Subscribers to Shooting People’s Casting Network will probably still remember the nasty taste left in the mouth by the recent volley of bitter recriminations about low and unpaid work. Always keen to take an unpopular route I wheezed on loud and long about the value of such work and why Shooting People should still offer its acting members the chance to make their own minds up about what they turn down or follow up.

There are caveats to this of course. No one supports productions that don’t share their resources equitably and with respect for the work of all involved. No one is suggesting that actors shouldn’t be paid – only that sometimes no one earning any money is not a reason for a film not to get made.

However the biggest problem I find with repeating this argument is the postings that then come in from directors looking for actors to collaborate with. My girlfriend is an actress and so I generally skim over the casting bulletin each day and recommend to her anything I think she’d be amazing in. She is definitely castable as “…late 20’s/early 30’s – well spoken – attractive – height between 5′6″ and 5′10″…” so my fingers hesitated over yesterday’s casting call from Mark McDermott about his feature film project “Silent Terror”.

I’ve never met Mark and I don’t think I’ve seen any of his previous work, I have no personal vendetta against him and I am definitely not accusing him of any short practice, unfairness or anything other than crass stupidity. Equally I am in no way intending to attack his feature project, just the way in which he is pitching it to his would-be collaborators. This is not the worst casting call I’ve read on Shooting People but it does contain some of the regular flash points that always stop me forwarding things to my girlfriend so I thought I’d take a moment to explain why, expressed like this, actors have good reason for feeling like we’re treating them like idiots.

“Hi, I am currently casting for my second low-budget feature film Silent Terror, a suspense driven psychological thriller….”

Mark’s opening sentence at least sets out a clear genre and he goes on to give useful and concise information about shooting dates, location and format. However whilst “second low-budget feature” may sound like a step up from your “first” low-budget feature just have a think about what message this is actually sending. Of course it is good to let your prospective cast know that you have experience and we all know how hard it is to make films so no one will hold it against you that your first low-budget feature clearly vanished without a trace. But is this the first thing you want to tell people?

Because the simple fact is that if this is your “second low-budget feature” that generally means the first didn’t enable you to secure a better budget for this film. Again I must stress that I’m not trying to say Mark is a bad filmmaker, I’ve not seen his first film and I have no idea what he was trying to achieve with it. Neither does the average reader of this casting call. All they have is the information he has given them, so, like me, their first thought should be that rather than promoting his credentials, a man directing his “second low-budget feature” is not actually showing a glowing track record. This is probably an unfair assumption – but there is nothing to stop us leaping to it – especially when we later read:

“We are evaluating distribution opportunities at present and are considering a self-distribution strategy, along with film festival submissions.”

Come on, we are all grown ups here. No one considers a self-distribution strategy. You are forced to accept a self-distribution strategy because distributors don’t yet trust you to back you. This is fine. This is your second low-budget feature after the first one did nothing – of course you’re “considering a self-distribution strategy”. No one will think you’re a failure for this state of affairs, what erks the reader is the attempt at spinning it.

Mark is clearly an ambitious young filmmaker who has yet to receive any real support from within the industry. He is getting off his arse and defying their lethargy by making a film to prove that he has a talent with story telling. He is exactly the sort of person that Shooting People was set up to support and exactly the sort of person that actors should want to meet and possibly work with. Yet because of the way he has presented his past record and place within the industry he makes himself look like a conceited fool who doesn’t yet realise that his films suck.

However the real problem with this casting call comes when he pitches the story and the involvement he hopes his actors will have.

“The film is far reaching in its scope, with a large meandering story. Therefore, the parts we are looking for are significant and pivotal, but will only be required for a limited time in production.”

This blew me away. Who pitches a film with the word “meandering”? I mean I find a lot of Robert Altman’s work to often be meandering but I bet he didn’t try and raise the finance like that. Meandering means dull. Meandering means listless, directionless, rambling tedium. You don’t mean meandering you mean, I don’t know, far reaching or complex or many layered or multi-faceted. OK it’s a mistake and we all make mistakes but a pitch is a pitch and it should be cared about and if you say your film is “meandering” then even if I’m being charitable I’m thinking you’re going into this project without a clear idea of what you’re doing – an idea backed up by the next sentence…

“There will be opportunities for improvisation of performance and dialogue, so you have the potential to bring your own elements to the roles.”

Doesn’t that just mean that you’ve not written a good script yet?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m neither being purely sarcastic or anti-impro. Trust me, my girlfriend is a gifted and experienced improvisor and thanks to her I’ve been lucky enough to see some of the best practitioners of the craft in the world (genuinely). I love impro. Which is why it makes me cross when filmmakers reach for it unknowingly, when they assume that it’s a simple case of letting the actors say the gist of the script rather than being word perfect. Again I’m not accusing Mark of this, rather I’m hoping to point out that expressions like “opportunities for improvisation” are meaningless, foggy and suggest that he is not being rigorous in his approach. Perhaps improvisation is a key creative tool in his production, if so, say so. This reads like you’re hoping your actors will save you from the still unresolved problems in your script.

“All travel and food expenses will be covered. A DVD of the finished film will be provided, along with a digital file of your scenes if required for your showreel.”

Hooray for this, the bare minimum requirements of getting strangers to work on your project. But lets just skim over the story to the character breakdown…

“Jane – late 20’s/early 30’s – well spoken – attractive – height between 5′6″ and 5′10″ – partial nudity required. She has dark hidden secrets.”

And there it is. The ever present bugbear of the Shooting People Casting forum. “Partial nudity required”. How come nudity is “required” yet everything else has “opportunities for improvisation”? I mean, what if, using her impro skills, the actress decides to leave her clothes on? Is that ok? As a piece of impro?

Again, don’t get me wrong, as a filmmaker I’m all in favour of nudity in films. Story telling is about drama and I can think of plenty of dramatic situations that are heightened by everyone being actually physically naked. Not a problem. However that’s a general point about cinema. Let’s just think what you are asking your actress to do in this post. You want her to improve your script with her impro skills and get her tits out. For this you will pay her bus fare, buy her a bacon sandwich and send her a DVD of another low-budget film which you will then send to film festivals because no distributor will touch it.
This is why actors get pissed off.

Again, don’t get me wrong – I am merely talking about how Mark has sold this project, not the project and not Mark. I can think of many situations when a gifted young director will inspire his cast to give astonishing performances because they believe totally in his creative vision. This could turn out to be one of those situations… but you can’t introduce yourself to people like this – you can’t just expect people to get naked for the price of a train ticket because you’ve already made one low budget film that has flopped.

I fully support the right of people to seek collaborators for low and unpaid films – but if you are forced into taking this route think about how collaboration actually works before you start demanding your cast get naked.

Eating chocolates has been slightly ruined for me by everyone who has ever quoted Forrest Gump’s mum at me. I’ve not seen the film because everything about it made me want to kick a window but there was a short time following its release when you couldn’t turn for people quoting Ma Gump’s sage wisdom that “life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get next”.

This has stuck in to my brain like anti-climb paint and consequently every time I open a box of chocolates and am faced with the small guide which clearly tells you what each glossy brown surface conceals, I am struck with a twinge of needless rage. Life is not like a box of chocolates. Unlike life, with chocolates you do know what you are going to get next and you generally get to choose. Had she said “Life is like a box of chocolates because it’s generally over too quickly and contains too much marzipan” I’d probably have gone to see the film but as it is I’m just left bitter and angry.

Apart from that I had a lovely Valentine’s day.

A short talk on the nature of creativity which manages to be down to earth and uplifting all at once…

Come to http://shootingpeople.org/bensblog if you can’t see this video…

An old friend of mine recently joined Shooting People and sent me a link to his short film. As those of you reading this blog in its original form will know, my virtual doors are always open to new films and I do my best to watch everything that comes my way (I am quite behind though…)

My friend’s film is only two minutes long, and for that I thank him. He also had the good sense to upload to the Shooting People Watch Film site meaning all I had to do was click a link and I could watch it. It also features a brilliant use of shadow from a large fan which adds a great layer of visual interest and character. I make no bones about the fact that I intend to someday steal or “homage” this trick – that, after all, is the joy of filmmaking. The whole beauty is not to work in isolation but to take ruthlessly from all other films that have ever been made – reusing what works and abandoning what doesn’t. And in most cases what doesn’t work in a short film is a twist.

This is quite a bold statement since most short films are little else. However it makes more sense if you think about feature films and all other forms of story telling. Twists are, of course, an integral part of the story teller’s armoury, but whilst there are many great twists in the history of story telling there are very few great stories that don’t exist beyond their twists. In feature films I can only think of one and it’s not Fight Club.

Fight Club is the story of a man falling apart. The great big jaw dropping twist is a sublime coup de cinema but it is just a very elegant way of letting you experience the world in the same way that the main character does. Fight Club is not about the twist, it’s about the consequences of it.

This is the problem with twists in short films; by dint of being short it is far harder to make the audience care enough about what they are seeing that they are sufficiently affected by the surprise when it comes and harder still to say anything of meaning about the consequences of that surprise. The film becomes about nothing but the surprise and that is very unsatisfactory.

My friend’s film is a good example. Here it is:

And don’t worry, I checked with Paul first that he was OK with me ripping into this in public. He is far from being either the only or the worst offender; I wanted to write this blog because I see this device backfire time after time and I just want it to end.

And like I say – that fan is brilliant.

Anyway, my problem with this film is that the twist structure hides the active dramatic question of ‘why’. The point of the piece is that you are drawn into believing she is reliving her own childhood trauma, only to find that she is in fact reenacting it. But that means for most of the film you think she is just reliving her own childhood trauma which is quite a passive situation. Without knowing more about her as a character what can we feel except sympathy? With no dramatic question the poor actress has to do all the work, the ratio of sympathy to apathy that you feel is entirely down to how affecting you find her performance is – stuck in the dark, on her own in a virtually empty, characterless hotel bedroom – she has her work cut out and I think she does a sterling job but it’s all up hill.

By revealing that abuse is actually happening in this scene and not just in her memory, all the director does is show that he can surprise the audience – an easy task since as director he holds all the cards. To create this easy surprise he’s had to rob us of any reason to keep watching in the first place.

Imagine this film the other way round, without a twist. Because whilst watching an unknown woman apparently relive her childhood trauma is not dramatically interesting – watching a woman abuse her child is (horrible but) inherently dramatic as it forces you to ask “Why is she doing this?” To then reveal that what we don’t know is the truth about her own abuse is much more powerful because rather than being a twist for twisting’s sake, it is answering a question that has already been asked.

Rather than leaving the actress to emote in an empty room she would be an active character, actively doing something, albeit something awful. And the resolution, rather than being merely a twist that leaves you feeling “Oh I see, so she’s actually evil”, would be a revelation that answered the dramatic question of ‘why’ whilst leaving open the moral issue of ‘how’.

Startling people is easy, making them think about something is far harder. The twist may leave your audience reeling but it evaporates quickly on the tongue. The only feature film I can think of that is built entirely around a twist (in the way that so many short films are) is “The Usual Suspects”. Here the whole point of the story is that it’s being made up by Kevin Spacey. As the credits roll you realise that pretty much everything you’ve seen has been a lie. It’s a cheap trick, a smug trick, and, as Kevin shakes off the limp and straightens his posture you are supposed to feel utterly cheated but be warned – this is the only emotion that a twist without a story can provoke.

There are a few of these doing the rounds on the internet and in someways it’s a bit unfair because, as we all know, there are only seven stories in the first place… however…

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Tanya Seghatchian is Queen of the UKFC.

I don’t think anyone guessed that was going to happen. No one at all. Anywhere.

Still, surprises are overrated and I for one am well chuffed. Long live the Queen.

OK I’m well past time here since the event has been and gone but I’m the half of the Blaine with no understanding of this game and no idea as to why it’s called football since it’s about guys carrying and egg. Handegg. American Handegg. Surely?

But anyway, the Viking’s supporting half of the Blaines found this and it made us both laugh so I hope it has the same effect for you (the first one’s not up to much and the Lynch makes more sense apparently if you follow the sport but the Wes Anderson is one of the most perfect pastiche’s I’ve seen… hell it brought a lump to my throat…)

Can’t see this video? You’re probably reading this on Facebook then aren’t you? Come here: http://shootingpeople.org/bensblog.

So on Friday I was in an actual cinema with an actual audience of other people. It was the late afternoon and we were an odd bunch but never the less an interesting cross section of the ticket buying public and this trailer was one of the many to crash off the screen at us…

And with perfect timing, just as it comes to the quiet bit at the end, the unnervingly loud voices of two middle-aged women broke through the theatrical gloom:

“Oh that’s that book isn’t it? Have you read it?”
“No. I started it but in the end I couldn’t be bothered.”

Coming so balloon burstingly soon after the bombast of the trailer with its heaviest of heavy bread voice overs, this brief conversation gave me an oddly giddy sensation of pure joy. Though actually I think I was just reacting against the increasingly naggy pre-movie sequence of commercials and trailers.

Preparing to watch a film in the cinema used to be a relatively painless process of being sold at, something that generally acted as a helpful way of tuning out reality in preparation for the movie. Like milling around in the departure lounge before a flight, the ads and trailers were at worst bland but at best felt like the start of a holiday, the commonplace commercialism made strangely exotic.

However, rather like trying to get onboard an aeroplane, the lead up to a film is now bogged down with dire warnings and security checks. I was ordered three times to turn off my mobile – once by Nanny McPhee and once by yet another iteration of the Orange advert, plumbing new depths of tedium in what seems to have strayed even from their grim determination to kill a once funny joke and now seems to be a one brand campaign to make me pull out my own teeth in bitter irritation.

I was then given a brief, uplifting lecture on how watching a film anywhere other than a cinema was a rubbish thing that only an idiot would do. It was then further pointed out to me that this particular cinema chain was probably the best and that, in case I hadn’t noticed, going to the cinema was, by the way, the best thing I could ever do and much better than watching stinky old tv.

I was warned that if I was found to filming this movie I’d be fined or jailed or both (and please would I turn off my damn phone so I don’t use it for this purpose) and then to cap it all, someone actually came on and begged for the lives and jobs of the entire British Film Industry, like we’re all inmates in asylum and these are the baskets we’ve spent the past month weaving. As I left I half expected to stumble over Tim Bevan slumped in the doorway rattling coins in a cup.

As you can imagine I’m a fan of the cinema. I like going. I like watching films with other people. Hell – I was even in this movie on my own because I enjoy the experience so much I have no shame or dignity. But rather than celebrating Cinema, these ads feel like they’re all telling me off. As if Cinema were a grumpy wife furious with me because I’d spent all my time down the pub with my mates the laptop and iTunes. “Where the hell have you been?” She shouts, angrily slamming the door much louder and in 3D. “And the least you could do is turn your bloody phone off now you’re here!”

Firstly what is the point of advertising the concept of cinema to people who have already paid to come and sit in a cinema? It’s like buying a pint and having the barman shout in your ear as your drink it “Wow – a pint of beer, have you forgotten how good a pint of beer tastes? I hope you’re not one of those idiots who sit at home drinking tea and then having to urinate in a normal household toilet. Why are you doing that when you could be sat here on this stool like you are doing drinking beer exactly like you are doing and then you can go and piss next to a whole load of other people who understand the great taste of actual beer in a pub! Wow, I bet you wish you were drinking beer in this pub right now just like you are.”

But actually what annoys me is the idea that we have to “thank everyone who helps make this possible” (other than by paying them a wage) tacitly creates the idea that cinema is basically already dying and needs to be protected. Worse these adverts perpetuate the myth that cinema is merely “a great experience”, as if all it offers is spectacle and 3D specs. Sure a cinema can deliver the kinds of bangs and crashes that only a lunatic would wish to have access to in their own home but that’s a pretty hollow trick. If that really is all the reason for watching a film in a theatre then they might as well turn the lot of them into bingo halls right away.

After all the begging and lecturing was over I watched “Up In The Air” a well crafted and compassionate film that is absolutely at its best when dealing with the minutiae of American corporate life. I can’t believe I’m even bothering to write this down but the obvious fact is that on the big screen the tiny takes on a power and importance that it lacks when watched on your phone. George Clooney – and even more so Vera Farmiga – build their performances around tiny delicious details and half glances that help to raise this above some pretty obvious stuff about the importance of family life.

You don’t need 3D glasses to see it and you probably don’t need to see it in a cinema – but if you do you will appreciate it more and find it easier to enjoy it. You don’t need to beg for cinema – cinema rocks. And you shouldn’t beg for it either because it just makes people question why you’re bothering. Like selling a film by saying the book it’s based on is “an international publishing phenomenon” when everyone can see it’s just another airport novel…

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Obviously I’m massively behind the times but hopefully some of the previous entries will explain why that is… however I’d just like to extend massive and belated congratulations to two of my favourite people who both find themselves in the Sun.

Brilliantly my mate Cath has been awarded the Sundance/Alfred P. Sloan Commissioning Grant to fund her to write a film called Beds about five strangers who come together in a ‘bed-rest’ experiment to aid astronauts in space.

Equally brilliant my mate Jim was not only the director of the only British short to play at the festival this year but he got a Mention, which is Sundance for shortlisted, which is filmmaker for awesome because it effectively makes his film “Can We Talk”, a past Shooting People film of the month, one of the 7 best in the world.

Look at it here:

Or for those of you not reading this on the Shooters site, look at it here: http://www.shootingpeople.org/watch/film.php?film_id=76689