Dressing Up Dogs

Part Three - Hollywood Or Bust.

Courtney Love makes a lousy cup of coffee. This is not her fault; she's a committed tea drinker and so she makes coffee like she makes tea - the water is in the briefest possible contact with the coffee grounds, resulting in something that is hot water with a homeopathic hint of coffee.

I'm in Malibu, at a house that Courtney is renting, maybe from Paul McCartney. Or it's possible that Paul McCartney bought her old house and that is why she is living here. The story features Paul McCartney somewhere, but I am finding the sense of it elusive, because Courtney doesn't like to stay on one topic for more than a few seconds. Mention of Martin Scorsese leads into “Casino”, which takes us to Sharon Stone and then something about David Mamet wanted to direct Courtney and Sharon in a play on Broadway but it didn’t work out for some reason. Scorsese to Mamet in maybe 15 seconds.

We move from the kitchen out to the deck. Huge Pacific waves are breaking just a few metres away and then rolling in under this deck. This might be the best house I have ever been in. Courtney is telling me that she loves my script because she’s always wanted to play a character who drives a vintage Aston Martin. I realise that she has misread Alfa Romeo as Aston Martin. And she also may have missed that her character never even gets into the car, let alone drives it. Courtney is excited. She has always wanted to do a car chase movie. This is not a car chase movie. I nod and smile and say “Great”, and take a sip of my coffee-water.

How did we get here? As always, the process starts with a script.

"One Way Split" is going to be my second movie. It is a story about a heist on a US Air Force base in East Anglia, but it is not a heist movie. The heist happens right at the beginning and then our hero, who is the getaway driver, double-crosses the rest of the gang and absconds with the money and his American girlfriend to Europe. The movie explores their attempts to shake off the gang he betrayed, the UK cops, and the US military so that he can start a new life with the girlfriend, who also turns out to have an agenda of her own. It's a crime movie, and kind of a love story, and it's pretty funny. (I haven't read this script for at least fifteen years, so I can't tell you if it's actually any good or not).

I should have written this script while we were trying to get The Criminal made, because then it would have been ready to go. But I didn't. It was only after we had made, and fumbled the release of, The Criminal that I sat down and started writing.

Lesson 1: Redundancy.

There's a saying in the military, "Two is one, and one is none". It's about back-ups and redundancy and the inevitability that if you only have one of something, it will fail when you need it most and you will be screwed. So it is with projects in the film industry. If you only have one, then when it runs aground, you are screwed. Screenwriters have to have several balls in the air at the same time. Any screenwriter who is only working on one project at a time is asking for trouble.

Nowadays, on any given day, I have projects circulating that I am trying to get made, I am working on at least one screenplay actively, and I have ideas for a handful more that are being fleshed out and can be talked about in meetings if necessary. That is the only way to hedge against failure.

Back then, I didn't know this rule, so I finished one movie and started writing another. The writing process was a little faster than it had been with The Criminal, though, and so I was able to get a draft circulating within a few months. And I had made a film, which made it a little easier to get the script read.

As always, the first thing you really want to do is to get an actor attached. Not only does this make your project "real", but it is also something of an insurance policy; if you have an actor who is considered valuable and they have bought in based on your script and the fact that you are directing, then it provides a certain level of job security moving forward - if the studio or financier tries to replace you, they might lose the star. (Never overplay this hand, because actors are as insecure as anyone else - if a financier comes to them and says "We want to lose this clown and get Ridley Scott", you will not hear a word uttered in your defence).

My UK agent represents an actor who he thinks would be perfect for One Way Split. He's a guy who has been working in the West End for the past few years, but he was just in a show where he attracted the attention of a Hollywood producer, who cast him in a big studio movie. The movie has yet to open, but great things are expected. Right now, the actor is looking for his next project and, not being a star quite yet, he is approachable and, as importantly, affordable.

The actor reads the script and he likes it and he wants to meet. Usually, this initial meeting will happen on neutral ground; the agent's office, or a cafe somewhere. But this actor suggests I come to his house.

We hang out for the afternoon and I am blown away. I've met lots of actors, I have now directed some. But this guy is not like them. He appears to have no insecurity whatsoever; he is entirely comfortable in his own skin and that allows him to just be incredibly nice. He understands that he has been very lucky recently, and he talks about filming a big Hollywood movie with a sense of genuine wonder and enthusiasm. But rather than worrying that this will have been his one shot, he seems fine with whatever happens. Right now, he is hot and he is keen to use that to raise some other boats. Specifically, he wants to attach to my movie in the hope that he can help it to get made.

I cannot say enough good things about this guy. He's not just the nicest, warmest actor I've met, but he's the nicest, warmest human being I have ever met. He loves acting, he loves his life and his family. He's getting successful, but there's that rare sense that he would be exactly the same if he emptied bins for a living.

He's also perfect for the part. I report back to my agent and my producer that we have our lead. Everyone is excited. This guy is going to be a major star and we have caught him on the ascendant...

One Way Split is budgeted somewhere between $10-15 million. That's not huge for a second film, but it is a lot of money. In order to get that money outside of the studio system (and we had to be outside of that system because Hollywood is not rolling the dice on a 27-year-old with a quirky European thriller), you have to pre-sell territories. Without getting into the weeds, that means that you persuade, for example, a French distributor to promise to buy the finished movie for their territory for a certain amount of money. You get a bunch of those promises (ideally $10-15 million worth) and you take them to a bank or a financier, who loans you the money to make the film, with those pre-sales as collateral.

In order to get pre-sales, you need a sales agent. That is a company that takes your movie pitch, and the star names you have attached, out to market...

Lesson 2: The tail wags the dog.

In a regular industry, a product is made and the sales department are instructed to sell it. In the independent movie industry, the sales agents get to dictate what movies get made. The tail wags the dog. If the sales agent doesn't think they can pre-sell a movie, you are not going to get to make it. The sales agent bases their decision on pretty much one thing; who is in the movie?

There are probably some good sales agents out there, people who are ingenious and think laterally and can tailor a pitch to the potential buyer, who work hard and exhibit determination and enthusiasm - all the qualities I was told were necessary for sales when I was starting out in life. If those sales agents exist, I have not met them. The ones I have met only want to sell a movie if Margot Robbie is in it, because that means they can show up to Berlin or Cannes or wherever, sell the movie in the first twenty minutes of the festival and then go and get drunk with their mates for a week. Film sales is where lazy, stupid people end up if the British television industry is full.

This is not to suggest that film sales is easy, it's not. What makes it hard is distributors, because they don't want to try selling a movie to exhibitors (the cinema chains) if there isn't a big star in it. And exhibitors don't think a movie will attract an audience unless there is a big star on the poster.

So being an effective sales agent would involve developing a strategy for a prospective movie that shows a path to success for exhibitors and distributors across a range of different territories with different tastes (no one says it out loud, for instance, but a lot of those territories, even in 2026, don't think they can attract an audience with a non-white face on the poster). I personally think this can be done, and has been done. But it's a lot of work, and that is not as attractive to sales agents as being able to say "Tom Cruise is attached" and then signing the deal on the way to the hotel bar.

A lot of independent movies fall at the first hurdle of not having a big enough name attached to motivate international sales. (There are, obviously, countless examples of movies that get made without big stars, and, like an astronomer positing the existence of dark matter, I really hope that is an indicator that there are some good sales agents out there somewhere.) But we had our name actor; he wasn't a star YET, but his trajectory was undeniable. This was an opportunity for people to buy a movie that would come out AFTER this actor had hit big. It was a bargain. You're buying Apple shares before the iPhone launches.

But it turns out that no sales agent or foreign distributor would have been able to retire on the back of their Apple shares, because even the tiniest amount of risk is too much risk. Across the UK and the European Continent, we were met with one flat response: let's see how this Hollywood movie does, because there's no reason to think it will be successful and this actor will probably disappear without trace.

In the event, X-Men opened pretty strong, and Hugh Jackman's turn as Wolverine did indeed do a little something for his career.

That opening was still a few months away, though, so we had a window. Hugh wasn't a big enough name to get us moving, but perhaps we could round out the cast to make the package attractive?

When I had met with Benicio Del Toro, I had told him about the bad guy in the script (I hadn't finished writing it at that point). He was interested, and had some great (mad) ideas for the character. Maybe we could add Benicio Del Toro to the cast? I floated this possibility and was assured that, even post The Usual Suspects and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "No one knows who he is."

OK, so maybe we could cast the female lead and that person PLUS Hugh, PLUS Benicio would get some attention...

Which is how I wind up drinking flavoured water at Courtney Love's house.

By the time I get back in the car and head south from Malibu back to LA, Courtney wants to do the movie. Whether she has actually read the script is a little uncertain, but she is excited nonetheless (as am I because, despite her quirks, she's a great actress who I liked enormously). Hugh Jackman, Courtney Love, Benicio Del Toro. And there's a murmur that Mickey Rourke might be interested... Set aside how a 27-year-old sophomore British director wrangles this cast on set, it's surely a package worthy of note?

Luckily, while the UK and the Europeans are still waiting for a "big name" to attach, the Americans are a little more bullish; a new US distributor has read the script and, because they have the foresight to predict that the X-Men movie might actually sell some tickets, they are now pledging $10 million dollars to the movie. I think we are off to the races...

But there is one stumbling block. Word is out that I am in Los Angeles, and I have been summoned to meet Hugh Jackman's US reps...

If memory serves, at this time there were five major talent agencies in the US: Creative Artists Agency (CAA), International Creative Management (ICM), William Morris, Endeavour and United Talent Agency (UTA). Since then, some have merged, some have disappeared.

Going into one of the big agencies is an incredible experience; you're entering a modernist temple dedicated to the art of the hustle - the whole building throbs with energy, millions and millions of dollars are moving through these places every minute and the whole machine works in service to the production of film and television. This is the engine room of Hollywood and it is its boot camp; the person who brings you a cup of coffee today could be running a studio in a few years time (Pro Tip: Be REALLY nice to the people bringing the coffee.)

I know writers and directors who despise agents as a breed but I have always got along very well with my reps and I value their experience and their judgement. They're smart people doing a difficult job under enormous pressure, and you won't find anyone in the industry who works harder.

Walking into an agency as a prospective client is one thing, walking in as the enemy is another. Going to meet Hugh's agents was like taking a meeting on the Death Star.

The producer and I were shown into a conference room and seated on one side of a long table. A few moments later (during which we didn't speak because we had become convinced that the room was bugged - probably not true, but you wouldn't put it past them), the door opened and a group of identically dressed reps walked and and took their seats on the other side of the table. Among them was one big name agent who was very obviously in charge. Everyone else was either there to assist, or to watch and learn how you swat a fly.

We were the fly, because we were trying to make some tiny piece-of-shit independent British movie with their client who was about to be a huge movie star. The fear was that at the exact point that Hugh ascended to movie star status, he would be unavailable to accept wildly lucrative starring roles in blockbusters because he would be committed to the aforementioned tiny piece-of-shit.

Our job in this meeting was to hold the line. If the US reps had been able to persuade Hugh to back out of this commitment, they would have done so. That we were sitting here suggested that they had tried that and it had not worked. So now the play was to intimidate us into withdrawing our offer to Hugh, thus freeing up his schedule. All we had to do was resist that and get out of there alive.

Lesson 3: Sometimes the bad guys are right.

I've just set up the classic David v. Goliath scene; the big, rich, powerful, corporate agents versus the plucky British film-makers. We understand who we're meant to be rooting for, right? But here's the thing: Goliath is the good guy in the story. Here's why... The door to opportunity only ever opens for a brief moment. Usually, you don't know when that will be. But in the case of the release of X-Men, these agents had got a countdown; not to when the movie opened, but to just before. At the point that the marketing and the hype are reaching their peak, that's when you start doing deals for your client. That's the hedge; if the movie opens and it's a turkey, you're already onto the next thing. If it's a hit, then you can keep doing more deals and line those jobs up. (You'll note that this is the opposite of the sales agent/distributor thinking - they all wanted to wait and see what the movie did, but which point it would have been too late.)

The problem these reps had was that Hugh was saying that he was committed to One Way Split and would jump onto it whenever we found the finance. In other words, he had given us first call. An agent can't very well do a deal with Paramount or Warner Brothers for millions of dollars if the caveat is "Unless this little British movie goes, in which case the deal is off."

So not only were we standing in the way of their sizeable commission, but we also (though we didn't see it like this at the time), by our very existence, threatened to scupper Hugh's chances at ever becoming a movie star.

I don't remember much about that meeting. I know the main agent laid out his case for why he needed us to withdraw the offer. At the time, it sounded like bullying though, as noted, I do think they had a strong case. As instructed by the producer, I nodded and smiled and promised to consider their case. And we got out of the room, alive, without destroying our movie.

We emerged into the Hollywood sunshine. We had three, maybe four, name actors, and a ten million dollar investment in our movie. And we had survived a trip into the lions' den, we had faced down the Hollywood elite and survived. All we had to do was find the extra five million dollars (or actually more, because we now had to pay some serious actor fees) and we had a movie.

I remember looking around at Santa Monica Boulevard while the producer took a call on his mobile phone. Could I live here? Is this where my career was leading me? An open-top sports car, a swimming pool, making movies for the big studios, an office on the Paramount Lot...? It all suddenly seemed entirely possible. A little over a year ago, I had been on the dole. My fortunes had turned around fast...

And then the producer ended the call and told me that the US distributor who was putting up the $10 million dollars had just collapsed and filed for bankruptcy. We were back to zero. We knew the UK and Europe was not good for the money, so our only hope was the US. But X-Men billboards were already going up, which meant that any potential financier would be checking in with Hugh's US reps on claims that he was committed to One Way Split, and we knew that they were not on side.

We flew back to London, deflated. A few weeks later, X-Men opened to great numbers. Hugh Jackman's fee went through the roof. I think he might still have stayed committed to us, out of loyalty and because he is the nicest human on Earth, but by then it seemed outrageous to ask him to pause his wild ascent while we tried to scrape our movie together.

We let Hugh off the hook, and Courtney and Benicio moved on to other things, but we kept plugging away with the movie for a while. It was maybe a year later, in a meeting with yet another sales agent, that I heard the words "If you could get someone like Hugh Jackman..."

Meanwhile, I was flat broke, again, and all I had was this one script that I was trying to get made and getting nowhere with (see Lesson 1). I was asked to go on a panel at the London Film Festival, to discuss the difficulties of getting a second film made. I agreed, feeling somewhat over-qualified to speak on the topic.

The panel took place in a function room of a London hotel, I forget which one. Seated next to me was Asif Kapadia, who had been the sound recordist on my short film all that time ago, and who had since made his debut feature "The Warrior". He too was having a hard time getting movie number two going. We commiserated and shared war stories before the panel started, and then the audience filed in and the event got underway.

I was unprepared for the reception that my tale of woe received. While I wasn't expecting sympathetic wailing and gnashing of teeth, I thought I had learned some lessons worth imparting, and I hoped there might be some useful advice coming my way from the other members of the panel. But, aside from Asif, the other members of the panel were film producers in salaried positions for companies that had proved adept at marshalling public money from the likes of the BFI and the Arts Council and using it to make niche movies, immune to the requirements of the market. While I admired a lot of the movies these people had made, we were definitely not playing the same game.

Instead of a discussion about the trials and tribulations of film financing, I found myself under attack from the person chairing the panel (who will remain nameless), who claimed it was "disgusting" that I was trying to get so much money for my second film and that I must be "greedy" and was clearly just trying to "sell out to Hollywood."

Asif came to my defence, pointing out that $15million was not, in fact, a King's ransom in the movie industry. The chair replied that he himself had never made a film for more than a couple of thousand pounds and implied that spending more than that on a movie was some kind of mortal sin.

I had hung out in Wolverine's kitchen, sat on Courtney Love's Malibu deck, faced down a room full of Hollywood agents... More than that, I had written a script that had facilitated these things, that was, at least for a moment, taken seriously enough as a piece of work, and as a commercial prospect, that those people would give me the time of day. And now here I was, broke, in a dingy hotel function room in London, being lambasted by a late-night cable TV presenter who thought he was John Cassavetes, to the amusement of people who had risen without trace through a cottage industry that leeched public money to furnish their handsome salaries.

I remember looking out into the audience and seeing my British agent looking back at me, trying not to laugh at this ridiculous spectacle. Egged on by that, I decided to turn off my inner censor. "I think the difference between us," I said. "Is that I'm trying to make films people might actually want to see."

It's far from the sickest of burns, but it shut him up quite effectively. It also turned the rest of the panel, Asif excepted, against me because they were all most certainly not in the business of making films anyone wanted to see.

The event stumbled on, turning into quite an ugly attack on these two vulgar directors who had the temerity to want to make commercial films. The last word was given to one of the producers (who I would meet again, years later, and who would then claim to have always been a fan of my work). She said, "Instead of coming here and whining, why don't these film-makers just pack up their bags and go and work in television?"

So I did...

COMING SOON: Part Four - Adventures on the Small Screen.

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

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