Posted on

In the second episode of Short Hand, we’re putting the spotlight on directing and asking our guests Ella Jones (Sarah Chong Is Going To Kill Herself), Harry Lighton (Wren Boys) and Edem Kelman (Princess), how they formulate a perspective and a vision, hone their craft and then disseminate that in applications or conversations to entice other people to come on board. 

Topics covered include: gaining confidence and experience as a director, putting yourself out there, directing material you haven’t written, mentorship, formal innovation, why you should always be cutting, stretching budgets and finding your voice.

I see ambition as wanting to make something which surprises an audience and I mean, it sounds horribly, horribly ambitious, but also surprises the film world. I want to put something out there which people watch and they go, I’ve never seen a story told this way before or I’ve never seen someone use the form in this way before.

Harry Lighton

SHOW NOTES & RESOURCES

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Short Hand: Hello, you’re listening to SHORT HAND – a BFI NETWORK and Film Hub South East podcast. Whether you’re actively making a short film or just passively thinking about it, this is a podcast designed to help you on the journey from coming up with a compelling short film idea to editing it into a finished product. In this second episode, we’re talking to directors about how they honed their visions and then communicated that to collaborators and funders, as well as how they gained confidence and used limitations to their advantage. 

Ella Jones: I don’t think growing up I thought directing is the thing that I definitely want to do. But I knew that I loved the world of film and TV. I was very lucky in a sense to be an actress as a child. So I got to be on sets and kind of grow up around people working in that industry. And I think that led to me, you know, developing a real passion for the world of it. And I think what I loved so much and continue to love to this day was the kind of collaborative nature of film and TV and the fact that certainly growing up and I think I still feel is that everyone working in these jobs is doing it because they’re passionate about it and because they love it. Because it’s so difficult to just fall into it. And so I think it was that kind of growing passion for the industry in general. And starting off getting to experience what that was like from in front of the camera, but then developing more of an interest in being behind the camera.

Short Hand: That’s Ella Jones talking about how she discovered that directing was something she wanted to or could do. Ella is an award-winning film and TV director based in London. Her recent and upcoming television work includes HBO’s comedy horror series The Baby, as well as Back to Life and Pandemonium for the BBC. Ella’s short films have played at festivals internationally and include the Creative England-backed comedy Sarah Chong is Going To Kill Herself. She recently finished post-production on Miss Fortunate and Petra a short drama written by and starring Charlotte Hamblin. You’re about to hear Ella talk about what she considers to be her first directing gig and finding collaborators and people that she was coming up through the industry with.

Ella Jones: My first film directing gig is kind of a tricky one to break down, I guess it could mean three different things. In a sense, it could mean the first thing that I ever directed, it could be the thing that I kind of see as my breakout kind of defining thing that I directed and then I guess the third thing could be the first paid thing I did, because all three are kind of different, but significant in different ways. So I guess the first thing I ever directed for screen was a short film that I did with some friends and a tiny camera at my friend’s house. And we literally kind of got, you know, a few passionate friends together. And me and my friend, we made breakfast and we also held the lights. And my friend did the costume and everything was just kind of all hands on deck. But it was really, really fun. But very much in a vacuum of self-funded low budget, calling in favours just making it possible really. And then the first defining or breakout film I did was a short film that was my first properly funded short film through Creative England. It was a scheme called ‘Funny Girls’ for female comedy directors. And that was an incredible opportunity for me. And I think for the other female directors who took part in the scheme because they’ve all gone on to do really amazing things. We basically applied with a script and the writer I was working with, I’d met at a production company I’d interned in and worked at and it was the first thing she’d written. And we kind of applied on a whim thinking, you know, give it a go. And then yeah, we got selected. It was quite a long selection process  which involved a weekend in Brighton developing the scripts and working with script editors and stuff, which was amazing. And then yeah, the opportunity to make a funded short film with support as well. And the development help was amazing. And off the back of that film, I got an agent and me and the writer and the producer who made the film got a meeting with Film4 and then got a feature commission and so various very exciting things happened off the back of that and that kind of became and kind of still is in a weird way a calling card short film, and it definitely allowed me to make the next step. So the third kind of first directing gig in a sense would be like my first paid directing gig, which was a TV taster for Channel 4. So I think for a lot of directors who are kind of stepping into the world of TV or paid work, if you don’t go down the commercials route, you kind of do tasters and teasers. And they’re kind of mini-pilots. So it’s like 10 minutes long or 15 minutes long. And often they don’t, the idea is not for them to be broadcast, it’s more to act as a taster or a pitch for wider series. So I did one of those with a company. And that was my first experience of directing in a paid environment. 

I think that collaboration is one of the things that really attracted me to directing and the industry as a whole. And I absolutely love working with writers and producers.I think there’s obviously, you know, a real interest in the auteur and the person who writes and directs and does it all and I have a lot of respect for those people. But I also think that that’s not the only way to do things. You can have something that’s just as distinctive and authored through a collaboration with trusted people that are all working towards the same end goal. For me, I think your collaborators as a director are so important, even as director who writes their own stuff, your collaborators, or your Heads of Departments, so your Director of Photography, your 1st AD, those people are people that you’ll often take on future jobs, and you’re allowed to as a director to select those people, because everyone recognises that there’s such an important relationship and how you work together is going to be so key to that end goal. 

In terms of finding those collaborators, what’s really interesting is that, I think so often it can seem like you have to go down this one linear path to get to where you want to get to, so I want to be a director, so I’m just gonna make films and then become a director. And then it happens. And, and it’s quite tricky, because there’s no clear ladder to follow, and everyone’s journey is different. And I think that can seem certainly, as it did for me, kind of scary. And you can feel a bit lost. But at the same time, looking back, I think those different circuitous kind of jobs and things that you do along the way actually allow you to learn so much and build connections. So I met the writer that I made my first funded short film with when I was working as an office manager in a production company, so we became friends and got on as colleagues, both doing jobs that weren’t really the jobs that we ultimately wanted to do. The DoP who made the first short films with me, my friend met, because they were both volunteering on an NFTS film. So you know, and they were both volunteering in different roles, but they kind of saw each other and were like, Oh, do you want to do something ourselves? And then they did. So you know, it’s kind of unpredictable, but ultimately, it makes sense. It’s like, the more we put ourselves out there. And the more experience we get in different ways, in a broad capacity that I think we meet people who are like-minded.

One of the biggest pieces of advice that I was given and I would pass on even though it seems so kind of obvious is like make stuff but make stuff and show people stuff because that’s the only way that you can both learn, but also that you can put yourself out there and that ultimately, it might not be the first thing that you make that attracts people’s attention. But it might instead attract collaborators, and then you might together build something better, and create something better. And then ultimately, the people that you want to see it and respond to it will at some point. And so it’s just yeah, putting yourself out there and being brave.

Short Hand: In the next section, Ella discusses how she approaches working on material that she didn’t write, honing her instincts as a director, conveying that approach to potential collaborators, or funders and gaining confidence by using every project you worked on as an opportunity to bank knowledge.

Ella Jones: I really enjoy the process of coming to a script as a director, because there’s a level of fresh eyes and fresh perspective that you can bring. I think, for me, it’s also been really helpful, again, going back to that thing of seemingly circuitous routes to get where you want to get to is that I worked for a long time as a script editor. And that, you know, on one level was a job that allowed me to pay the bills and allowed me  keep pursuingdirecting. But actually, I learned so much from script editing that I’ve been able to take into my directing. And what I think fundamentally it gave me is an understanding of story, which I think is how every director in my eyes when approaching a narrative project should be approaching the script and how to bring it to life because ultimately, I think as a director, it’s your responsibility to tell the story.

So in terms of bringing my own stamp to something I don’t really come at it from a like how am I going to make my mark on it because I actually think everyone’s going to, you know, whether they want to or not, bring their own stamp, just subconsciously, by the way that we imagine what’s on the page and the shots that we visualised and everything else. But all I can do is come at it from trying to understand the story. And if I don’t understand that, that’s where I start to ask the questions, and then that kind of informs the choices I make as a director, I think it’s an endless thing for a director is, is how do you communicate a visual medium, and how you’re going to approach a visual medium through both words and visuals. And it’s something that continues to be true, you know, throughout your career, and certainly when I go in to pitch for TV shows, that’s what I’m doing. I’m having to convey my approach because it’s hard and being on the other side of it, as a director meeting heads of department, you’re going How can I tell what kind of visuals you’re gonna bring as a director of photography, or what the costumes are gonna look like without you having to do all the work now? And so how do you communicate that, I think is an ongoing question that we’re all kind of trying to answer and learn, I guess and get better at. 

For me, I’m still refining that approach. But I find it’s a mixture of really trying to get a real understanding of the story. And what I think the story is, what I connect with and what I respond to, because in a starting point, that allows me to have a conversation with whoever I’m talking to about it. And it allows us to work out whether we’re on the same page, I think that really helps me to kind of find a way in and access it. The second thing is tone. I think tone is so key to a project. And I work a lot in comedy and comedy-drama. And that’s where tone is such a delicate balance, like light and dark and edge and warmth, and all of that stuff. I mean, my favourite projects are things that straddle that, but again, tone is a way I find of accessing what the project is and what my approach to it would be. And by that, what I mean is, if the tone feels quite heightened, then for me, the story world and the visuals often should be quite heightened to match. Or if it feels very real, where the authenticity and reality of the story is so key to conveying what the writer is trying to convey, then I think the visuals would be, well, in my sense, might be kind of more grounded and naturalistic. But you know, there might be something interesting in flipping that. But I think that basically allows me to have a way into how I think about the visuals. Even if something is a written thing that I’m doing or an interview that I have, I’ll always do visuals as well, because I find that such a useful way in, even if they’re just for me, but also it allows me to almost build the kind of presentation of how I’m going to talk about or how I’m going to articulate the visuals. Because sometimes it can seem a bit like well, I know I want it to look like this. Or like I know, I want it to look like a Wes Anderson film or I want it to look a bit Coen Brothers-y, but how do you actually articulate that. But actually, the more you collect the images, and you start to look at the patterns and the images and understand what it is that you’re looking for, I think the more that you find a language for talking about that, that’s certainly what I found. And as a result, my visual pitches have got stronger, but also they’ve become more organised in a way that I’ve, at the beginning, they were just mood images. And they were just like, Oh, these are images that kind of reflect my feeling and general ideas for this film or this TV project. And now I’m able to kind of sort them into images that show framing or lighting or help talk about tone, so I’ll be able to say, you know, I’ll use framing in a comedic way in order to enhance the moments of comedy, but then I’ll also use framing in other ways in order to show those moments of loneliness or intimacy or whatever it is. So I can then find a language that kind of goes alongside the visuals, if that makes sense, or helps me to describe the visuals. Sometimes just by kind of building that little document for yourself, which you may get to show you may not get to show it can be a useful way of ordering your thoughts. And also I think it gives you confidence. 

Confidence is such an elusive, evolving thing. I think we all feel like, well, I certainly feel like I’d love to have more confidence. But then I’m also aware, I’ve got more confidence than maybe I used to have or I must have a certain amount of confidence in order to be putting myself out there. One of the things I’ve actually found that has given me a lot of confidence is mentoring, because what’s been really nice is I’ve been mentored and I mentor. I think it’s something that as an industry we should do more of, it’s like a chain of mentoring because I’ve kind of gained so much from being mentored by an older more experienced director. But I also have found that in the process of mentoring someone starting out or several people starting out, it’s allowed me to acknowledge and really recognise how far I’ve come and what I’ve learned and then I also think that it’s constantly trying to remind yourself that it’s not an end goal. It’s the process, the process of making things, the process of directing and of your career. It’s all a process. And you know that that applies specifically to the project as well. Because so often, especially with something like a TV show, you’re working on it for so long, but by the time it finishes, you’ve kind of lost sight of whether it’s good anymore. And in a way, you’ve kind of got to love the process, otherwise, you’re not going to get the reward. My husband suggested I should write down what I’ve learned in each kind of time I’ve been at it because I feel like that’s where I look up the shots that I got, or the the ideas I had, and see whether they worked or see what worked, what didn’t work. And I think that’s where I’ve built up the kind of tools or the lessons that I can then take confidence from next time because I know I learned that lesson.

Harry Lighton: I began very much wanting to make films which related to my own personal experience, but not in autobiographical way. So I’d think about something which was, I mean, often a concern in my daily life, it tended not to be something which was giving me a lot of pleasure. And then I try and find a narrative, which extrapolated that and sometimes I guess obscured it as well, and then use that as the scaffold to tell a story.

Short Hand: That’s Harry Lighton, the BAFTA-nominated writer and director of short films such as Wren Boys, Sunday Morning Coming Down and Leash, talking about the types of stories he’s interested in telling. You’re about to hear more from Harry as he discusses formal innovation in filmmaking and why that should go hand in hand with the content, rather than for the sake of boldness. 

Harry Lighton: A good example of that is the very first film I made. You absolutely can’t find it anywhere. It was called Three Speech, very witty title. And it was about a guy who had a form of obsessive compulsive disorder where he could only communicate in sentences where the total number of words were divisible by three. It was a fairly high concept idea. And within that, there was a scene where he was masturbating to a soundtrack of poems, which were written in these triplets. And that for me was, at the time, I hadn’t come out of the closet. So it was me trying to find a way to communicate a sense of repressed desire, or an inability to form romantic relationships with people through a very extrapolated, distant narrative device. Now, I spend as much time I’d say, thinking about how to make something which is formally interesting to me or formally innovative as I do try and make something which has a narrative, which is personal. And I think that’s probably been the biggest change. 

The more time I spend watching films, the more I feel this desire to try and do something different on a formal level, as opposed to simply tell a story which hasn’t been seen before. Personally, for me, when I first saw Victoria, the one shot film, I thought, wow, that’s unbelievable. That’s the coolest thing ever. And since then, there’s been a kind of onslaught of like TV episodes and films told in one take. And by dint of their not being original to me, it becomes labour. And I’m so familiar with the feeling of tension. Now in a one shot, there has to be something different to grip me. But I think the key is just always relating form to content. So never starting out with the intention of making a film in one shot. Now they’re starting out with the intention of making a film like Pawlikowski, where everything is a certain aspect ratio, and locked off and single scenes unfold and one takes you just have to think, well, what you hope, I think is that you have a story, which is original in the first place. And by virtue of that story being original, there should be a form out there, which is going to be specific to the story. 

I think a good example of formal innovation to me, which maybe doesn’t punch you in the face, is a film like Toni Erdmann, where the form on the surface looks like something we’ve seen over and over again, which is a kind of documentary realism. And I imagine that people might see it and think, Oh, well, maybe there’s a link there to Andrea Arnold or something, I wouldn’t personally but actually, I think that the form begins in that documentary way and and along with the narrative moves towards surrealism, so it ends up in a very claustrophobic party with a camera language, which is it’s like actively propelling the humour of the situation as opposed to just recording it. Formal innovation can come in all sorts of forms. And it doesn’t need to be a punch in the face.

Short Hand: What Harry says about artistic choices propelling narrative forward and contributing to the feeling you want to leave the audience with is key. Here he talks about how he formulates a vision and point of view for his films…

Harry Lighton: For me, it works in two ways. So the first way I make it personal is I tend to begin with theme, rather than story. So I will try and interrogate something, whether it’s folk tradition, or whether it’s body image I’ve been looking at recently, and I’ll almost treat it like a kind of essay where I’ll go and I’ll spend like days or even weeks reading around the subject and looking at like secondary criticism and looking at film history as well which have approached similar themes, and then I’ll formulate an opinion on it, my opinion on it, and then I’ll try and marry that with a way I can see it being formally interesting in film. So that’s one way of making it personal is by making it opinionated, not in the sense that the film is going to be declaring that opinion, but that it’s coming from a point of view. 

And then the other way I do I think, which is probably more conventional is within the kind of microcosm of the film, I’ll then place characters or scenes, which do directly relate to my experience and fold in the person or that way. I think the first thing which I do is go to photography and image, so whether it’s painting or even film, and with a film like Wren Boys, there was an archive which I could access, which related to  this outdated tradition of hunting. So I remember scouring the internet for photography on the tradition, and then finding these amazing images from the 1930s is like, I mean, they actually looked like they were out of a Pawlikowski film, but like stark black and white, very composed images of these six year old boys wearing like, crazy straw outfits. And then alongside that there was also an archive. So lots of interviews of people discussing the tradition. And as the years went on, that oral archive began to change. So you had people criticising the tradition, as well as people who said, No, we need to keep on with this. And I found that that gave me a really good stock of both landscape and character, and also like dialogue to work with. So in that way I managed to get inside the rhythms of speech, which was specific to the story. That’s actually something which is consistent across all my projects. 

Actually, if I think about it as a way of getting to like the texture of what I’m trying to do. I’ve been working on this film about sumo wrestling now for a fair while. And with that film, I found that actually, there was a limit to how much I could get inside that world from my desk in London. So very kindly, my producers at the BBC sent me off to live with these sumos in a stable, which is the equivalent of,, I guess, like a boarding school, and I got to live with them for two weeks. And so I think that depending on your distance from the project, if you’re writing something which you know, inside out, then obviously, you don’t need to do the same kind of interrogation. But I had never been to Japan, I certainly only had that basic idea of sumo wrestling, which you grew up with watching like TransWorld sport, if you were born in the early 90s, where it seems like there’s a couple of big fat guys running into each other. And it’s funny. And so I knew that part of the interest of the project to me was trying to see what was actually, you know, what the world was actually like, as opposed to this to the idea I had. But I wouldn’t have carried through with the project if I hadn’t been able to, I don’t think go out and actually witness it myself. Because for me, definitely, there is a limit to what the imagination can do without first hand experience, I definitely need to feel like there’s a reality to the world, which I’m writing in. And I need to feel like I understand that reality.

Short Hand: One of the main components of the BFI NETWORK Short Film Fund application, and indeed any press kit created for your short film is the director’s statement, so we asked Harry how he approaches disseminating his vision for potential funders, collaborators and audiences alike, what his advice is for saying a lot with a little – be that the word count in your application – or the running time of your actual film and what ambition means to him…

Harry Lighton: I do remember agonising over over each word in that, Film London, for me, application process, and I think that’s because the words limits they always give you – obviously because they have to read hundreds –  are very limited and so each word was felt like it was going to make or break the application. What’s gonna appeal to the funders in my experience is that combination of originality in the project, technique from the director, and then also what we’ve talked about, which is the personal relationship between the creators and the project. So it was about trying to communicate those three things within the short space on the page. The hardest one was, I think, showing that you had a sort of technical sophistication in a written application, when obviously the two things feel a bit counterintuitive. But you know, if you’re the writer, or if you’re not, getting your writer to contribute to that application makes a lot of sense, because they will likely have an ability to spin words into images that are evocative, whether it’s describing what your first image is going to be, and taking them by the scruff of the neck with that, or finding some other way to show that you’re thinking about this film as a film not just thinking about it as a story, which you want to tell. 

A good example of always wanting to extend the short film narrative and it being better suited not to, and to actually try and condense it is Wren Boys, because I was constantly fighting with the page limit which Film London had, which was 10 pages, and I ended up shooting like 40 minute film, and then butting heads with the people at Film London because I said, I’m not gonna cut it down anymore. And after a lot of argy bargy, I then listened to them and took out a long scene, which I thought was pivotal to the narrative, but they kept saying no it was a distraction, because it was adding an extra element to the film. Five years later, or whatever, I think they were totally right. And I look back on that argument and feel a bit embarrassed because I was trying to do too much, I was trying to spoon in another thematic interest of mine into a short film, which was a love story, and it had no place in that love story. 

I think what you need to do is work out really what the most important image in that short film is. And the most important thing you want the audience to feel when the film finishes is, and then be incredibly strict about trying to carve out the flab and until you’re really distilling that intention into the short film. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a short film at a festival and thought this should’ve had more, you know, more minutes, I only ever watched them in festivals and go, I wish that started that film five pages later. A good way to start is, honestly, like, see if you can begin the story four pages later than you have in your outline, because I think there’s an intrigue for the audience in joining a story when you’re not entirely sure where that story is situated. And the temptation with writing a short as I’ve done in the past is often to start with someone waking up and then start with them having conversation in the kitchen with their brother. And then finally they’re on the journey to where they’re supposed to be going. And you watch it two years later, and you’re like, well, I should have just started this on the journey. So yeah, always be cutting. 

I think ambition and boldness actually go hand in hand for me. Because I see ambition as wanting to make something which surprises an audience and I mean, it sounds horribly, horribly ambitious, but also like surprises the film world. So I want to put something out there which people watch and they go, Gosh, I’ve never seen a story told this way before or I’ve never seen someone use the form in this way before. And like that’s where I situate ambition alongside obviously more practical things, which I think are important to mention. Like the ambition to build a career out of filmmaking is one which I definitely started out with and I’m incredibly grateful for rather than having to juggle multiple jobs. I think that’s a very obvious pragmatic ambition but in terms of filmmaking itself, ambition to me means trying to do something original. A good way I think to test that ambition of or test the idea of boldness is to go to short film festivals and see which films in a programme of 100 standout to you. 

Edem Kelman: Well, the idea for Princess came about with, I had an idea that was in my mind for a while, which was what would happen if a mother were to leave her daughter. That’s quite a romantic idea. It’s not something that would really happen, a mother wouldn’t leave her daughter in a cafe on a Friday night, but that was a general idea. And what we did from then on was kind of work our way backwards into thinking of a story.

Short Hand: That’s Edem Kelman, a 2021 ScreenDaily Star of Tomorrow and the writer-director of a self-funded, low-budget short called Princess. Set in Dalston, east London, Edem mixed professional and non-actors to tell the story of a troubled mother who wants to give her daughter a brilliant day out. Here he talks about how he developed that story, why he wanted to tell it through the medium of cinema and how he got a group of friends and collaborators together in order to make it, as well as the tricks for stretching the budget. 

Edem Kelman: Princess came about at a time where I’d you know, I’d done smaller projects before and I was trying to find my voice. And I had just become a bit jaded by the whole kind of theatrics behind filmmaking, all the elements that come into play, when you’re coming up with an idea  it feels quite artistic. And when you get to set, it can be quite hectic, and it can become quite mechanical. So I just wanted something that was very simple. And I wanted to, to really just see if we could make an audience feel something, that was the goal. It was never to make something that would go on to benefit my career in any way like that. But it was just can we make an audience feel something.

Developing Princess was actually quite simple. At the start, it was, how can we do something quite small. It was more just writing a script, and constantly returning to it each night and thinking of moments that I felt spoke towards a mother-daughter relationship. There’s a scene which would be the mother and the daughter in the photobooth taking a picture together and the mother would slip the picture into her bag. And you know, on the day, you get to the train station and you try and shoot in a photo booth. And I just thought what the hell’s going on. It was just finding these moments, which I felt were really honest, and quite magical. We wanted it to feel slightly uplifting, and concentrate, not on the tragedy behind it but the joy of it all. So yeah, it was just kind of bullet pointing ideas and moments. And then after writing them into the script, whenever I kind of go into a project, especially after Princess I try to develop a relationship with the cast. I tried to cast as close to the characters as I can. I like the idea that they’re real people, so much of the performances, and the way that we found it was kind of guided by or informed by the characters themselves, you know, you have a child who you’ve street cast, who I think at the time, she was six, so that means that she’s, she’s not gonna do well with dialogue, she’s not going to perform in any way that you you want her to, you have to bend the film, in accordance to who she is. But there’s also something quite beautiful in that, which is the fact that if she can play, she will play and if she can run around, she will run around. And if she can eat on screen, she’ll eat on screen, you know, she won’t kind of process it in any kind of intellectual way. So it’s kind of bending the film towards that, and also taking quite a documentary approach to all. 

So what we did was, I would spend everyday with her after school, get to know her, have a chat, go to McDonald’s, do things that she might do if I’m a mother character. And then after that, what we’d do is we brought in Robinah, who’s an actor and a fantastic actor, and they developed a relationship. So that meant that when we did have a crew on the day, and we were filming, there’s only really one person who she can turn to, you know, with all the theatrics of a film crew, there’s only one person she can really turn to, and that would be Robinah. And in that there’s a truth and there’s an honesty, I hope because that’s what a daughter does. She turns to her mother.

Getting Princess made was, I’d saved up a bit of money and was just wanting to make something actually quite quickly and quite urgently. I needed to make something. I needed to make a film just because I’m a bit of a hustler. And I just wanted to make something so badly. I was like the last thing that I made, or I tried to make didn’t work at all really. So I needed to make something and I knew somebody that was studying in Cambridge who was interested in production. And me and my friend Michael, we took the train and we met up with him. I presented him with a script and you know, a couple of months later, he was like, let’s do this. That’s how he went about making it. We knew we didn’t have a lot of money. So you know, you kind of use that to an advantage. You pick people who have a desire to get on like you do, who have that same hunger and, and, you know, they work for for a bit less money, but they put a lot of heart into it. And it’s the same for equipment, you know, and I don’t believe that you have to shoot on the best camera to tell the best story. I think there’s something quite beautiful even if you shot your film on an iPhone. That’s not what we did. But we approached a cinematographer who was graduating NFTS, and as you know, if somebody is at NFTS, they get their equipment for free. So that was a big chunk of the budget. And that’s just kind of how we hustled it. 

So you just get a group of like-minded people together, and you go ahead and you and you make it. I’d never been to film school. But what I do have is good friends who are as fanatic about films as I am. We work together via WhatsApp group chat, and we’re constantly sending each other references. But what they do that’s really special, when we’re prepping, or when I’m prepping, is we’ll always ask each other Why? Why do you want to shoot on this camera? Why did you want to shoot on this lens? You know, Why are you moving the camera? Why are you choosing these actors or non-actors or first-time actors? And just by having them constantly questioning you, you kind of develop a theory and hopefully within that a voice. And that’s kind of how we are, or at least I learned to direct in a way. 

And then also it’s just pulling references, you pull references not to be derivative, but because you’re not yet or I’m not yet at a stage where I’m completely assured or technically skilled enough to know that oh, this is what and 50mm will give me. So I look at specific references. I think you know, there’s that moment in Princess when they’re walking down the high street and I’m not ashamed to say that that came from Midnight Cowboy because I was watching Midnight Cowboy and I saw, you know, how they were able to use real people on the street and allow that to give them a level of production design and embellish the frame, but also tell their story. And I think that’s how I approach directing. By watching films or by referencing films, you can get a certain amount of confidence and assurance towards your vision. But in terms of how I direct, I work closely with my friends, have a lot of conversations, go about it in quite an academic way. You know, Why? What’s your reasoning? And then on the performance side of things, I get close, I  develop a relationship. And you hope that that serves you on the day. 

Yeah, on the budgeting front, you know, you can either look at it as a limitation, or you can look at it as an advantage. I kind of had to ask myself, Why do I gravitate towards a long lens? And the truth is, I think it’s like in short films, if you don’t have a lot of money, and you know, everything’s in focus, your background is in focus, you’re going to reveal the fact that you had no money but if you shoot on a length lens and everything, you know, the background is slightly out of focus and your focus is now on essential characters. Well, the audience’s sole point of focus and, and what they’re drawn into the world is the characters. And that was one of the tricks I used on Princess to get away from the fact that there was practically no money. You’ve got to be quite specific about who you bring on board. And Michael as well, he’s a fantastic DoP, and is willing to take a chance on somebody that hasn’t really done much, you know. In terms of budgeting, he wanted to put as much of it on screen and you want to not necessarily hide the fact that you don’t have a lot of money but you want to tell a story which doesn’t require a lot of money. You know, some of the best films that we watch are documentaries, things that are just a camera in a room with people living and existing and it hits you on a level that’s unreal. 

Short Hand: Ultimately what Edem is saying is ‘find your tribe’ which I’m sure is advice that you’ll hear again over the course of this series. It’s about finding collaborators who are at your level, who have the same hunger you do and are willing to put in that time to get that short film made. Don’t worry, in the next episode we’ll be covering how you find that tribe. In the meantime, part of the application process as a director is stating how your short film project connects with your aspirations and what it might enable you to practice and explore. Here Edem talks about how making Princess has furthered his career and what it’s allowed him to do. 

Edem Kelman: The truth is Princess opened a lot of doors, and we never expected it. But what I think Princess allowed me to do is get closer to finding my voice. Princess has given me confidence that has informed me on how I’d like to work because as things get slightly bigger, I can always use Princess as a point of reference on a level of what I’d like to achieve. I want to make films where people watch it and just say, Wow, that felt unreal. That felt so real. I felt that Princess allowed me to see characters, you know, that reflect me in a way that I haven’t regularly seen them shown on screen, with an honesty that I don’t really see them shown on screen. Princess allowed me a certain level of confidence to say yes, I’m a filmmaker. And yes, my time isn’t wasted. Watching films, learning, my time isn’t wasted spending time with real people. My time isn’t wasted, you know, cycling around investigating stories. And I mean, you know, the great thing about Princess is that, you know, when I was approaching the little girl in that film, her mum was like, you know, why’d you want to spend time with my daughter to put a camera to film her and tell the story? But now after Princess it’s like, you know, type my name in Google, something comes up. Now I’m actually a filmmaker, I’m able to use that to to convince people to want to be on screen and toe and tell stories together.

Short Hand: Thank you for listening to Short Hand. Look out for a new episode next week that will focus on producing – what that is, how you can do it and where you find people to collaborate with. Thank you to our guests this week: Ella Jones, Harry Lighton and Edem Kelman. Short Hand is a BFI NETWORK and Film Hub South East podcast produced by Nicole Davis with support from the BFI NETWORK and the ICO team. Special thanks to our editor Graciela Mae Chico, and Epidemic for music. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *