03-12-08 / INTERVIEWS / 'SOFT' WINS BIFA / BUCHAREST
There are a couple of new magazine interviews online; one from Little White Lies and the other from Film & Festivals. The latter is from their October issue but I was only just informed about it, having been previously told it would be published in January.

Well, it's a funny old world. Having submitted Soft for consideration at the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) last year, only to be ignored, this year it was invited and won Best Short Film. Needless to say, I couldn't take the nomination seriously so I was more than a little surprised to learn of the win while sitting in a dark little Bucharest bar. The last award in a great run, for sure. Alongside the Cinema16 release, it seems to have reignited a lot of press interest, although most of it focuses on the film being "about hoodies and happy slapping" (groan).

The Bucharest trip was to sit on the jury for Dakino Film Festival, where Soft won last year. Unfortunately I only saw the city by night, or more specifically its clubs and bars, having spent my days either sleeping or attempting to write in my hotel room. It was the first time I ever attended a festival where I still couldn't find my geographical bearings by the time I left. At the rather unique awards ceremony, the awards went to Laszlo Nemes' The Counterpart (Hungary), Samuel Tilman's Voix de Garage (Dead End) (Belgium) and Hadrian Marcu's Joi (Thursday) (Romania). The festival president is a celebrity chef and owns many restaurants so providing you weren't vegetarian the food was great, although I experienced a slightly different restaurant menu once the festival closed, with 'Brain Speciality', 'Breadcrumbed Brain' and 'Turkey Testicles'. Err, I'll take the trout please...

23-11-08 / 'SOFT' AVAILABLE TO BUY ON DEEVEEDEE
Soft is finally available to buy as part of the latest Cinema 16 DVD compilation ‘World Short Films'. It's a double-disc edition this time, featuring the usual eclectic blend of shorts by big players (such as Guillermo del Toro, Park Chan-Wook, Alfonso Cuaron, Jane Campion) alongside work by newcomers (such as me).

I've yet to receive my copy at the time of writing but if the three films I have seen are anything to go by then you should feel guilty that you haven't purchased it already, and if you have, then feel daft that you didn't buy multiple copies. Christmas is coming don't you know, and this would make a perfect gift for a friend in need of some savvy guidance from your good, cultured self. With five hours (five!!!) of films including directors' commentaries, your finger will be so on the pulse that you'll have to dip it into a bag of frozen peas to stop it vibrating, oh yes. Well what are you waiting for? Why are you reading this when you should be here or here buying these ridiculously affordable pleasurediscs? Oh and while you're there you might as well pick up the original Cinema 16 DVD ‘British Short Films' which includes my film Telling Lies.

15-11-08 / INTERFILM JURY, BERLIN
Another blast in Berlin at Interfilm Short Film Festival, except I caught another cold on the flight over. I only kicked the last one a week before and this one has now mutated into the flu. Brilliant. Either there are way too many germs dancing around these days or my immune system has packed its bags. Festival highlights for me were David Charon's Le Secret de Salamon (Salomon's Secret) (France), Jason Stutter's Careful with that Axe (New Zealand), Mads Matthiesen's Dennis (Denmark), Grimur Hakonarson's Wrestling (Iceland), Frederick Vin's Paul Rondin est... Paul Rondin (France), Bill Plympton's Hot Dog (USA) and Alan Becker's Animator Vs Animation (USA).

International Competition Jury members (left to right): French cinematographer Carlo Varini, Swiss actress Sabine Timoteo, Simon Ellis and Director of Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival Eileen Arandiga.

31-10-08 / UPPSALA SHORT FILM FESTIVAL, SWEDEN
After years of meeting the director of Uppsala Short Film Festival in Hamburg each year, and having missed the opportunity to attend last year, I finally made it over to present Soft in the Prix UIP programme, out of competition. The Q&A sessions were great and I learned that a social dilemma similar to the one in the film has recently occurred in Sweden, resulting in a father shooting the tormentor of his son. Sadly, this isn't the first time that international audiences have told me that these problems (all too common in the UK) are beginning to happen in their country.

On a happier note, I also managed to watch plenty of other films for a change. International competition highlights included Tobias Nölle's René (Switzerland), Sergi Perez's New Dress (Spain), and the idea behind Bevan Walsh's Love Does Grow on Trees (UK) was one of those gems that had me wondering why I had never thought of it myself; an ode to one of the less talked-about phenomena of the eighties – discarded porn mags in wooded areas.

The Norweigan programmes included some brilliant comedies, including Roar Uthag's The Martin Administration, Joachim Solum's extraordinary Depth Solitude, Hans Petter Moland's United We Stand, and Martin Lund's Home Game (included in a screening of my favourite shorts in Hull Short Film Festival earlier this year). The Romanian focus typically featured strong work but my favourite was still Cristian Nemescu's Marilena de la P7, which I first saw a year ago and enjoyed even more this time around. I had never seen Constantin Popescu's The Apartment before; a festival success in 2004/2005. Great.

In other news, i'm currently experiencing a serious case of idea-overload and having enormous trouble focusing while there are no less than eight shorts I want to make and two or three potential features to sit down and develop. My head is spinning almost constantly and I can't seem to make it settle. I have declined the lure of several free trips to other festivals (including one in Lithuania, bah) for fear of compounding the problem. Beyond commitments that are too late to avoid, it's hard to resist squeezing in more trips in between trips.

Back to a bum note, naturally, the biggest thing I have learned from the mammoth stretch of post-production on my first feature is that too much time spent on something can be just as dangerous as not enough. Never before have I been so consumed by a project that it has made me thoroughly blind as to whether it is actually any good or not. I have no idea if the film works at all, if it's good/great/bad/abysmal. I just can't see it, can no longer trust my own judgement, and haven't been able to for a long time. Terrifying.

16-10-08 / GHENT FILM FESTIVAL, BELGIUM
Flew to Brussels with a cold and landed with one blocked ear. By the time I arrived in the postcard city of Ghent an hour later it popped clear but then somehow blocked again during a screening, staying that way for two days when the snot finally started to unwrap itself from around my brain. I was expecting to be on a short film jury but it was in fact the international feature jury so I felt somewhat out of my depth, the other jury members being older, wiser, and generally more interested in cinema than myself. They were a great bunch though and despite us rarely agreeing on anything unanimously, debates never became arguments and it was a good experience. I couldn't believe my luck when I walked into my gargantuan hotel room. There would have been enough space to install a full-size snooker table, including all necessary elbow room and an accompanying audience. The bed was a monster; I have seen smaller bedrooms.

Having to introduce myself to a prince while trying not to accidentally spit a half-chewed chicken curry sandwich on him seems like a worthy tidbit, though perhaps not. The opening film (The Visitor) was a good start, albeit out of competition, and I wound up talking shite at two of the actors in their room until small o'clock before retiring to my BED and instantly falling asleep, full of too much free wine. Over the next few days I fleetingly met Woody Harrelson following a screening of his new film 'Trans-Siberian', watched Harold Lloyd's ‘Safety Last' on the big screen and turned into a child for 73 minutes, got scared by big ugly oysters and mussels but ate many fresh shrimps/sole/turbot/seawolf/partridge/veal and deer, slept many big sleeps in my big bed that was big enough for five big people, met a very funny and unassuming man who happened to be the writer of Ben E King's 'Stand by Me' and a bunch of Elvis hits, fought off sleep in the cinema during several screenings and finally lost the battle on one occasion, went to a fully bombastic John Williams concert, was shocked by Emmanuel Beart's lips, had my first Westmalle beer, kneeled down to photograph a small slug that was having her moment of fame slithering across the red carpet, smiling and everything, only for some bloke to walk right on top of her and carry her away on the sole of his crap shoe:

I like to think that when he got home that night, she dislodged herself from between the grooves in his sole and slid into his snoring mouth to have slug babies. Go here for more pictures of the trip.

04-10-08 / NOTHING OF MUCH CONSEQUENCE EXCEPT MY BELT
Well the good news is that my wrist is neither broken nor fractured. It's just buggered. For the time being anyway. I also woke with a cold today, the day that I have to record a commentary track for Soft, now certain to be a hideously nasal affair.

Last week, in Dublin airport, I forgot to remove my belt when walking through security-check's scanners. A security guard took it from me and I walked through again to prove I didn't have a samurai sword in my pocket, then, while I struggled to repack my other belongings on the conveyor belt, with one working hand, he somehow failed to return it to me and I ended up rushing off without it. It was the only belt I ever wore and it used to be my dad's. Even writing about it in past tense is killing me. It's older than I am and I'm devastated because lost property don't have it, even though many other belts were handed in that day. I can't even remember the security guard's face in order to picture it being slapped repeatedly by an enlarged version of my one working hand. I went to try and buy some kind of contemporary replacement today but it was predictably miserable. All those twatty 'jesuslovesblahblahblah' belts that fashion spackers wear have never failed to irritate me but today... oh, man.

This has nothing to do with work but it felt good to get it off my chest.

25-09-08 / JAPAN / RANT / ACCIDENT
Sometimes it can be very hard to leave a place behind at the end of a festival, which is exactly how I feel about having just returned from Sapporo in Japan once again. It's pointless even trying to describe how much I love this festival, or indeed Japanese culture as a whole. While so much is happening at the moment and I often need to be in two places at once, this was exactly what the doctor ordered. I met great people, had memorable times, and I'm thoroughly saddened that it's all over. So affecting was the experience that I have been considering a new format for this site in order to accommodate a more detailed blog/diary section, but that's something for the future, perhaps. Three galleries of pictures can be seen here, here, and here.

After a sleepless, hotel-less final stopover in Tokyo on the way home, I was stuck in an aisle seat on the twelve-hour return flight with little hope of rest, and my subsequent hyper-sensitivity made getting onto the London underground at Heathrow even more of a nightmare than it should have been. Fellow commuters were reading the free London papers with their interminable coverage of the same old yawnshit 'celebrities' entering/exiting parties. My piss started to boil. This soon gave way to an all-consuming sadness. It was as if I had been away from home for two years rather than two months (including Berlin). I was somehow surprised by the bilge that never fails to generate public interest, realising how desensitised I must have become when faced with it every day. I found some solace in fantasising that all the media attention these people get will eventually incite an enormous backlash, ending the epidemic once and for all. The problem is that I have been anticipating said backlash for the last six or seven years and it still hasn't happened. So, the hour-long journey to King's Cross took me through the whole spectrum of emotions, and then I received a call that compounded my fears about the upcoming american film I moaned about in my last entry. Welcome home.

I stuck around in London for a small screening of Dogging: A Love Story which involved most of the cast, some crew, investors, distributors and the like. It was the first time I had seen the graded picture at full resolution, 99% finished, combined with the sound (I'm never satisfied with the sound). As the screening was late afternoon, the subsequent drinking with people I hadn't seen together since we filmed almost two years ago got a little out of hand. I ended up drunken pavement wrestling with one of the actors and did something to my wrist which, after a day of increasing pain and creeping bruises, required a visit to accident and emergency the following evening. My arm is in a cast, and further x-rays will confirm if my wrist is broken, but I don't think so. The nurse told me that it's the scafoid bone, which, if not treated properly, can lead to arthritis in older age. Fantastic. The only thing that makes me happier than this news is trying to type this with one hand and having to correct typo errors every three words.

02-09-08 / BERLIN / DOGGING / BERLIN / DOGGING / BERLIN / DOGGING
Well, having just returned from six weeks finishing Dogging: A Love Story in sunny Berlin, I can safely say that it's nice to be doing something else with my time for a little while. Even if that 'something else' is paying outrageous telephone bills and attempting to mow overgrown lawns while they are still wet. There have been many little ups and downs throughout post-production and I can't think of anything more simultaneously boring and painful than bleating on about it here, suffice to say that, finally it's almost over. Just a couple of images to tweak in the title sequence, a wait for the 35mm print to be born, and the search for a vacancy in the nearest warm cave.

The huge delay (it should have been released a year ago) has meant that one particular idea I created for the film appears to have now been employed by an upcoming sex-comedy from the US called Sexdrive. I was furious when I found out and couldn't work for a day, staring out of the window like an incapacitated gibbon. Then I found out last week that our release has been pushed to early NEXT year, meaning that, according to the history books, Sexdrive will precede us by a year. Despite my hopes that said film is shit, I heard it was tipped to be "the new Superbad" and then I wanted to hurt people. Still, saying something is "the new...(anything)" is hopefully a good sign that it's bilge after all. Don't ask me if i'm happy with mine though. I haven't got a clue. Expect something commercial, perhaps.

But bollocks to all that. The producer says i'll end up in an early grave if I carry on this way (like I don't know that already) so let's talk about how much I love Berlin. Actually, no I can't do that either because it plummets me into a black realisation that i'm now home, trying to cope with the greyness of a rip-off world I abandoned just long enough for it to become a nightmare to return to. All of the shit I expected but somehow still couldn't avoid, like retarded fascist estate agents (another boring but painful story).

Soft scooped Best Cinematography the Kodak Short Film Awards, which is surely its final, cheeky bow.

07-07-08 / ARTFILM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SLOVAKIA
I left my best pants in a cupboard in Slovakia. Shit. Located in the idyllic northern Slovak town of Trencianske Teplice, Artfilm International Film Festival is a ninety minute drive from Bratislava airport and the moment I got to my hotel I was urged to dump my bags in my room and join everyone for a medieval banquet at a beautiful big castle, including lots of food and drink. This was swiftly followed with games and performances by folk in medieval costume, and finally a night tour of the castle itself, complete with spectres jumping out of dark corners. A pretty unexpected first evening, and then I found the VIP bar with unlimited free quantities of any drink (every night). When I asked for a glass of champagne they said I could only have a bottle! Dangerous, but a great way to meet people, which can get confusing when there are four Janas, three Zuzanas, and as much Borovicka as you dare to drink. Soft screened well and I wished I could have stayed longer than the meagre four days I had. It was a lovely, relaxed time and I didn't even get to use the spa or swimming pool.

Coming home was the usual shit. Groups of gobby English lads (again with popped collars on their polo shirts) who invaded Bratislava for the cheap beer and couldn't keep themselves quiet on the plane, jeering at the flight attendants (one of them hollered "Oh yeah, buckle me up baby!" from the back while the seatbelt procedure was being demonstrated, I kid you not). It's always so toe-curlingly embarrassing. Do these people have no cringe bone?

Three festivals and a music video in four weeks isn't bad going. If you have a few minutes to kill while the kettle is boiling or your cornflakes are sinking, you can go here for an image gallery.

01-07-08 / MUSIC VIDEO / NEW MAGAZINE ARTICLE / MAX RICHTER
Finished cutting the music video for Swimming's new single Panthalassa. Hats off to everyone who turned up and trooped underground to Nottingham's cosy Baselab studio to jump about and play merry hell. My head wept like a loaded sponge and I was only filming.

Go here for an article in the impressive new 4Talent magazine. The scan is 1mb for legible text so how quickly it appears will depend on the speed of your connection. I popped into Borders bookstore on Oxford Street to see if Filmwaves magazine was selling like nobody's business but there were lots of them on the shelf. Hmm. Maybe they just, er, restocked after popular demand.

I finally got to see Max Richter perform live (the composer whose music I used for A Storm and Some Snow), double-billed with Johan Johansson, in a church. Very satisfying it was too. You would have to be missing a spine not to be stirred by the time it was all over. As both composers neatly dovetail classical with electronic elements, I wasn't quite sure which way the vibe would swing and wondered if everyone would be exteremely serious and wearing suits. Then they handed out fizzy sweets at the door and I noticed that Max was wearing jeans and trainers. Brilliant.

17-06-08 / PORTUGAL
Having just been to Festroia Film Festival in Portugal to present Soft in the Prix UIP section, I feel obliged to rant about flying for a bit. Carbon footprints aside, flying is shit. We all know how hideous cheap airlines can be, airlines such as Ryanair, the flying equivalent of catching the local bus that only costs one pence until you then have to cough up £24.99 tax and a further £24.99 tax tax. They never hesitate to proudly boast to their passengers if they land at their destination ahead of schedule but completely fail to even acknowledge, let alone offer an explanation, if they are late. And let's not mention the shrill commercials for energy drinks and scratchcards that bleat your ears off from the moment you set foot on the plane. I could write an essay on the wrongs of this stupid little company but it's well documented already and there's even a book devoted to it. So...

... this time I flew with BMI and, with my outbound flight being delayed by two hours, things didn't get off to a promising start. Then I had the serious misfortune of being seated directly in front of a gaggle of let's-all-get-pissed-as-fast-as-we-can blokes. You know the type, collar-popped polo shirts tucked into their jeans, shit trainers, identical haircuts, almost certainly bullied at school and making up for it ever since by seeing who can sink the most beer. The main problem is that these money-sucking airlines never refuse alcohol to anyone, no matter how shitfaced and annoying they might get.

So, after the whole plane got to hear about the menchildren's drinking itinerary for the evening, and a mildly bumpy landing in Lisbon saw snakebite being splashed down the back of my neck, I escaped the plane and was shot of them at last. Time to start to calming down and wondering why I still haven't moved to Germany. The festival driver then tells me that, as the flight was so delayed and it was late in the evening, I wasn't likely to find much to eat in our destination town of Setúbal unless I was prepared to eat McDonalds. I was starving, so against my better judgement I had one of their meal things. My body refused to digest it and after walking about with a brick in my stomach for a couple of hours I vowed never to eat a McDonalds again. How the hell people eat it on a regular basis I'll never know.

After these teething troubles things calmed down and the festival had a lovely, laid back vibe. Within no time I found a cold beer and a bean bag. The following day the sun was scorching and I went to the beach, ate actual food and met nice people. Over the whole weekend I only actually got to watch one film, a rather forgettable Polish feature, but I bumped into the actor Nickolas Grace, who played the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1984 television series Robin of Sherwood.

When the time came to fly back to the UK I was overjoyed to discover that my return flight was delayed by an hour and would land too late to catch a train back to Nottingham. Deep breaths. By this point I hated BMI so much that everything they did would infuriate me, like announcing before we took off that the plane had "two free toilets" as if such facilities were some kind of luxury extra that we should be paying a surcharge for, or by stating that their selection of drinks and snacks were available "at competitive prices". Now, I can't say that paying almost a pound for a can of coke the size of a baby's foot is value for money, but "competitive"? At 35,000 feet in the air, who are they competing with exactly?!? I guess they must mean Ryanair.

Go here for a teeny, tiny, almost pointless gallery of images from the trip.

(OLDER POSTS)