Thursday 6th April 2023
I went to the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, just after I finished shooting my debut feature, A Reckoning. I was still editing at that point (and would be for another year), but I’d cut a trailer and was going to show it to everyone and anyone. I was still pretty green and even though it was my second year in Cannes, I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
On my first night there, I met Marc Price. He had just made a zombie film called Colin. We got on well, had drinks, chewed the fat, and then went our separate ways. I went off and hawked my trailer around, almost got knocked over by Harvey Weinstein, tried not to buy anything in the Hotel Barrière Le Majestic for fear of completely wiping out my already depleting bank balance, and somehow managed to have a one-to-one conversation with Jean-Claude Van Damme about low budget filmmaking (he was very kind and generous with his time), plus me and my writing partner Matthew Waldram spent time with Charles Martin Smith talking Trick Or Treat! When I next saw Marc two days later, he was famous.
Marc and his team had played a blinder to the press. They said they’d made Colin for £45. They didn’t, but who cares about the truth; it made for a great story. It became the breakout hit of Cannes, the 45 quid zombie film! Marc couldn’t believe how the world’s press had picked it up and ran with it and he now had everyone talking about his little film.
(I also met good friends and regular collaborators David Bryant and Leigh Dovey during my two year bounce in Cannes.)
I returned to England having achieved very little with A Reckoning other than collecting a stack of business cards and continued with the edit. Marc on the other hand saw his film explode. George Romero was talking about it, admiring it, even Martin Scorsese gave it a big thumbs up, and Marc began to travel the world screening the film at festivals.
I finished my film and for one reason or another, the film ended up in legal limbo, and I walked away from filmmaking. Me and Marc kept in touch and he began developing new projects, some he made, some he didn’t, but he was doing it. I on the other hand found myself in so much debt (without even a film to show for it) that I had to take agency jobs. I remember working as a pot washer in the back room of a restaurant trying to figure out what happened. Now I freely admit that yes, I did feel sorry for myself, and I most probably did mope about not being very much fun to be around. But eventually, things did begin to turn around.
It was writing that saved me (that and my wife, anyway), and the books I wrote, The Electric, Dead Leaves, and Society Place, all led me back to filmmaking. The need, the drive to make, may have lay dormant, but it certainly never left me.
And now I find myself at this point. Baby On Board will be the third short I’ll have directed in less than two years, and I want to keep this pace going now. No more massive gaps in my filmography. I’m on this track now, more focused, more determined, than I’ve ever been.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes on my filmmaking journey (the most were made on A Reckoning: I think I learned about four films worth of knowledge on that film), but I feel in a good place after Here Lies… (by far my most accomplished short, I believe), and as I head into production with Baby On Board, I want to truly show what I can do as a director.
No more looking back now. Time to get very serious about all this stuff.