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Tuesday 20 October 2015

Chatting to Andrew Hulme at Film Fest Gent, director of the brilliant Cannes nominated SNOW IN PARADISE, he said that you can't really tell new emerging filmmakers what its really like in the British film industry, as it will scare them and put them off for life.



This is something I have pondered now for 20 years, since I first starting sitting on panels, doing talks and writing film making articles.

Every single producer who makes a film is an entrepreneur. Every one. 

As an entrepreneur you learn that you provide a product or service and you sell that for more than it cost to make and thus you make a profit. So many new film producers have run another kind of business either unrelated to the production of images before the come into films or they have produced something profitable related to films - corporates, commercials or pop promos. They all of them, every single one of them convinced that they will make a profit. No matter what you tell them they all think this at first. They think the laws of business apply to the film industry. 

They are wrong. 

It does not work like in films.

My first film was 65% funded by the BBC for just certain UK rights, yet despite being nominated for a BAFTA, starring Michael Gough and Kenneth Branagh, winning many other awards, getting great reviews and selling to 30 odd territories it never fully recouped and so failed to make a profit.


( The American distributors lied in on the above sleeve. It did NOT win a BAFTA and it was NOT from the BBC..well not entirely )


This happened with my first three films. For a great many years I thought I was a shit filmmaker and an even worse businessman because even though I produced three films that did well critically and were seen by many millions of people I could not make a buck from them.

Its was only, many years later that I discovered that making a film that makes a profit in the true independent sector in the UK, is as rare as hens teeth. I found that I was far from being alone, I was in fact in the majority of UK film producers. 

Distributor, sales agent and lecturer Alan McQueen recently told his students the truth - the real unvarnished truth and it did scare them. Many of them will now bury this information somewhere in the back of their minds thinking they will be different. Not to worry young students most of us who have been around for a very long time also do this. Its like death - we all think it will never happen to us.


( Alan McQueen is the bloke on the right. Not sure who the geezer on the left is). 

I have no doubt these students asked the same question that everyone asks when confronted with the raw truth about the British film industry " why does anyone do it if its that bad" ?

Why ?

This is a question I have never been able to answer myself in the 35 years since I gave up a successful acting career so don't expect any words of wisdom from me. I have no fucking idea !!!

( Its 4.07 am and I am going to try to get back to sleep and hope I won't have another nightmare like the one I just had - I am in a dark room and this man slowly approaches me with something under his cloak......it's a screenplay. A brilliant screenplay. I grab it with both hands and then spend 3-4-5 years of my life making it. Then some critics destroyed it, others praised it, some distributors buy it but few in number and so I make far less money in that time than I would selling pork pies in Leeds Market......and then I have to start all over again......only this time it will be REALLY difficult.....)

Tuesday 29 September 2015

Facebook requests

I keep getting all these Facebook requests from young women in their early 20's in bikini's (a one-piece swimsuit is far far better - bikini's are so off putting) who would love to get together with me after viewing my profile photo. 
They all appear to be from women who live behind, what was once called the Iron Curtain (I always thought that sounded such attractive part of the world and was a place I really wanted to go. Now I am not so sure). 
These Russian/ Baltic women obviously have a real thing for old men with grey beards, man breast where once there were Ryan Gosling pecs and liver spots. 
However I never get any from young men of the same age.
Why not ?
I am an equal opportunities potential blackmail victim !

Saturday 26 September 2015

Bankers and others with money !

What is it with bankers and finance people ?

They decided their own jobs are boring or something and want to move into films because they think it a glamorous industry. Because they have a lot of money WE let them in and give into all their demands no matter how daft.

However they don't just want to invest, they want to produce. Not executive produce which would be a sensible route, and a great many people from the City have done this successful over the years, but there are those who actually want to produce from the getgo - finding screenplays, selecting directors,  directly casting the actors etc.

Why ?

What on earth is is about what they do shuffling money from A to B and earning millions gambling with other peoples money or buying pork bellies for pigs that will not be born for five years that makes them think they are qualified to do a job it has taken so many of us decades to learn how to do.



I met one recently at a social gathering. He was slagging of the British film industry. Turned out he had produced and invested a large amount of his money in not just a film, but a drama. Yes a drama.

He had apparently taken advice from distributors and sales agents before production who warned him of how difficult it was to sell a drama. He of course knew better so did not listen.

I know the film in question. It has won a couple of awards and played well in the festival circuit but sales have not been forth coming....and will not be. It is a really hard sell. It is like selling marmite corn flakes.

He of course blamed people like me for not supporting him.

Now he tells other finance people to avoid the film industry. Thus we get the blame for his lack of knowledge and experience. He put off two very important people I was there to meet, about a film I am working on. They now think we, not him, are all a bunch of dilettantes who are irresponsible with other peoples money.

If I started trading shares, something I know absolutely nothing about, and then lost my money, it would be my fault.

All filmmakers need money and we all welcome any and all financiers, we could not make films without them.  I once had money from the Prudential Insurance for a film with Michael Gough, Rosemary Harris and Kenneth Branagh. I went to them to ask about casting and they replied "Why are you asking us. We know nothing about such things you are the filmmakers and we are backing you, so you decide". These days, sadly it is somewhat different.

The most successful finance worker to cross over into films in my opinion was Jake Eberts a Canadian who had a huge impact on the world film stage.  He flourished because he started working on other peoples productions first. He backed tried and tested filmmakers. Then after executive producing many films, films that had sold for more than they cost to produce, and only then when he knew and understood the whole process, did he move into producing. When he died it was reported that films he was involved with had received 66 Oscar nominations.

A man, greatly missed, who learnt to walk before he ran.

© David Nicholas Wilkinson. 2016. All Rights Reserved. 


Friday 25 September 2015

The Best Micro Budget Film Ever


Advice for newcomers -

I have spent almost 20 years distributing the challenging and interesting British & Irish films that no other company wanted to take on.  So many of these were made by emerging filmmakers and on micro budgets. Many of these filmmakers do fall into the easy trap, that I too have been tripped up by, and that is copying other films that have worked. This can be a sound move but it is unlikely to ever stand out. The goal for ever new filmmaker is delivering something that is good and original.

The best British micro budget ever made, in my opinion, is Christopher Nolan's FOLLOWING.



FOLLOWING is to some degree like other films but for me it was unique and different from everything the year it came to market. Most of us who saw it predicted great things for its young director.

This minor masterpiece was shot over a series of Saturday’s with only enough stock for two takes. The director broke many of the rules – black & white, only 70 minutes long, shooting on film with just a budget of £2,000 (with $83,000 of finishing funding from Peter Broaderick but he did not know that when shooting) yet apparently when Patrick Wachsberger of Summit saw it he said I don’t care whatever that directors next film is I will finance it. This might be an urban myth but that's the reaction every new filmmaker should aim for. Don't not let yourself settle for anything less.


That next film was MEMENTO.



I had wanted the distributing right's to Nolan's film but it was that good so did many other UK distributors, extremely unusual in a first film. FOLLOWING took £36,000 from just one print in the UK ( I felt it should have been released on far more given the fantastic reviews). Interestingly in the film Christopher Nolan has a shot of a door with a Batman sticker on it. I have often wondered if that was accident or design.




For Nolan’s last installment of the Batman trilogy he must have had a budget of at least $250 million for production and more for marketing/distribution. It just shows that if you make an impressive first film you are set up for life !

I have distributed around 50 British & Irish micro budget feature films and seen, at least 500 more since 1998, and the one overriding mistake the vast majority of new filmmakers make, is that there films are just not as good as they could be. Far, far too many of them are rushed into production before the screenplay is right.

I learnt myself the very hard way that you just cannot resolve weaknesses in the script and story during production. I do know how long development takes and, and if you are like me in the past, you will be in great need of that producing/ directing/ writing etc pay cheque but rushing into production before a screenplay is ready will almost certainly cause long term damage to that persons ongoing career, as it has done with many of the filmmakers who made films I have distributed.  Once the film is released it is of course far too late to change anything.

As I have said many times, for so many filmmakers the hardest film to get off the ground is their second one.

New filmmakers have to be absolutely honest with themselves. Compare that film with lots of other successful micro budget films and see if stands up. Be really honest with yourself. You can kid others but don't be so very stupid as to kid yourself.


Compare your script to FOLLOWING. Is it as good ?

Really ?

Only you will know.

Mrs Vincent Price

Alan Bates was asked at Coral Browne’s memorial service in London to speak about her.




My wife was a very good friend of hers which is why we were there. As I knew also her very slightly when she was Christopher Cazenoves much older lover in 1970,  so we both attended. She was one of the funniest people ever to grace the London stage, and off it.


Alan then proceeded to tell a story in which, bizarrely Coral was but a bit part player to her husband Vincent Price, something she rarely was in life. It was usually the other around.





Some years before Alan, Coral and Vincent were all dining out at a famous restaurant in LA when a member of the public spotted Mr Price and approached him for an autograph. Being the gentleman he was he willingly signed.

Vinny then suggested to them that " you must not pass up the chance of asking for my companions autograph too" who he informed the puzzled woman was very actor famous back in England. Bates duly obliged.

When she left Alan asked Vincent  “why on earth did you not sign your own name and why of all people did you put Dolores del Rio”. VP had been with the once famous screen goddess just before she died. Failing rapidly she grabbed his arm and said “ Vinny don’t ever let them forgot me” He promised that he never would.

So he said from that day onwards whenever he was asked for an autograph he had always signed Doloris del Rio. Apparently not one of the recipients ever noticed ……. well not at the time at least.



Life is so easy being a man !

Women, "normal" women are constantly under so much pressure to look the best they can. They seem to be judged harshly, not just by men but by other women if they don't look absolutely fabulous. I find it a deeply worrying trend in our society that the female human is still judged by what she looks like. Few men are, or ever have been. The recent attacks on Jeremy Corbyn's visual appearance by the media are so rare we all notice them. With women it has become so commonplace that even I find myself occasionally, shamefully, agreeing to some bitchy comment on Ann Widdecombe's grey hair or odd skirt. 
As an ageing man I have never felt the way I look a problem in anyway directly or indirectly. As my hair thins and disappears, with what's left going grey, along with my beard and as the wrinkles multiple, no advert sends me subliminal messages that pressurises me to think, I need to inject botulinum toxin type A into my forehead or Michelin rubber products into my lips. Even if they did, as a man I would just say "fuck it, what's it matter". I do moisturise, when I remember, but then one does need have to have a hobby. 
However almost every woman I know seems pressurised to look younger than her actual years. 
Kate Moss is 41. 
You look at any advertising she appears in and she does not look 41, ever. However if you look at the photos in the Daily Mail article below she looks exactly what she is, a woman of 41.
Proof, is ever it was needed, that the cosmetics industry is selling a lie. The gloop, sorry luxurious life enhancing products that KM is advertising, to make women look younger, are allegedly not even working on Kate Moss, so photoshop is seems to used in what appears, from the evidence presented, to be a confidence trick, which if it were used like that in the car or food industries, someone would be taking those companies to the Trades Description Board!
I rest my case.


Wednesday 23 September 2015

You sacked Martin Scorsese then !?!

“ You sacked Scorsese then……..Martin SCORSESE” ?!

“ No. No of course not. Well, not really no…….. Kind of, in a long round about way. No. Definitely not. He was not committed…Yes, I can see how you might think that,  but… it’s a very long story”.

I first pitched my idea for THE FIRST FILM, a feature length documentary to the BBC in 1982 and then subsequently to SKY, the UK Film Council, the BBC, Yorkshire Television, NatGeo, various history related channels, White Rose Television (an almost broadcaster), the BBC (again), the BFI, anyone and everyone for the next 31 years, even the Leeds City Council, Yorkshire Forward and Yorkshire Tourist Board. No one showed even the slightest interest - at all, partly because for the first 20 odd years or so no one (outside Yorkshire) believed the story I was trying to tell. They thought it pure fabrication. 

On the 14th October 1888, a Frenchman, Louis Le Prince made the worlds very first film, not in Paris, nor London or New York but in Leeds, Yorkshire, England. This was several years before those Jonny come lately’s the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison, who were famed to be the authentic foremost movie makers - something I knew was not true. The reason that no one knew this fact was because on 16th September 1890 Le Prince boarded the Dijon to Paris train, was never seen or heard from again and because there was no body, no one was legally able to fight for his claim. 




I have always thought this a great mystery, a cracking tale and could never fathom out why no one else seemed to share my enthusiasm. Was it purely because I am from Leeds, where Le Prince made the first film, rendering me biased - or blindly obsessed, as many would say, to my face, down the years. 

In 2012 I had all but given up again, feeling beaten after yet another rejection from an investment source, when I watched Martin Scorsese’s love symphony to early cinema, HUGO. The next morning I rang Irfan Shah my co-writer and co-producer to announce we were going into pre-production regardless of the fact that we had no money. That would come later. Le Prince’s story had to be told.

Had I not watched that film, would I have continued?




I filmed fourteen blocks over two calendar years, stopping as and when the money was running out, waiting for more cash to continue. From 1982 until 2013, when we first turned over, I had only come across four people working in the film industry, not connected with Leeds or Yorkshire, who previously knew the story. Just four. Then as I was filming on one of the blocks, across from Leeds Bridge as it happens, the setting for Le Prince’s third film, Stephen Herbert, one of the historians in the film, rang to tell me that Martin Scorsese had just given the 2013 Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA and in this speech there was this one line, this one glorious very important magical line  – “And actually you can go back to a man named Louis Le Prince who shot a little home movie in 1888”. 

At last, a well known filmmaker acknowledging Le Prince. Not just any old well known filmmaker but none other than Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time AND the greatest filmmaker/ film historian alive. 



Needless to say I wanted him in the film. 

I wrote to his agent, his office, I contacted producer Colin Vaines and actor, writer Stuart Brennan - both of whom knew him to help me, which they kindly did. I spent hours writing and rewriting letters and emails trying to find the correct sentences to win him over. After many months, just when I thought I had failed, Lisa Frechette Scorsese’s assistant contacted me to say he was interested in appearing. OMG. This would be fantastic. I had worried that when I released the film many would doubt my findings. Having such an eminent authority on early cinema endorsing the Le Prince claim would be perfect, just the goal I had hoped for ever since that day in December 1982 when first I made the pitch. Fingers crossed it would be a definite yes. 

On my very limited budget I had arranged to film in the USA – Memphis, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Fire Island and New York in May 2014. The budget was so pared to the bone that I had to leave behind Irfan, who had worked with me since 2009 and stuck by me when so many others came and went, all thinking it would not amount to much more than a film in script form only, never to be made. Naively, I had hoped Mr S would fit in with me and my schedule. Don McVey, my trusted DOP, was gutted when it did not happen. 





On returning to the UK I would ring Lisa from time to time. She was hopeful we could film him in July, which became August, which then became September. I was really pushing for October. I felt I had to finish filming by then, as it had been two years since we went into pre-production and there was a date sensitive scene in the film. Eventually Lisa said that due to a punishing workload the earliest she felt I could film realistically was May 2015. But it could be later. 

The agony. To be finished or to be waiting, that was the question.

Kathleen McInnis, American film guru, summed up the views of so many people from whom I sought an answer. “ With Scorsese in the film everyone in the film industry would watch it – Harvey Weinstein, HBO, Ken Burns, 20th Century Fox, all of them and more.  Every film festival in the world would want to consider it”. 

This made so much sense. It would be good for me ( none of these people knew me or my work). It would be good for the film ( and the investors of which, as it turned out, I was the biggest one). It would, most importantly, be good for the memory of Le Prince. 




The problem was, and it was a big problem, that I had reluctantly gone along with one of my team’s insistence that we start a social media profile even before we started filming. This became very high profile within the industry in the UK, with so many film professionals who were Facebook friends, intrigued as soon as I started posting about the story were always asking me questions regarding a account about their own business that they had never heard. Eighteen months had passed by the time I was talking to Lisa about delaying, and there were already rumblings within the UK film industry, that had got back to me, that the film was in trouble as it was taking so long. It was not, but I knew how these things can damage a production. 

If May became June 2015, or even later, then I would be releasing in the UK in 2016; a full four years since I started pre-production and the worse case scenario would be if, seeing what I had shot so far, the answer was a no,  then that would have been very damaging, as by then I would have told everyone that the delay was because I was Waiting for God…Oh, I mean Mr. Scorsese. 

So with a very heavy heart I took the very tough decision of deciding to complete the film without Scorsese’s involvement and moved on.




Doing it this way did pay dividends, to a degree.  

My hard earned skills as a distributor kicked in and I was able to get two bites at the press cherry as THE FIRST FILM had its World Premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival at the end of June 2015 and opened in UK cinemas a week later. This is rare for a small doc, as with so many films being released at any one time you normally only get the editorial PR for the première or on the release. We had it both times. The reviews were the biggest shock to me, as I have never directed before and don’t think I did this especially well, and yet 87.5% of them were above average. The worst one said that the film was ruined because the presenter (me) was Alan Partridge. As I rather like AP, crass as he is, I am thinking of putting this quote on the DVD sleeve. 




The film really caught the interest of the editorial press, as well as the reviewers, in a way that even I was surprised by. So many of those film & TV commissioning editors who had rejected the film, did so because they said it was a story no one would be interested in, other than a few anoraks fascinated in film history. They were wrong. The press at least were captivated. 

News At Ten, one of the UK’s high rating news programme did a feature, as did the highly respected BBC Radio 4 Today programme. The Daily Telegraph, Times, Express and lots more TV, radio and newspaper outlets also did big editorial features and, to cap it all, CBS Saturday Morning had a five minute feature going out from one coast to another in the USA. 

Sometimes the waiting is worth it. And sometimes it isn’t. You have to make that call. You have to persevere. And sometimes you have to ditch what you are developing as it will never work and move on to something new. Judging which path to take I have always found the hardest decision to make in the filmmaking process. 

For me, this time, the long, long, long 33 year wait to see the film on the big screen really was worth it. 

However I still don’t know if I made the right decision regarding Martin Scorsese …and perhaps I never will. 

https://vimeo.com/123464162

(Answers as to what you think on a postcard please….or in the comments block below). “ You sacked Scorsese then……..Martin SCORSESE” ?!

© David Nicholas Wilkinson. 2015. All Rights Reserved.