Dressing Up Dogs

As a film-maker, you find yourself in a lot of meetings with new people, and one of the most common ice-breakers is "How did you get into the business?". I'm used to answering that question, used to it to the point that the answer I give has been edited and mutated and is now more noise than signal.

More recently, I have been approached by a few people asking how they can embark upon a career in the industry, and I've realised that I'm not even sure what a career in this industry looks like. There's no obvious trajectory, no typical path. Everyone's answer to "How did you get into this?" is different, and everyone's route to where they are now is unique.

On the executive side, there may still be a path that goes from the agency mailroom (if those still exist) to assistant, and then out to a studio or production company and the life of an executive. That's not to say everyone's experience is the same on that track, but there is (or at least there used to be) a well-worn path that can at least act as some kind of a rough map. On the creative/freelance side, there is no such thing.

So I have been pondering the honest answer to the first question, and then letting my mind wander along the meandering path that led from then to now. I'm presenting the journey here, across several instalments, not as advice or as a guide, but really as a curio. Whatever lessons I have learned along the way are probably peculiar to me, and most of them were learned too late to be of any use.

There's a quote I love, attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

I certainly did not go where the path lead, but I also think I failed to leave a trail.

Part One - Arrival

It's the summer of 1990. I am 18 years old, I have just finished A-levels and I am living in a small village in Essex. I don't know what I want to do, but I have always been interested in film and, latterly, theatre. I have no idea how you get into those industries.

My friends are mostly looking forward to what is being billed as "The Greatest Summer of their Lives" before they head off to university. I am not going to university, partly because I need to be done with education now and partly because I am not expected to get the required exam results.

The day after term ends, I get on a train and head to London. My grandmother lives in Westminster and I am going to sleep on her couch and get a job. I have no idea what that job might be, but I have no money and nowhere to be and so I need to start somewhere.

I get a job selling advertising over the phone for a computer publisher. I don't like it, but it pays pretty well and I'm not paying rent, so I have money in my pocket for the first time. I make a point of seeing every movie that comes out, and I start reading about movies and the people who make them. This is what I want to do. None of the books will tell me how to do it.

1991, I think. Time erases sequence and I am decades away from recording what happens in any form. A friend calls saying he wants to put on a play and our old school has agreed to let him use the theatre. Will I come and direct it? I quit my job in London. I tell my boss why. She tells me I'm an idiot. Apparently I am throwing away a promising career in advertising sales. Apparently there is such a thing as a promising career in advertising sales.

Back in Essex, we rehearse the play. The budget is coming out of our own pockets and those pockets are empty (18 year olds do not save money). I put the last of my coins into a slot machine in the local pub and win enough to buy paint for the set.

In our down time, we talk about forming a theatre company and touring. We talk about making low budget movies with a repertory company of actors. We're watching Moviedrome and learning about French New Wave and Film Noir, and thanks to Alex Cox, we understand that The Terminator is a modern noir classic. Ridley Scott is God. The movie Less Than Zero shows us who we think we are.

When the play is done, despite our best intentions, we are still broke. We want to do another one but life, and the university term, intrudes. We go our separate ways.

Back in London, I cycle through a variety of sales jobs. One turns out to be a scam and I get out just before the cops show up. At another, I spend a morning calling manufacturers of agricultural equipment in Russia, attempting to sell them advertising space in a catalogue that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist. But it's hard to scam people who don't speak English, and I don't subscribe to the boss's apparent theory that you can be understood if you shout in English very loudly and very slowly. I go out for lunch on the first day and I don't come back. The next time I see the shouty boss is several years later, when he shows up as a contestant on Blind Date.

Eventually, I get a job running advertising sales at Flicks magazine (some may remember this as the movie magazine that used to be given away free in cinemas). The woman who runs the magazine is married to a senior executive at Universal International Pictures. They are friends with John Landis and Steven Spielberg. At one point. I find myself in a private screening room, watching the new Spielberg movie, which has not been seen by anyone in the UK yet. It is called Jurassic Park.

I can see where I want to be now, but it's like I'm looking at it through bullet-proof glass. If I'm going to get into the film industry, I have to be fully committed. I tell my boss that I'm leaving, that I want to make films. She tells me I'm an idiot.

I enrol on a film and theatre studies BA course at the University of North London. I have no idea if it's a good course, I have no intention of finding out. Enrolment means I get a grant and a student loan, and I can use that money to make a short film. I sign the forms, cash the cheque and never return.

It takes me forever to write a 15 minute film about a serial killer at a dinner party. We shoot it in the house where I'm living and I get a crew by putting up a notice at the University of Westminster film school. Christopher Nolan probably walks past the note, as he is a student there at the time. Asif Kapadia sees it, though, and he sighs up to record sound. Asif tells me that I'm about to cram two years of film school into a 3-day shoot. He says he wishes he'd thought of this. The path that Asif took nonetheless paid off; he will go on to win all the prizes for his documentaries "Senna" and "Amy".

I'm hoping that the short will get me work in commercials or music videos, even if it doesn't immediately get me into the movie industry. In the event, it gets me no work at all. But I have had the time of my life, and I now know for certain that this is what I want to do.

I write another short. This one is intended to be more expensive and more commercial. It is also going to showcase the talent of an actress I've met briefly because she's at drama school with a friend of mine. The short never gets made, but I'm still married to the actress.

Short films are a dead end. At least if I write a feature, there's a business model whereby financiers can get their money back. I fire up Windows 3.1 again, and start typing...

This is my life now. I'm on the dole, living in a shared flat on the Archway Road, and I spend all day typing my feature script. I don't know it at the time, but in a neighbouring flat, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are working on the scripts for what will become Spaced. The pub across the street is called the Winchester Arms, a name they would lift for Shaun of the Dead.

Writing back then took me a lot longer than it does now. It's a year or more before I have a finished script. I title it "The Criminal". I think it's great. No one will be able to resist.

Resist they do. It's tumbleweed. I don't know anyone and no one knows me. I'm just a guy with a script and a dole card. The latter means that I can't afford to send the former out far and wide (e-mail has not been widely adopted yet). I make a list of companies to send the script to, and then I call them up and hassle them. If they don't want to make it (none of them want to make it), can they recommend other people I could approach? Slowly, I start to make more contacts.

Eventually, the guy who edited the short film gives the script to a friend of his who wants to be a producer. We all partner up and then find someone to come on board who actually does this for a living. He is optimistic that he can get The Criminal financed. It shouldn't take long...

Three years later. I'm 26 years old. For the past four years, I have been living on £45 per week, of which £20 has to be set aside to cover the gap between what the housing benefit people think the rent should be and what the rent actually is. I have not eaten in a restaurant or bought new clothes for years. I have never been on holiday as an adult. The people at the social security office are no longer buying the idea that my unemployment is 'only temporary'. They are going to start sending me out for jobs or they will cut my money off. Maybe this is not the life I'm meant to be living.

Meanwhile, The Criminal has been turned down by everyone who has read it. My friends and family think it's time I called it quits. They think I should put the whole idea of a film career aside and move on to do... What?

And then, out of the blue, I'm asked to go to a meeting with a company called Palm Pictures. They have been set up by Chris Blackwell, the guy who founded Island Records, and they want to get into movies. I don't want to go to this meeting. Of all the leads I've chased down, this one looks to be the least promising. I don't think I can hear another set of polite excuses as to why this movie, and by extension my dream of being a film-maker, is not viable.

The Palm Pictures 'office' is a flat in Notting Hill. I walk into the place and it all seems like a shambles. There are people sitting around getting stoned and I can't tell if they work there, or have just wandered in off the street. My meeting is with a hyperactive American rock-chick and an incredibly suave Persian man who definitely does not look like he belongs here. We sit down, someone gives me a coffee. They ask how much my movie will cost, I tell them about two million pounds.

"Oh, is that all? Let's just make it then."

There are very few definitive moments to celebrate in this industry. Someone saying yes to your first movie should definitely be one of them. And yet it has proved so difficult to get to this point, and then the moment itself was so easy, that I don't believe it. It will take many more weeks of meetings and contract negotiations before my brain will adapt to the idea that we have crossed the threshold.

I am 26 years old. I am making a movie. The years of scrabbling for rent are behind me. I am on track now. Hollywood, here I come.

What can possibly go wrong...?

COMING SOON: Part Two - The Criminal.

Part One will be available to all subscribers until Part Two goes up, at which point this will slide behind the paywall.