man from the holding bay "You're Ben Blaine aren't you?" I panic and probably say something fatuous like "usually". "I'm Phil Dixon from the Canary Wharf film festival, I screened your films!"

The relief is immense. He sits, we talk and he doesn't try and sell me anything. However before the flight finally departs the third seat in our row is taken by the small girl, now free from her luggage. She too is bound for the Branchage film festival on Jersey, she is an actress and star of a short film playing in the same programme as mine. She is actually in her twenties but has been blessed with a casting bracket nearly ten years younger than her.

At the other end of the flight we are all picked up by one of the festival drivers, me, Phil, Ellie and the two women who were discussing perfume, one of whom, it turns out, is also a filmmaker bound for the festival.

In short, and I'm sorry to have taken so much of your time to reach this conclusion, but, in short, that holding pen was nothing more than my own personal establishing shot for the weekend to come. Some how my subconscious edited out all the other non-festival attending crowd in the room and just drew my eye to three who would later play some sort of role in the story.

I mention this purely to illustrate something I think of as the integral truth of the Branchage Film Festival on Jersey. It is not just a festival of films, the whole crazy thing is like one long cinematic dream.


I could be completely wrong (I often am) but I think the Branchage Film Festival on Jersey has basically been willed into existence because somewhere on the island someone has started wondering why the Isle of Mann has a film industry and Jersey doesn't. If this is the case then they're very smart because I can think of no better advert for the island than the Branchage Festival, easily the best and most exciting new film festival I've been to in years.

There are two things that attract filmmakers - money and ideas. Jersey has money. This is inescapable the moment you smell the air. Inescapable when you use a cash point and are delivered a massive fistful of their astonishing currency, which still includes one pound notes and has the "I'm a millionaire" feel of monopoly money. Perhaps I was lucky to have had my first introduction to the place on a sun-kissed afternoon in what had otherwise been a dreary autumn; it certainly felt like I had stepped out of a land of darkness and wind into a paradise of sun light transforming the windows of expensive cars into sheets of pure gold. Here at last is a land full of people where 'tax incentive' doesn't refer to working cash-in-hand.

But what was so really attractive was the atmosphere of the festival. Again, perhaps I'm biased because I've been spending the past months in virtual isolation struggling with a feature script that was refusing to obey. As a jazz musician will tell you, a change is as good as a rest, and a weekend surrounded by people who love, hate, fight and understand film as much as we do was exactly the inspiration we both needed. All too often writing ends up being a solitary task (he typed, alone in the bleak white light of a November morning...) and Branchage was full of people. Amazing people. Delightful people. From the scattering I met on the plane to the sweating, heaving mass of the Spiegel Tent which formed the hub of the festival - Branchage was a collection of supremely fascinating people. But what really made it good was that they were all on the same tiny island as I was.


The real magic of the Branchage festival was, I think, that you had to cross water to get to it. As a result there was no hiding place. You can't just go watch a film and then go home - you're here, you're stuck, you're on an island. As a result rather than all the creative and fascinating people who attend a festival disappearing off back into their own private worlds, Branchage saw everyone flung constantly together.

What was also nice was that we were also flung into the arms and houses of the natives. Far from being a bubble of the film industry floating out to sea, this felt like a community celebrating film, celebrating it's own odd sensibility (the musical runner up in the prize for best film by a Jersey resident gave me an insight into life out there the like of which I'd never quite imagined) and welcoming the world to it's bosom.

Inspiring people, on an island, celebrating the ludicrous act of telling stories with pictures and sound. Far more than any of the island's financial wealth, what Branchage so effortlessly proved was that Jersey is a place that can inspire you, a place where you could make amazing films.

I bet you thought I was dead!

Well, perhaps I was but appropriately for Halloween I have sprung back to life like a Creature sliding off a slab and I am currently in hiding in the snow bound wastes of Hertfordshire. There have been reasons for my silence on this frequency, some interesting, some less so, none to be revealed for the time being - especially since I have great and important news... I too have created a Monster.

But, as all good and avid readers of the original book will tell you the Creature, far from being a lumbering mess with a bolt through it's neck, is a thing of beauty - perhaps a thing of perfection. More specifically it is the 4th in my series of increasingly irregular BFI showcase screenings and it is made up of equal parts of the filmmakers Lucy Moore and Joe Tunmer.

For those of you unaware of the Split Focus screenings, this event is a unique chance for me to bring to your attention two cinematic artists whose work I think you should be aware of. Not a mere greatest hits compilation but a chance to really get inside the heads of two people who are right on the brink of brilliance.


Lucy Moore is something of a first for Split Focus in that she is more writer than director. I think it's very hard for a writer to really stamp their mark on a short film, especially in a world where so much of the kudos and attention goes straight to the director. But I think it's also uncommon because so much writing for short film is lazy and make-do which is why it's always been a delight to watch anything that Lucy has written. You feel in safe hands - you get told a story.

A member of the Royal Court Theatre young writer's programme for five years before turning her attention to screenwriting, her first script Gone was made as part of the Digital Shorts scheme in 2004 and won the BBC New Film makers award. Her next short Undone, which she also directed, was selected for the Cannes Online film competition in 2006 and screened at festivals in France, Italy and Canada. In 2005 she wrote an original drama for Channel 4's 'Coming Up' strand entitled Heavenly Father which was pick of the day in Timeout.

Her first feature script Lullaby is currently in development with Miramax and she is developing a horror project with Hammer Films called 6 Sunnyside Road . She has recently been commissioned to adapt Daphne du Maurier's short story The Apple Tree for the BBC and is working on an original TV series idea for Hillbilly Films/Talkback Thames. She is represented by Tally Garner at Curtis Brown.


By contrast the first thing that strikes you about Joe's films is his gift for the image. He has a strong background in commercials and music videos and has the synesthesiac's gift of freely translating musical and visual emotion. However whilst, for instance, I'll never forget the purple he uses in his film "Mockingbird", what really makes the piece a success is the sublime performance he gets from William Houston and the bedrock of yet another damn fine script.

Joe has written and directed a number of short films which have been funded by the UK Film Council, Warp Films, BBC and Meridian, and have screened and won awards at Cannes, Aspen, Edinburgh, Palm Springs, and Bristol Brief Encounters amongst many others. They have also sold internationally, screened theatrically, and been distributed on DVD. He has also directed commercials, virals and made music videos for artists such as The Pipettes, Animal Collective, Gomez, Cornelius, Simian Mobile Disco, Frightened Rabbit, Múm, Brakes, Elisa, Emiliana Torrini, Help She Can't Swim, Royal Treatment Plant, Radar Brothers and Barringtone.

His first two feature projects are in development, after receiving support from the UK Film Council, Screen South and The Script Factory. He was recently awarded a place on the Skillset/Film London/BFI LFF Think-Shoot-Distribute scheme for emerging talent, and is also a part of the Guiding Lights mentorship scheme, with Stephen Frears as his personal mentor. Joe is represented by Giles Smart at United Agents.


So we have a writer who can direct and a director who can write and we have some of the most compelling and visually arresting films you'll find on a screen... but, and this is the nice bit, we also have two old friends who have worked together for years and who have had a hand in each other's films in more ways than one...

Hard Facts:
BFI Studio on the Southbank at 6.30pm (7pm start) on Monday 10th November for films, talking, drinking, more talking and quite a deal of inspiration.

Admission is free but space is limited so please RSVP to james@shootingpeople.org - if your name's not on the list then we will resort to cliché.

Right, mark off Monday 30th in your diary because we're back in the BFI with two more supremely talented filmmakers bubbling to the top of the sprawling Shooting People community.

Even though these events are irregular (and yes, this one was postponed a month because of me wanting to avoid a clash of superb Shooter events that fell into place last month...) I'd sort of hope that most of you roughly know the score by now; however since 599 new people joined in the past month alone I guess I'd better give a quick run down for those of you still blinking in the sunlight...

For some time I've been searching through the oceans of celluloid and digital tape produced by the populace of the great Shooter Nation keeping my eyes peeled for films that delight, inspire and entertain. In doing so I've been lucky enough to come across a great many brilliant films but I've been luckier to find a greater number of brilliant filmmakers. Often the most interesting and enjoyable part of the process has been following their careers and seeing their work grow, seeing their good films turn into better films. So this year I've been trying to share that pleasure with anyone who can squeeze into the BFI Studio on the Southbank... and in most cases anyone with internet enough to use the Watch Film pages of this very site.

Next on my list of filmmakers I think you should spend some time getting to know are Deva Palmier and Lee Kern.


Deva and Lee share a sense of the bizarre and also a delight in the mundane. They are fantasists who offer a vision of life that can be both funny and disturbing. Most of all though I felt that their work complimented each other because they are, in their own ways, forces of nature.

Stylistically they are very different. Deva is a classicist, film school educated her work is often, at first glance, what you might term "proper" filmmaking. Beautiful, controlled, and well crafted as they are, her films truly shine most when the indescribable Devaness comes leaking out. Her films are never quite what you expect, even when you think you've got her pinned. For instance in Fishy what you think is going to happen does, but where another filmmaker would have let the magical event that hinges the story be cute, in Deva's hands and with the immaculate Shirley Henderson playing the lead the moment is dark and uncompromising. She takes you to where the structure of the story dictates you should go, and satisfied like a good audience we happily follow - but then that oddness, that Devaness seeps in and you realise once again you're getting more than you bargained for.

Lee's work is sort of the reverse. His films sprawl across genres and include documentaries, animations and a sort of film essay that you really have to be Lee to pull off. At first glance he can seem amateurish, charming you with his apparent confusion. He wanders into films that are supposedly about something else with a disingenuous grin as if the whole process of making the film is genuinely slipping out of his hands. Be beguiled, but don't be fooled. At his best Lee's films are among the sharpest, smartest, and most perceptive you'll find. Original, hysterical and genuinely unique Lee's films are those rarest of delights which give cak-handed solipsism a good name.

Or to put it another way, this time I bring you a crazy genius and a genius who is crazy. I'll leave it to you to decide which way round you want to apply those.

6.30pm (7pm start) Monday 30th June at the BFI Studio on the Southbank. Admission is free but space is limited so please RSVP to jane@shootingpeople.org - if your name's not on the list then we will resort to cliche.

It's not often that a punch in the face leaves you feeling lucky. However that is the position that my benevolent fate has left me with. At the start of the month I was returning home with my girlfriend, it was late and the tube station car park was dark but it's not a bad area and it's a journey we've both made for years. Now there's a sentence that clearly paves the way for something bad...

I'm not going to go into much detail, partly because I don't want to think about it but mainly just because the act of retelling will naturally tend to give it some undeserved colour. All that matters for our purposes here is that I finally got the punch in the face that many Shooters have been longing to give me for years and three guys ran off with my laptop and the six months of unbacked up work contained thereon.

But as I'm sure you may have noticed I'm a lucky bastard. For starters in the middle of everything I was allowed a moment of clarity which helped get some useful priority back in my life. My girlfriend was unharmed, as, basically, was I. The laptop was expensive, but that's really quite low on the list of what matters. I had lost a lot of work and a lot of other digital clutter that, when I first realised it had gone, made its absence felt with a sharp pang of need and regret; but this was soon replaced with a sense of freedom. What mattered about all of that stuff was what was in my head.

Oddly, because my good fortune continued, this sense of serenity and freedom, the joy of release from the clutter encouraged by a large hard drive, didn't last all that long. A passerby, clearly drawn by the noise of the event, noticed the three men as they jumped into a car and drove off. With a presence of mind I doubt I could muster she memorised their number plate and came and found my girlfriend and I as I was on the phone to the police. She gave their registration which was traced to an address at which, five hours later, a man was arrested in possession of my laptop.


At this point in the narrative some people have said that were this in the script of "one of those films of your's Ben" it would be seen as unbelievable. So before you make that mistake I will just point out that this isn't so dissimilar to the plot of classic heist movie "The League Of Gentlemen" starring Jack Hawkins and Richard Attenborough, in which a hand picked gang of crack bank robbers is eventually caught simply through the keenness of a child collecting number plates... but I digress.

But then, now I come to think about it, life has digressed too. After all it's not just "The League Of Gentlemen" that contains echoes of what happened. There's barely a moment from the attack that you cannot find replicated in the archives of film. What is harder to find, for obvious narrative reasons, is anything that comes close to the quiet emptiness and frustration that's followed.

My laptop and contents are safely sealed in an air tight back somewhere in Colindale police station. Two weeks on and I'm still not sure when it'll be released. I've been told that they no longer need it, and also that they cannot let it go until after the trial, a date for which isn't going to be set until August. An odd limbo, but in many ways the least of my worries.

I went shopping the other day, just to the supermarket to get some food. It was late afternoon and the offices were shutting. A bunch of work colleagues were hanging about, I walked past and, well I think they were playing kiss chase which is perhaps an office bonding game too far, but for whatever reason three or four them suddenly came sprinting after me. Not after me of course, nothing to do with me. But ridiculously the sound of their feet froze my guts.

I'm lucky. Nothing bad happened to me. As far as being mugged goes I think the only way it could have been a better experience is if before running off they'd given me an ice pack for my jaw an a complimentary t-shirt with a funny logo like "I got mugged and all they left me with was this lousy t-shirt!!" But never the less I feel like shit. I feel like a part of my life has been turned black and white.

Mugging someone is brilliantly filmic. So is being mugged. It's a great story and if you buy me a beer and I'll do the voices and everything. What doesn't work as a story is the endless grey truth that followed. The hundreds of narratively baron ways in which a forty second transaction has altered things. This is what I really appreciate now. This is why I feel lucky.


However this is neither the only trial nor the only good fortune that I have to relay. I'm delighted to say that The Sitcom Trials are returning and are opening their doors now for new submissions for their autumn run. Not only that but the success of last year's run has enabled them to expand the programme as you'll see if you read this.

For those of you not aware of the Trials the idea is pretty simple. Each week they host a live theatrical run off between four prospective sitcoms and the audience vote for their favourite. The winners eventually going through to a final laugh off at the Soho Theatre with an audience of industry figures including the legendary Geoff Posner.

Last year's finalists included "The Good Guide" which, though not the final winner, was definitely mine and Chris' favourite. We've been working with the writer, Sara Pascoe, ever since, helping her shape it into something more saleable and I'm delighted to say that our talent spotting instincts were on form again because, entirely due to her own stand-up brilliance, she's now signing Dawn Sedgewick, agent to, amongst others, Catherine Tate and Simon Pegg. Which I think means she is now legally termed "hot".

What was so good about the Sitcom Trials though was that it took very little skill to see that Sara's script was really funny because we were sat in a room full of people laughing... More over the whole process was great for Sara because it enabled her to put her words in the mouths of some brilliant actors (including Cariad Lloyd off of our Panda film and Nick Ewans who really is due some sort of award for his dedication to short films, if you're reading this and you've not worked with him then you really can't call yourself a filmmaker...) something which really changed the course the script took after the competition was over.

So there, if you're sat at home rereading and rereading the pages you've just written trying to work out if it's just you that's laughing then get in touch with Simon at the sitcom trials through his website every1sacritic.com

And if it all goes wrong and it's not funny, remember there are many worse things in life than people not laughing.

Well apologises to all six of you who asked me where I was and why I'd stopped writing. Truth is I haven't, I've just been concentrating on writing things other than rambling gibberish intended to distract and divert you from your day in the office...

However, that's not all I've been doing because I stumbled across a rather good site called The Open Video Project which offers an astonishing collection of old films for public use. On the whole they are non-fiction, but since this includes all those stunning public information films of the fifties and sixties, not to mention a seemingly endlessly supply of jaunty newsreel footage sponsored by Chevrolet, it is a veritable treasure trove of oddity and delight.

To prove my excitement here's a video I cut together from a couple of films about the perils of drink and drugs amongst the youth of the 1970s. Who could ask for more!

Ah so, another week in the hectic life of a filmmaker and what have I done? Well, oddly, I've actually been doing something rather to the point. No, I've not been making a film, obviously not, I'm a filmmaker living in Britain and so I respect the legislation passed which underlines the fiscal principle that, like children in a newsagent, the economy cannot support more than two filmmakers working at any time.

However no one can stop you writing. They can distract you, but they can't actually stop you. So Chris and I cranked up our group of cranks and spent a very long weekend camping on a friend's sofa and forcing him to feed us whilst we forced other people to be funny so we could write it down. We've then spent most of the rest of the week trying to cajole all the pursuant nonsense into some sort of orderly shape and with a bit of luck this pattern will repeat for the next few weeks...

In this task we have been very ably aided by a rather fantastic new piece of screen writing software which both Chris and I have fallen in love with. Scrivener is a British made piece of Mac only writing software which is still in comparatively early stages of development, but it's already a brilliant all round writing tool.

Now first of all I must come clean, I've never used Final Draft. I'm sure for some of you that's a bit like me saying I've never used Final Cut or a biro. However the simple truth is that for all the bells and whistles I never fancied the idea of paying $200 for something to write with. It's a lot of biros. It always felt like buying a home gym instead of going for a walk. Scrivener is currently $39.95 which would still keep one in ink for a few months but it's no rowing machine. If the words you write are still rubbish you're not going to feel quite so cheated.

Cost issues aside what I'm really enjoying about Scrivener is that it has been designed by somehow who knows how writers think. Index cards, outlining tools and actual pages are all seamlessly integrated enabling you to move from a structural overview to the actual words with the touch of a button. All your research lives in the same project, right next to the draft, and in whatever form it takes (providing that it is in someway digital of course, mp3 is fine but memory is, at the moment, still non-downloadable).

It's also nice that the programme is not a screenwriting tool, but a writing tool. It comes with a series of different templates, screenplay format, stage format, radio play format and so on and is really just designed to help you manage any long writing project - and to do so in a way that Mac addicts like me will find instantly understandable.

It comes with a free 30 day trial period as well and if you'd like to try it you can find it here www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener and if you have any thoughts on it then I for one would love to hear them.


A delight to many - Scrivener will probably be keeping me a little quiet on the blog for a while, however for those of you who, for some reason, may miss me, you can find me wittering in person tomorrow in Stratford as part of the East End Film Festival where I will be chairing an NPA hosted discussion between more interesting people about how best to work with others in film.

That's me, Jes Benstock and Rachel Tillotson talking from 2pm to 3.30pm with plenty of deviation, hesitation and repetition at:

Stratford Circus
Theatre Square, Stratford, London, E15 1BX

Are you an aspiring film professional who has already banged your head against too many doors and is starting to feel like the whole stupid idea was a pointless waste of time and you'd have been better off becoming a plumber?

Can you see how your entire creative and professional world could change if only you could get yourself some better friends, meet some people further along with their career and get some solid one to one advice about the things you should never ever do?

Well, you've got until 5pm on Tuesday 29th April to get your application in for your next best chance of finding exactly the help and support that you're actually looking for. Brilliantly Guiding Lights, the mentoring scheme that I graduated from a year or so ago has been given a second year of funding and is once again offering to match a group of the best struggling talent with some of the industries real achievers.

Thanks to Guiding Lights, my brother and I were taken under the paternal wing of Gillies MacKinnon and I simply can't stress enough quite how brilliant it was to have someone like that at the end of the phone to give you script feedback. Painful, sure, but well timed, well judged and exactly what we needed. Not only did Gillies help us unstick our projects and enable us to move forward (or stumble forward in the usual vein of the industry...) he also helped us to stop worrying quite so much about that strange and difficult motion of developing a film. Getting to see how the process works at first hand, getting to see how hard it is for someone as gifted and experienced as Gillies to get a project off the ground and seeing the way he deals with the ups and downs of it all... it's the best learning experience you could ever ask for.

This year the possible mentors include Paul Greengrass, Kevin Macdonald, Nira Park, Mark Herbert, Emma Thompson, David Yates, Julia Short, Patrick Marber, Kenneth Branagh, Seamus McGarvey, Cameron McCracken and Paul Webster and more are being added. If you are not where you want to be in your career and you don't apply to this then you've got no one but yourself to blame...

www.guiding-lights.org.uk

Not that you can really see in these pictures but there was also a entire screenplay in German, gently being transformed by the rain into a single soggy lump.

And also a business card from someone in the BBC Wales Sports Department.

A strange relationship with Paris.

As both of you who check this blog regularly will have noticed, I've been away for the past month enjoying the peaceful bliss of not having broadband internet, not answering the phone and being barely able to understand what most people in the world are saying. It is surprising how nice it is to be uncomprehending. Massively frustrating at times too, even, for someone endlessly verbose like I am, depressing. However it is nice how easy it is to ignore the constant blather of guilt and greed that leech from adverts into your subconscious when you have very little idea what they are actually saying. Celebrity magazines are finally rendered as meaningless as they are and the moans and whines of bored children are as sweet as birdsong.

However the first time my girlfriend and I went to the cinema it was with the deliberate intention of watching something Version Originale so that we could hear people talking our language. What's odd about watching a film in English with subtitles you can't really understand is that it's still very hard to not read the subtitles. It's also quite interesting watching how a film is translated, what is lost and what is changed. Best of all for this was going to see some Beckett at Peter Brook's Parisian home, Bouffes Du Nord. Because Beckett was fluently bilingual the matinee performances are in French and the evenings are English with French surtitles. I can only presume therefore that the surtitles, which again I found I had to read and try and understand, are not merely the best effort of a third party to translate the meaning, they are Beckett himself gleefully rewriting his own work in a second language. Things that in spoken English have two meanings, like describing a woman as staring out through the pane, don't come across in the French translation - and I'm sure vice versa, I definitely noted a gleeful rhyme in the French for gambling and god that the alliteration doesn't quite capture.

After three weeks and having already seen "Juno" and "There Will Be Blood" (which, oddly I thought, was a title never translated to French) we did however feel brave enough to try watching Kristin Scott-Thomas' new film "Il y Longtemps Que Je T'aime." or "Love You Long Time" as it is not called in English. I'm not quite sure why the fact that we knew the star was bilingual made us feel we might be able to understand her better when she was still talking in a language neither of us can really speak, but somehow it did seem like because she was English we'd sort of manage to get along...

It seems like a brilliant film and I can't wait for it to come out here in translation so I can see it again and actually understand what was really going on. Certainly it got to the French, about two thirds of the way through, seemingly apropro nothing at all, most of the audience burst into tears. However, even if we didn't quite follow the nuances of each scene it was nice to see how much of the general plot and emotion you did pick up even if you don't really know what people are saying to each other. Also, as with being able to turn off the blather of everyday life, it was also much easier to sit back and enjoy the way the director was telling the story, his eye for detail and the controlled way he let scenes run or played with the narrative perspective.

Having seen a French play, albeit one directed by an Englishman, written by an Irishman and staring an English woman, A Dutchman and an Italian and watched a French film (yeah, with an English star), and having loved them both we were feeling rather full of the joys of the city. It is, after all, an easy city to fall in love with, the design is enticing, the architecture attractive and the food amazing. But more specifically, from our brief stay, it seemed like the French had the right approach to life. Bouffes Du Nord, with it's ripped out beat up grandeur is one of the most attractive theatre spaces I've ever been in. It reeks of dedication to the theatrical moment and the bare simplicity of the place makes the entire building seethe with an energy that I've never felt in the west end. Likewise standing in the pouring rain in a queue to get into a cinema may be dampening and irritating but it's also not something you'd imagine an English audience doing - especially not for an English film.

Then we met up with a French friend of ours called Margot, who'd been out of the city for most of our stay. Within minutes she was raving about how lucky we were to have the West End, how there was nothing in Paris that really come close to it and how much she loved British Cinema, especially Richard Curtis... What she especially liked was the way we approached the arts. For her the subsidised theatre just made French actors lazy, it makes a lack of professionalism hide behind a mask of artistic integrity, it makes learning your lines look like trying too hard. Likewise with the French films she'd seen recently, they all felt, too French, too lazy, as if the director had been too high and mighty to bother working out what the plot actually was...


Paris is like London through the Looking Glass. They cities made of the same basic stuff, peopled with the same basic people, but brought up by different parents. We are siblings, and, like all siblings, we want nothing so much as what the other has.

One of the clever things that I've just worked out about the blogging interface that George got me to use when this whole malarky was set up, is that if I set the date in advance then the entry pops up in the future without me having to be there to actually upload it.

Consequently if you are reading this then it means I've not been able to delete it and prevent it appearing, which in turns mean I don't have the internet in Paris.

I'm in Paris for the whole of March. Yeah, I know.

See you in April my loves.

xx

Well I'm delighted to say that following the success of the first Split Focus event at the BFI we've been allowed back for a second bite of the cherry...

For those who've not been paying attention, Split Focus is a new programme of screenings Shooting People are putting on in an attempt to give a platform to proven talent. For some time now I've been trying to find the best films being made by members of the Shooting People community. My aim has always been to support the films that reach an audience and give the rest of us something to aspire to. However, since I'm mainly looking at first or second films by new directors I've often found myself coming across films that aren't perfect, films that don't really stand up on their own, but which never the less excite me and clearly demonstrate that their creators are gifted and grappling with some amazing ideas.

To put it another way, to make a single amazing film always requires a degree of good fortune; to make four or five films less than perfect films that never the less stretch the imagination and delight the senses takes a gifted and dedicated director. So, with thanks to the BFI, we've started putting on showcases for some of the more delightful and dedicated filmmakers who are using Shooting People to get their work made and seen. This time round our focus falls on Daniel Cormack and Kara Miller.


Whilst last time I chose two filmmakers with very differing styles, this programme brings together two directors with a shared love of simple, powerful story telling. Drama is a very dirty word at the moment, usually being used to conjure a certain humdrum quietude which is far from compelling. What I love about Daniel's film "Amelia and Michael" or Kara's "Elephant Palm Tree", is that both demonstrate the directors' ability to set the simplest of scenes on fire. These films are dramas, short plays which bring you for a moment into the lives of strangers and peel back the layers, revealing, showing but never telling. If you don't watch a lot of films then these are the sort of films you imagine get made all the time; if, like me, you watch far too many films you begin to appreciate the subtle skill and grace that makes something as simple as two people talking over breakfast so electrifying.

What is also so refreshing about these films is that it is only when watched together that you realise quite how much work Daniel and Kara are putting in. Like swans, the furious paddling is going on under the surface and rather than having your attention constantly drawn to the fact that you are watching the work of a director, all the focus is given to the story, to the characters, to the emotion, to the things that engage on the basic human level.


For this show Daniel is returning to the BFI for the second time in as many months, having already had one retrospective there this year, as part of the Disability Film Festival. His epilepsy meant that he couldn't watch TV as a child and consequently spent his childhood in the cinema. It is unsurprising then to find that he has turned into a classicist, his films full of all the hallmarks of someone with an innate understanding and love of cinema in the truest sense of the term. Though his first film "Amelia & Michael" is, I think, still his most successful, my favourite is "A Fitting Tribute" where he takes what other directors would shape into a glib film with a twist and injects it full of pathos. What he's done is not complicated, he's just shown the story, the characters and indeed the audience the respect that they deserve.

Similarly, Kara's background writing for both the radio and the stage helps explain the skill and care she uses to craft her characters and dialogue. However if her most visually accomplished film "Elephant Palm Tree" strains at the edges of theatricality, then her follow-up, my favourite of hers "How To Make Friends" shows her heading off in a much looser and more cinematic style. She is a great writer, but here she lets her directorial side take over and the results are delightful.

Lastly, the other thing that unites these directors is their shared ability to find great actors and allow them to give great performances. Anthony Head, Natasha Powell, Tamsin Grieg, Dudley Sutton, Dona Croll, the truly immense George Harris and the ever rising star Tom Nelstrop all give of their best in this collection of films and that is, with apologises for the pun, indeed a fitting tribute to the talents of directors Daniel Cormack and Kara Miller.


The event is at 6pm on Monday March 10th at the BFI Studio, part of the shiny new bit of what use to be called the NFT. Both Daniel and Kara will be there and will be chatting after the screening about the way they work and what they're working on next.

It is FREE entry, but obviously we're limited by space and judging by last time you need to RSVP to Jo to make sure you can get in.


You can find out more about Daniel Cormack from his website www.actaeonfilms.com

And more about Kara Miller from her website www.arawakfilms.com

And there is a facebook page for the event with pictures and everything here..

OK, having been on a bit of an artsy tip for the past couple of weeks I feel duty bound to bring to your attention Alex Emslie's short film "Portrait Of An Artist."

It features two superb comic performances... but I can't wait for the film to rebuffer so I can scroll to the end to get the cast's names. Alex! Fill out the cast details on the film page!

Anyway, though I have to ask the question "Is Mockumentary A Hateful Waste Of Time? (Discuss)" I have to say that this is a charming and delightful film. (Click on the links to watch it!)