FADE IN:
INT. ANDY’S HOUSE – MORNING
It’s all a bit messy… I’ve never had quite so much stuff in quite such an assortment of bags as when Saturday 19th April 2014 rolled around.
I’d been up the night before packing said stuff into said bags and they were now strewn all over the kitchen, front hall and dining room. I was very much hoping the GoPro, Nikon D610 & lenses were in there somewhere – along with the various SD and Micro SD cards that each of those took. I was busy putting the various battery chargers into the biscuit tin when I realised… Things Were Getting Out Of Hand.
All this because I was about to cut my teeth directing a short film I’d written called Lucky Charm.
People have asked me if directing a film was a passion – something I’ve always wanted to do. Is it on my bucket list?
No, is my normal reply. It’s because I am impatient.
I’m not trying to be mystical or even interesting when I say this. No – I am just impatient. I also hate being late, I’m desperately trying not to turn into a grumpy old man, and I love cake.
None of this has anything to do with directing, but I did get someone to provide cake for the cast and crew via a twitter shout… it was damn good too!
So why directing?
Two things really.
My mum passed away in February of last year after a long battle with Myeloma. At the same time I was getting married in April, and my future wife had just discovered she was pregnant. As you can probably imagine I was experiencing complete all encompassing, I’m not really functioning properly grief – contrasting with the joy & excitement that there was a sprout on the way.
I remember the contradiction well. My Mum’s death wasn’t something I was able to prepare for and because we didn’t want to talk about the pregnancy until the 3 month scan, I didn’t really talk about that ether. I found myself doing a lot of thinking and a lot of internalising.
I remember walking up the hill home from the station and sitting one very chilly evening on a bench on the local cricket field in Sevenoaks… I drank strawberry milk and had a bit of cry – thinking about mum and well… just thinking. Then of course my thoughts turned babywards and I started feeling happier. Two opposite emotions, so close together so impactful. It was like an emotional tumble dryer really.
I think at that point I realised I wanted to explore that contradiction.
If I’m honest it left my head quite quickly, there were too many other mum based thoughts in there to do anything… so in the end I filed it away for later.
The second reason is more practical.
I wrote a full length romcom script and submitted a query letter to 100 or so producers. I had a success rate of about 3%, of those who wanted to read it (which I was actually quite pleased with). Anyway – the way these things work seems to be you send it off and you wait… Then you wait a bit more… And then a teeny bit more…Then you contact them to see if they had perhaps had the time to read it… And then you wait some more… Then you wait a bit more.
Spotting the pattern?
While I waited, I exceeded my impatient threshold. So I went back to a horror script I’d been developing. I got vaguely serious about it. I actually wrote a treatment. I had a beginning middle and end and everything. I even purchased Save the Cat on my kindle. (Not read it yet but shhhh, don’t tell anyone).
The brother, or Ugly Boy as I shall refer to him, is a professional thesp/theatre director/writer. He mingles in the world of actors whose names your Nan would know. Me I’m mucking about in the long grass down the road, over the bridge and in another dimension to that, but none the less – he agreed to give it a read.
Aside from finding it horrific (which I took as a good sign), he suggested over a beer that I should perhaps think about turning the first scene of it into a short film… and so, Lucky Charm was born.
NEXT TIME: getting to grips with the mantra ‘budget, budget, budget’