Many years ago I was drunk in a pub in Hatfield. There was no particular cause beyond being in Hatfield which is usually reason enough. However the prospect of another night of not very much suddenly seemed more than any of us could bare so we decided to go to the cinema, which meant trekking across the very unpedestrianised part of town to get the Hatfield Galleria. Drunkenly we picked a film almost at random. Adam had seen the poster for Regeneration and thought it looked kinda cool. I was just in a mood for something to fill my eyes and so, despite not being a massive fan of war movies or war poetry, I agreed.

Regeneration sobered me up and blew my mind. It was beautiful beyond compare. The horror of the situation was realised with a simple humanity that breathed new life into poems I had studied into meaninglessness at school. A world I had not understood suddenly made sense to me.

As you may have gathered our script “Hallo Panda” was recently given the once over by the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writer’s Forum and it’s toughest and fairest critic was Gillies MacKinnon who directed Regeneration. This was, I’m glad to say, not our first encounter with this passionate and, though it may sound odd in the context of filmmaking, honourable man.

Photograph by Mat Ricardo
A few years ago Chris and I were lucky enough to be accepted onto the first ever year of Guiding Lights, a mentoring scheme run by Lighthouse with Skillset and the Film Council. We were given Gillies as a mentor. At the time we were working on a thriller script which we thought was brilliant and ready to be released on the industry but Gillies pretty quickly put us straight. His notes were brief, to the point and painfully accurate. The story we’d told him we were making was great but it was not what we’d written.

This was the year that we made the short version of Hallo Panda so we were very much under the kosh and whilst Gillies had hoped to give us a chance to shadow him on set, instead we got to see the slow and frustrating side of the industry as various projects stalled. As a result we didn’t see as much of him as other mentees did of their mentors, one of the many mistakes we made that year. However we did meet up and get drunk and learnt a great deal more from him than he’d probably imagine.

At BAFTA on Monday he repeated something he said to us once. He’s lectured at the NFTS in the past and has often said something along the lines of “I can’t teach you to be a director, I can’t teach you to be me, I can only help you think about what you need to do in order to make the films you have to make”. This is precisely what he did for us and it is precisely what Guiding Lights is set up for.

The deadline for this year’s scheme is 1pm on Wednesday 23rd December and I strongly recommend that you apply, it is one of the most positive things I’ve been involved with in the film industry.

You can apply for it here http://www.guiding-lights.org.uk/