Dressing Up Dogs

Part Two - The Criminal

A young musician finds himself falsely accused of murder, and on the run from sinister forces who are part of a government conspiracy.

I am 26 years old, standing on the set of my first feature film. Prior to this, I have spent just 2 days, several years ago, making a short film. That is the extent of my experience. Now I am responsible for a £2million budget to shoot a movie in 5 weeks. The cast includes Steven Mackintosh, Bernard Hill and Eddie Izzard.

The learning curve is long and steep, but here are some of the lessons I will carry through a career...

I love film crews

The first day on set. There are people everywhere, everything is in motion. Electricians, riggers, costume people, make-up people, artists and crafts people, camera technicians, security people, location people, caterers, the facilities guys, the runners... Each an expert in their chosen field and all working together on the same project, pulling in the same direction.

Watching any one person on the crew do their job is fascinating to me, as is hearing their stories; everyone had a different way into this world, they are all coming from a different place and heading to a different destination. And everyone has war stories; from the Bond movie, from that time with Clint Eastwood, from that movie with Redford, the encounter with Meryl Streep... Everyone holds a piece of movie history.

The Unit Base is the village of trucks and trailers that moves with production wherever we need to go. Like an army base or a carnival train, it pops up wherever it is needed and then vanishes again to the next place. I love the brute logistics of the thing, I love the atmosphere, and I love these incredible people.

The Make-Up department is a director's secret weapon.

The actors go into make-up first thing in the morning, and they gossip. The make-up people therefore know who is having relationship problems, who is hungover etc. None of which is to suggest that the folks in make-up are indiscreet, quite the opposite, but they can give a director pointers as to which members of cast might be prickly, or require special attention on any given day.

To this day, I always start my day with a cup of coffee on the make-up bus (make-up has the best coffee), chatting with actors, taking the temperature of the room, and dealing with any issues that might have arisen while actors were looking over today's scenes on their way in. Not only does this give me a jump on the day ahead (and potentially cuts down rehearsal time) but hanging out with actors forms a bond of trust and familiarity that helps both sides. I am always surprised at how few directors do this.

The 1st AD is your closest ally.

I didn't even really know what a First Assistant Director did until I made this movie. I had one on the short film, and I think he was very good, but you don't get much of a sense of how anything works on a two-day shoot. The 1st AD schedules the shoot and is in charge of making sure everything happens when and how it is supposed to happen. In West Wing terms, this is your Chief-of-Staff. With a good 1st AD, a director only has to express a desire ("The cars crash into each other over there" or "And then that building explodes") and the 1st AD will, apparently magically, make it happen.

A good 1st AD doesn't just know the names of every crew member, they know the names of their partners and children and what is going on in their lives; they have the trust and friendship of the actors; they know every word of the script; they can anticipate how long anything will take to shoot, what might go wrong and what the contingency will be etc etc. A good 1st AD completely frees up the director to concern his or herself with the creative aspects of the job. One of my favourite 1sts hates me wearing a watch on set; "You don't need to know what time it is, that's my job."

I have enough 1st AD stories to fill a book, but one of my favourites illustrates the fine line of diplomacy and familiarity that this role requires. It's years after The Criminal, and we are having a tough day on a TV set. One of the leading actors is having a frustrating time for different reasons, and has been kept waiting because of technical delays. He finally storms onto the set, furious, and bellows, "Is this how we treat stars on this show?" The place falls silent. The 1st AD turns, looks at the actor and calmly says, "I don't know. Let's find a star and we can ask them." There's a long, impossibly tense, beat, and then the 1st AD smiles and the actor cracks up laughing. That level of judgement and confidence is hard-earned and invaluable.

Good actors aren't difficult

I've read the same stories that you've read, and I've been shouted at, had actors burst into tears, had actors refuse to come to set etc etc. On each occasion, I can see people on the crew rolling their eyes at the antics of another "difficult" actor. In reality, all of these situations have had some justification. (In the case of the actor refusing to come to set, it was month two of a TV series and the guy still hadn't been paid!)

Actors are people who pretend to be someone else for a living. It's a peculiar talent, but the work does not make them special. They have home lives and domestic issues and countless problems, just like anyone else. And just like anyone else, they can be insecure and they can be moody and they can be short-tempered. Moreover, the job itself is not the bed of roses you might have been led to believe.

Imagine, if you will, that you had to leave for work at the crack of dawn but, when you got there, you had to sit around not doing your job for an unknown amount of time (it could be hours, it could ultimately be all day), all the while being treated like a child who can't do anything for yourself, even to the extent of being followed to the toilet by someone with a walkie-talkie, announcing to the world that you are currently walking to the toilet. Then imagine that when you DID get to do your job, you were interrupted every few minutes by people swarming over you, straightening your clothes and fiddling with your hair.

On top of all that, when you are working, there's a camera in your face and you're acutely aware that every facial expression you make, every line reading you give, is being judged not just by the people on set, but by potentially millions of people all over the world, forever. It's a lot of pressure and sometimes it causes friction. The director's job is to help the actor navigate it all, to shut the world out for long enough to get the performance.

Do some actors have giant egos? Maybe, mostly I've encountered nerves, doubt and insecurity, however toxically those things can sometimes present themselves.

The most common cause of the "difficult" label comes when an actor questions the content or construction of a scene. Often, as we're blocking a scene on camera, an actor might bring everything to a halt because they don't understand why their character says or does whatever is prescribed on the page. This costs time, and time is money, and so a producer looking on may jump to the conclusion that the actor is "difficult".

But they are not being difficult, any more than a builder telling an architect that this ceiling will fall down is being difficult. The actor is not always correct about the nature of the problem but, in my experience, they are almost always right that there IS a problem. The director's job is to work through it, answer the actor's questions and figure out how to make the scene work WITH the actors. No one is being difficult, it's just part of the process, and sometimes the process eats time and money. But adding half an hour to the day now, to make the end product work better forever, seems to me like a perfectly sensible trade-off.

Not everyone works for you.

On any given production, there seems to be two sides - people who work for the director and people who work for production. Needless to say, it would be ideal if both director and production were pulling in the same direction, but that is often not the case.

The Criminal was my first experience of this. For obvious reasons (I hadn't done it before and didn't know anyone), most of the crew had been brought on by senior members of production. It is to those people that the crew owed their loyalty, because it was those people who would take loyal crew members on to the next job. I naively imagined that the director was leading the thing, but the reality was that I was being allowed to act like I was in charge, but pretty much every request I made was passed on to production to be ratified, because people did not want to be biting the hand that fed them.

Thus, I would ask for something to be built or painted etc. and I would be told that there was no money available for that, only to discover much later that the money WAS there, but it had been ear-marked for something else - a lavish dinner for the art department, or a better venue for the wrap party (both real examples).

A film set is an intensely political place, which I didn't appreciate at the time. I had to learn to navigate that very fast. Some directors seek to exert their authority by screaming and shouting and throwing things. That's not how I function best; I'm less interested in people viewing me as "in charge" than I am in getting onto the screen what I want to be there. If my idea has to look like someone else's idea in order to run the gauntlet, I am OK with that. It's my name up on the screen, and I get credit or blame for the movie, regardless of what I did or didn't do. If you let yourself get into a toe-to-toe fight with a producer or executive, you may well lose the fight. Far better to not have the fight at all and go around the obstacle to get your way.

Likewise, best idea wins - if an idea is good, it should be in the movie, regardless of whether it was my idea, or it came from an actor, a producer, a runner etc. Crews love to rubbish directors they didn't like working with, so I have heard lots of stories. The most common kind of bad behaviour is the shouty director who bullied everyone to assert dominance and who would throw out any idea that he (almost always he) didn't generate. Some of these guys have Academy Awards, so I'm not saying it doesn't work, I just don't think it's a way for the boss to behave.

Related to this is a way to let everyone know you're in charge without raising your voice or stabbing anyone in the back: MAKE DECISIONS. In order for things on set to move forward, decisions need to be made. Are we using the red jacket or the blue jacket? The director's job is to make that decision and to make it fast. Faced with red or blue, you pick one, there and then. It doesn't mean you can't change your mind later, but if you can't make a decision on the spot, the person asking the question will go elsewhere for the answer, and whoever gives it to them will be the person they come back to with the next question.

As a director, you don't really have anything to do other than make decisions, about costume, sets, lens choices, performance. There are hundred of decisions to be made every day, and you need to make them all and fast. That is the job description. Indecision isn't just a weakness, or political suicide, it is a disqualification.

Producers are guilty until proven innocent

This is an unfortunate one, and something I hesitated to include. There are some great producers and execs out there, people I would be overjoyed to work with again and again. But they are the exception, in my experience, not the norm.

The way movies and TV shows are put together, projects tend to get top heavy with executives and producers very quickly. People get the job title because they work for the company that is financing the thing, or because they work for an actor who has been cast, or because they once financed a draft of the script, or once owned some underlying rights to the material etc etc. Those people all get their name on the back of a chair and get waited on hand and foot and feel the need to justify their position by having an opinion and giving orders. Almost none of them have a clue what they're doing.

On any given production, there is usually only one person who is actively producing the thing; that is, they are involved in assembling all the moving parts from the writing process through production and editing and into final release. Of the whole flock of people with the word "producer" in their title (with the honourable exception of line producers, who deal with the money and schedule and have an actual defined job), this producer is the only one who, in theory at least, the production actually depends on.

But even then, this person, especially in television, does not always have a vested interest in making the movie or show as good as it can be. They may have a number of productions they are dealing with, they may be more loyal to the production company or the financiers than they are to the movie or show itself. Ideally, a director works with a producer who shares their vision, but this is not always the case. A lot of times, the producer needs to protect their reputation by delivering something that is "good enough", and was made on time and on budget. If they feel like the director is threatening that by being somehow too fussy or perfectionist, they will throw that director under the bus at the first opportunity.

A good producer is invaluable. A self-serving company man can be a director's worst enemy.

Over the course of five 6-day weeks, I learned how to make a movie. I navigated the on-set politics, figured out who my allies and enemies were, coaxed performances, learned the basics of photography and lighting and lenses, grew to understand how the sound department worked, what the wardrobe people did, how locations are managed, what goes into designing and building a set... A movie set is an industry in miniature, and it is a travelling circus. Relationships are at once incredibly intense and fleeting. I had the best days of my life and the worst days of my life within a period of little more than a month.

And then, suddenly, it's all over. The whole unit packs up and goes home and leaves no trace. The last few nights of the shoot took place behind the Savoy Hotel in London. We had trucks and props and extras, gunfire, blood, lights on the roofs of buildings, police cars, camera track laid... For those few nights, we owned those streets. I went back a couple of days after we wrapped and there was no trace of us at all. Everything we had done had been translated into an instantaneous chemical process on strips of film and then had evaporated into the ether.

A film is made three times; once in the writing, once during the shoot, and once more in the edit. With the shoot done, most of the crew go on to their next jobs, while we decamped to an office and an edit suite in Soho.

Once you're in the edit, everything that went before ceases to matter. However hard it was to get a particular shot, however important that shot seemed at the time, if it doesn't work in the edit, it has to go. Most editors don't like coming to set for this exact reason; they don't want to know about the blood, sweat and tears of production because they want to judge the footage on its own merits; they can't afford to be attached to a shot or sequence just because they know how long it took or how much it cost.

During the shoot, the editor has been assembling the footage as it comes in. Once the shoot has finished, the director sits down with the editor and watches that first assembly. What you're watching is both disheartening, because it's never going to be the movie you had in your head, and encouraging because it shows you what you have and what the possibilities are. The director and the editor then have a number of weeks to hone the material into the director's cut. That cut is then shown to the execs...

Like a draft of a screenplay, the director's cut seems to be the best version of the thing that it is possible to get. As a director, you feel incredibly protective/defensive about it, and you are ready to fight tooth and nail not to change a frame. But, like a script draft, if you were to come back to it a few weeks later, you would find all kinds of things to fiddle with. It feels perfect, but it is not perfect. And now people are going to come and look at it and they are going to give notes and you have to decide if those notes are additive or not.

Palm Pictures, the main financier, had sent along an American executive, who was a genuinely open, pleasant and intelligent man. The editor and I hated his breathing guts before he even entered the room. We had spent weeks cutting this movie. We thought we had achieved perfection. And we had convinced ourselves, per Hollywood lore, that whoever walked through that door was going to try to ruin it.

The exec entered our frosty, hostile edit suite. He told us how excited he was to see the movie. We didn't believe him. The editor hit play and we sat for 98 agonising minutes while this idiot, this degenerate, this butcher, judged our masterpiece with his stupid Philistine eyes. The credits rolled and the editor put the lights on and the exec congratulated us on the movie. We did not believe him. He told us he had a few thoughts. Here we go...

I don't actually remember what his main note was now, it was about a sequence halfway through the movie. He told us what he thought. The editor swore, and threw something across the room. I remember my temper rising as I told the exec that I wasn't going to change a frame of MY movie, and just because he represented the money didn't mean he could-- And the exec interrupted me and calmly explained that Palm Pictures was not in the business of messing with a director's vision; this was my movie, and if I didn't want to change anything, I didn't have to.

Oh.

This guy wasn't into bullying us, he wasn't some studio enforcer... I didn't have to do anything he suggested... That changed things. I took a breath and realised I hadn't even heard his note. What was it again? He repeated it. Actually, that's not a bad idea...

Another lesson learned, but this one is really about human nature. That exec had the power to insist on his changes (his company had paid for the movie), but if he had bluntly exercised that power, it would have been a fight. He would have won, but no one would have gone away from the experience happy. Instead, he abdicated that power and, as far as I recall, we addressed all of his notes. Certainly we listened to them all and gave them due consideration.

He won the battle, and we thanked him for it.

This seems like an obvious point; we all know that we get further with charm than with threats. And yet you would be surprised by the number of authority figures in this industry who lack the courage and self-confidence to negotiate.

We locked the cut, then moved into colour timing (which was done the old-fashioned way, at a lab, watching prints and calling out changes to the red, green and blue channels which would then be dialled into the chemical bath for the next print) and sound-mixing. To this day, these are two of my favourite parts of the process, although I infinitely prefer digital colour grading to the old chemical process.

The last day of the sound mix is the last day of post-production. When you walk out of the mixing theatre, you have a finished movie. I had gone from the bottom of the mountain to planting my flag on the summit. I was 27 years old now, and I had made a feature film. The world was my oyster...

So why haven't you seen The Criminal?

I thought making a film was a minefield, but I hadn't met the distribution process yet.

The sales agent on The Criminal was a company called Storm Entertainment, based out of an office on 3rd Street in Santa Monica. They were a small team, but really enthusiastic and incredibly competent. They had been the first people on board the movie and had taken it to Cannes and various other markets before we made it, drumming up pre-sales from foreign territories (A pre-sale is a promise to the buy the movie for a particular territory, once it is made. Those promises can then be taken to a bank and used as a guarantee for a loan that will make up part of the budget.) Storm had done a great job getting us some of the way and then Palm Pictures had come in and financed the rest of the movie. The territory we had not yet sold was the big one - the USA. Not only is that the territory that pays the most money, but it's the one that, in success, launches your movie to the rest of the world. The US sale is a big deal. Our backstop, in the event that we could not sell the movie in the US, was that Palm Pictures would release it straight to video there. Underline that last sentence, it's going to come back to bite us in the ass...

To get us there, the movie had been entered into a few festivals in Europe, as a kind of soft-launch. We played the Sitges festival, in Spain, which was a blast. And we won Fantasporto in Portugal (there wasn't any money for me to actually go there and collect the award, so I had to just read about it in the trade papers). Then we were accepted into the London International Film Festival, and shortlisted for the FIPRESCI award, which is voted on and presented by the foreign press.

I would quite happily not have shown up to the awards ceremony (such as it was, it was actually just an announcement made by the head of the critics association before the closing night movie), because even then I wasn't very interested in awards. The process of making a film is gruelling and rewarding in equal measure. Anyone who can get a movie off the ground and then see it through to completion has achieved something incredibly rare. The idea that we then compare the level of those achievements... It makes me uncomfortable. The notion of a "best" one is strange, because I don't really know what we're comparing.

I'm also not someone who reads, or sets any store by, most film criticism. Reviews are handy if you need a quote for a poster, or if you're trying to sell yourself to someone who cares about those things, but as a fan of movies before anything else, I just don't find any value in what someone I don't know thought about a film or TV show.

So the idea of an award presented by critics held no interest for me. But I had to be there to represent the movie, because I am far from the only person who worked on it and, should I find myself giving an acceptance speech (which I am not expecting to be asked to give), it would be an opportunity to thank a bunch of people who might not otherwise get a mention.

What actually happened that evening was just... Weird. The audience was seated in the Odeon Leicester Square and the place was packed (the closing night movie was American Beauty, which was already generating a lot of excitement). The lights went down, the head of the FIPRESCI jury was announced and she came out onto the stage. We've all seen these things, and we all know that she's going to say that the competition was fierce and everyone deserved an award and blah blah blah and the winner is...

But that is not what happened. What happened was that the head of the jury announced that the standard of eligible movies this year was so low that the critics had debated not giving out the award at all. She actually said that. And this is a year in which the festival movies included Lynne Ramsay's "Ratcatcher", Sofia Copolla's "The Virgin Suicides", Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" and Christopher Nolan's "Following". I don't know if all of these were eligible for the award, but it was a pretty good year for movies. I certainly remember thinking that we had no chance of winning because the other contenders were really strong. Apparently not. Apparently our competition was piss-weak. And we still didn't win. The award went to Kimberley Pierce's "Boys Don't Cry", and I remember how angry I felt that someone had gone through the process of making a movie (a movie that would go on to win great acclaim and launch Hilary Swank's career), only to have her achievement denigrated as these critics tossed her an award because they apparently had to give it to someone.

That experience did nothing to raise my opinion of either awards ceremonies or movie critics.

Storm Entertainment could spin, though, and so they parlayed our win in Portugal and our London nomination into something worth paying attention to; they set up screenings in New York and LA and they managed to get every US independent distributor, from Miramax to New Line, to commit to coming to see the movie.

I flew to New York with the producer and my agent and we did some meetings and then set up the screening room and checked the projection etc for the New York screening. Right after that, we were due to fly to LA and do the same thing again the next day. The hope was that between New York and LA, we would spark some kind of bidding war and secure a US sale by the end of the week...

I remember we were in the bar of the Paramount Hotel, about an hour or so from the start of the New York screening when the call came in: Chris Blackwell, the head of Palm Pictures, had a problem with the movie. What was the problem? No one was authorised to tell us over the phone, they needed us to fly back to London immediately and go directly from the airport to Chris's place in the country. The producer explained that we were about to walk into the New York screening, only to be told that the New York and LA screenings had been cancelled moments earlier.

Storm Entertainment were furious; they had staked their reputation on getting all those buyers into screenings and now they were getting pissed off phone calls from those same buyers. The damage was irreparable. The door only ever opens for a short time and you either walk through it or you don't. You don't cancel a screening for the likes of Harvey Weinstein (no, we didn't know about Harvey back then) and expect him to come back a second time. We were dead in the water.

Angry and profoundly confused, we flew back to the UK and made our way to Chris Blackwell's house. There we sat in his living room and he played my movie off a VHS tape on a REALLY tiny television with a shitty picture and the wrong colour set up. (If you're wondering why the head of the company that financed the movie had not bothered watching the movie until the night before, so was I). We got maybe ten minutes into the movie and Blackwell paused the tape and said "Who's that?" I told him it was Natasha Little, the movie's femme fatale character. He nodded and continued on. A couple of minutes later, he paused again. "And who's that?" That, I explained, was also Natasha Little. "Why is her hair different?" I told him that this was a flashback to a time before the scene we had just watched.

"Oh," he said. And then he stopped the tape. That, apparently, had been the extent of his "problem" with the movie, and it had cost us a US deal.

Was this calculated sabotage? I assumed so for many years. As hinted earlier, in the absence of a US deal, Palm Pictures got to release the movie straight to video in the US by default. But I'm not sure what was to be gained from that. US video rights were hardly a license to print money. I wonder now if it wasn't just some combination of incompetence and a power trip, or if Blackwell had simply expressed his confusion to some flunkey who had taken it upon themselves to cancel everything and fly us home just to please the boss.

I'm not sure there's a lesson to be learned from that debacle. The film industry is not short of stories of people abusing their power or making stupid mistakes at the expense of others. I had experienced it early, but it was far from the last time I would witness this kind of behaviour.

Fighting the Future

The Criminal was released theatrically in the UK but the marketing campaign was not handled well. The promised advertising and PR blitz did not materialise, and the distributors did not even deliver posters to the cinemas in time for the release. I went to Leicester Square on opening night and ours was the only movie playing at the Warner West End that evening that had no poster in the lobby and an empty frame on the wall by the entrance to the screen.

By that time, it is too late to rage at anyone. That is the point at which you find yourself just making mental notes of the people you never want to be partnered with in the future.

The last thing we had to do was get the picture ready for home video. This involves reopening the colour grade and preparing a version especially for home viewing. It was fun to be able to go back and tinker with what we'd made and I think we did a really good job of adapting the movie for home media. DVD was just starting to be a thing then, as were widescreen televisions, and I was keen to optimise our movie for this new technology.

Back then, there were two ways to present a movie for widescreen DVD; you could have the original square picture with black bars at the top and bottom, and a widescreen TV would detect that and zoom in on the picture to fill the screen. This was a low-quality fix, because zooming in on the picture degraded quality. The better solution was Aspect Ration Conversion (ARC) whereby the picture was encoded on the disc as a "squeezed" image, so that the TV would unsqueeze it to widescreen. This retained the quality of the original image.

During the conversion process, I argued strongly that ARC was the way to go; digital formats were the future and using this method would future-proof the movie. But I was assured that this was a bad idea; apparently it was an unnecessary expense because "This whole widescreen digital thing is a fad". I fought my corner as hard as I could, but I lost. The DVD version of The Criminal was released as a 4:3 letterboxed version, which would be degraded by widescreen televisions. As the DVD market took off, to be replaced by Blu-Ray and then streaming, any movie that was encoded as ours was fell by the wayside because it didn't pass the minimum quality threshold. To date, The Criminal has never been available on blu-ray or any streaming service because there is no master of high enough quality. It even stopped being sold on DVD after a year or so because standards were rising quickly in that market and our movie rapidly found itself below the acceptable threshold for DVD quality. Like an out-of-print book, it simply ceased to be available.

But the ARC process had been prohibitively expensive, right? Future-proofing our film would have broken the bank, that's why it was out of the question... Right? So just what princely sum did we save by opting not to create a digital master that could still be in use twenty-five years later?

We saved... Drum roll please... Six hundred pounds.

So is The Criminal any good?

If everything had gone smoothly with the US screenings and the UK release, and the home video conversion, could we have had a hit on our hands? No, I don't think so.

I've been disparaging of critics thus far, but let me now step into that role and offer a review of the movie. I should caveat this by saying that I haven't seen The Criminal for a decade or more and the last time I watched it, projected for a film school screening, it made me cringe pretty solidly for 98 minutes. Admittedly this is partly this is a function of watching something your younger self created, like reading your teenage diary. But I'll try to be as objective as I can be...

The movie plays like a mess of ideas thrown up onto the screen by an over-enthusiastic twenty-something who is desperately trying to get noticed (which is exactly what it is). Some of those ideas are good, and some are even well-executed, but they don't hang together, in part because there is little consistency between them, and also because the script is not a sturdy enough frame on which to build them.

It's a basic Hitchcockian "wrong man" story, updated but unimproved. The characters are thin and under-explored, the plot is creaky and not sufficiently character-driven, and the dialogue is often clunky, over-written and smug. I also find a lot of the design to be over-the-top and unconvincing.

As both writer and director, I take full responsibility for all of these shortcomings. I can moan about how the movie was distributed and marketed, but I am responsible for everything that ended up on screen. Even those creative battles that I lost were mine to lose and the result has my name on it. This is why you have to fight like hell, why it doesn't pay to be amenable or play nice. Compromise happens all the time, but when you cave, as I did, because you want to be seen as a team player, you always regret it. The team deserts you (when the movie fails, you won't see them for dust) and you're left with your name on something that might have been better if you were more willing to piss people off.

That said, there are some elements that work in the movie's favour; it was beautifully photographed by Nic Morris, the acting, despite the shortcomings of the script, is really strong, and the music by Tolga Kashif and Mark Sayer-Wade is beautiful. There are also aspects of visual storytelling within it; switching points of view, chronological cross-cuts, one-take Steadicam shots, long static frames, which work very well and were incredibly bold for a young first-time filmmaker. There are a couple of sequences where the editing, by Mark Aarons, really comes to the fore and transforms scenes that were flat on the page into something both arresting and genuinely unusual. There's stuff in there that I have rarely seen accomplished anywhere else, that I think was really effective.

By way of example, there is a forensics scene in the movie which had some complicated staging and a number of speaking parts. When it came time to film it, there was a panic because there was no way we had time to shoot conventional coverage; a wide, then group shots, and then close-ups of the main cast and details of the crimes scene etc. It would have taken a day, and we only had about ninety minutes. This is where the wheels nearly came off the whole thing. Literally no one thought there was a way to do it, but we had to be out of this location by the end of the day and the movie didn't work without the scene.

I walked off on my own. I've had this feeling a few times since; it's akin to a panic attack, it's like my head is just filled with white noise and I cannot order my thoughts or get any kind of a grip on what is happening. But panic or flight was not an option. There had to be a way to solve this... I waited for the panic to subside and then, from somewhere in the ether, I had the spark of an idea.

I went back onto the set and had the actors walk through the scene again while I observed who interacted with who. Then I went into a huddle with the Director of Photography and the Steadicam operator (the brilliant Vince McGahon) and suggested lighting the scene practically, using the bright floor lamps that forensics people use (so that we would not have to change the lighting when we changed angles) and then running the scene multiple times with the Steadicam moving with a different character on each take.

At the time, this was wildly unconventional coverage. But I realised that when we were with Bernard Hill, we would catch his half of his exchanges with Holly Aird, and when we followed her, we would get her half. The sizes wouldn't match, and we would constantly be getting flare off the bright floor lamps, but we could make a virtue of the chaos.

No one thought this was a good idea until we put it on its feet, at which point the actors realised they were suddenly free to go anywhere; they didn't have to hit marks or maintain any real continuity. They liked that. Then, once we had done a pass on the first actor, other crew members started to come on board, throwing out suggestions of how their departments could jump in to make elements work.

In the end, we shot a scene that should have taken a day in about 45 minutes. Mark Aarons chopped the hell out of it in the edit, and it became the scene that was most often excerpted on TV shows like Film 2000 in the lead-up to release. Even now, though much of the dialogue makes me cringe, I still think the scene holds up very well.

Ultimately, although I don't think The Criminal works as a whole, we took a big swing. There is nothing timid or half-hearted about the film (which makes the bits which don't work even more glaring), and I would far rather have shot for the moon and missed than to have played it safe.

And it did have its fans. Ian Christie, who was Michael Powell's biographer and friend (and who organised the film school screening where I last saw the movie) took me aside the first time he saw it and said "Mickey would have really liked that." As praise goes, it doesn't get much better than that.

Ultimately, what I am most proud of is that we got the movie made. I learned an enormous amount, I had a great time doing it, and I met some incredible people. And despite the film not being successful at the box office, the sheer fact of its existence opened a lot of doors. The morning after the London Film Festival screening, I got to sit for several hours in a hotel lobby with Benicio Del Toro, brainstorming ideas for movies, just because I was suddenly an up-and-coming film-maker. Having a film under your belt, good or bad, opens doors.

Reliving this period of my life provokes mixed emotions. There were a lot of disappointments on the back end of the process, and it did leave a bad taste in my mouth for a while. But I had come from nowhere, without any formal training, and against all odds, I had made a feature film at the age of twenty-seven. Opportunities were presenting themselves and I finally felt like I was a part of the industry. My career was at last moving in the right direction.

And I had a new script to take out. I had learned from my mistakes, and movie number two was going to set the world on fire...

COMING SOON: Part Three - Hollywood or bust.

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