'Nowadays the market is awash with microbudget features and it’s so much harder to stand out in the crowd. I chose to put my stake in the ground and say GONE FISHING is the kind of films that I want to make; very large, emotional canvasses, big sweeping narratives, very wide demographic that it’s appealing to, very strong, commercial movies, and I knew I couldn’t make a microbudget feature that said that, but I could make a short film. So that was why I chose to make GONE FISHING.'

Chris Jones

Director, GONE FISHING

Shooter Chris Jones, feature filmmaker, author of the Guerrilla filmmaker series of handbooks and filmmaking mentor, has turned his hand to short films. He went for a big, emotional canvas of the cinematic kind and filmed on 35mm to get the richest possible image for his story. His arresting 13- minute short, called GONE FISHING, took the Rhode Island International Film Festival by storm and has repeated its success everywhere else it has been seen. The vibes are all good and Chris Makes no secret of his aspirations for the film. He hopes it might be put up for the short film Academy Award. With nominees due to be announced any day now, Shooters are all backing him to be recognised. A talent as big and as versatile as this one cannot be denied its place among the best, worldwide.
Good luck Chris and at Shooting People we are all rooting for you. You deserve not just another win, but a very special one…

It seems like you have been around in the indie film biz for quite some time Chris, remind us please of when you set out to become an indie filmmaker?I was bitten by the film bug as a young person when I started making zombie horror movies, by burying my friends in the back garden and filming it. That led onto me screening the films at school lunchtimes and turning a profit, and I was immediately entranced with the notion of shoot a film, show a film, make some money which pays for the next film. That was my genesis. I then went to film school and had a pretty awful time there, but after leaving the film school, I ended up on the set of my first action thriller starring Harrison Fords kid brother, called THE RUNNER. You have directed and produced quite a few features over the years, can you run through them for us and fill in some of the details on each of them?THE RUNNER was an all-guns blazing action thriller. It made a terrific trailer but not much else! It was a real baptism of fire and in many ways that was my film school. The second picture was much more successful, a serial-killer thriller starring Peter Frith called WHITE ANGEL, or in the US its called INTERVIEW WITH A SERIAL KILLER, and that was shot on Super 16 for just under 20 grand. It premiered as the centrepiece of the London Film Festival, got a theatrical release in the UK very, very successful. The third feature I made was URBAN GHOST STORY starring Jason Connery and a whole host of other British character actors, and that also did extremely well and was released in cinemas in 2001. Since then I started writing books. Only in the last year have I come back to film making. Youve been quite a prolific author too, all on filmmaking subjects, how many titles have you had published to date?There are 3 editions of the Guerilla Film Makers Handbook, each new one seemed to almost double in size. I wrote another book called The Movie Blueprint which is a detailed, ABC almost a cook book for film makers. We also did The Hollywood Handbook and the Documentary Film Makers Handbook. So there are now four titles in the Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, the UK edition having been updated to its third edition. And will you publish a short filmmakers handbook after Gone Fishing?We have some quite interesting developments that are going to be taking place for the Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, but I cant reveal what just yet.You had always made features before so you did not have to prove yourself as it were with a calling card short film production, so what made you want to create a short film, what was the spur for GONE FISHING?The world is a very different place in 2009. When I started making independent feature films, the actual mechanism, the machine of making the film was so dominating you simply could not do it for threepence hapenny; now with DV cameras you can literally pick up a camera, dash out and shoot a movie over a weekend and it can cost 300. That just wasnt possible when we made the first few movies. Consequently there was really no independent film scene or very few films were being made, so you could slip into the market place without anyone really noticing you were there. At worst youd probably look like a cheap movie. Nowadays the market is awash with microbudget features and its so much harder to stand out in the crowd. I chose to put my stake in the ground and say GONE FISHING is the kind of films that I want to make; very large, emotional canvasses, big sweeping narratives, very wide demographic that its appealing to, very strong, commercial movies, and I knew I couldnt make a microbudget feature that said that, but I could make a short film. So that was why I chose to make GONE FISHING.

What gave you the idea for GONE FISHING and what is it about?Id seen many short films and I noticed that there was a fairly significant trend with inner-city stories about young people, issuetastic kind of stuff - and theres an obvious reason for that these films are often made by people who are living in a city and in their 20s and theyre making movies about what they know, which is entirely appropriate. But I didnt want to do that. Ive always carried the philosophy that you should somehow be distinct from the rest of the group. So I wanted to make a film with a young boy and an old man - not twenty somethings, and Id always had this idea of a film about fishing based on my youth, when there was a huge pike called Oscar in a local lake. Everybody knew about this myth and now, thinking about it, the myth appeared about the same time as JAWS appeared in the cinemas, so Im not sure whether Oscar really existed! But it seemed to form a really exciting backdrop for a young boy and old man to experience a kind of JAWS but for kids.How easy was it to script - and as a short film what were the things you were having to think about perhaps for the first time?It was a tough script to write, although having come from features I was stunned at how quickly you can write a short with a feature, just managing a narrative over 90 pages is really hard work, you have to keep all of it in your head at the same time. With a short script you can literally write it in a day and redraft it the following day, have a break then go back and redraft it again in a few hours. So the difference between a short and a feature is quite something, and I think its a trap for many new film makers; if you make a terrific short film you could easily think that you can then make a terrific feature film, and Im all behind you, but a short and a feature script are very different animals, a feature is a much bigger beast to handle. Much bigger. How long altogether from the idea to the final shooting script, how quickly did that come about.It was quite short - about 9 to 12 months from concept to premier and given that we shot it on 35mm, graded it digitally and did everything to the highest technical standard without any money, I think that was quite something to pull it off. In terms of from script to production, that was quite quick too. Most of the time was spent on raising money and putting together all the elements for the project. Im never in a rush to get to set because I feel almost all your problems should be solved before you get to the stage. Even simple things like basic props that arent right on the day can really cause severe problems in post production. One bad prop completely destroys the audiences suspension of disbelief, and its so hard to create that in the first place.

Did you have a budget of any sort?Yes, we put the budget together by asking every person Id ever met for 50 quid. That generated just over 22,500.What about casting? How did you source your cast and what made you finally cast these individual actors?I worked with a friend of mine who is a casting director and she opened the door to many, many actors. We said from the outset that we wanted known actors in the all main roles and we started at the top and worked down. We eventually got Bill Patterson and also Devon Murray who was in the Harry Potter movies. Previously you had always worked in film, why was that your choice of medium again?I chose film because I believe that audiences have 100 years of cine-literacy in their brains. And digital has a different look. I also believe that cinema is a place of magic and that film has an ephemeral, ethereal quality that digital is struggling to replicate. Digital is perfect for some stories, but for this film it was not the right choice so I stayed with film and Im very delighted that I did and couldnt be happier with the final image.What sort of shooting kit did you use for this one?We had two 35mm Arri cameras and we also shot a little bit on a very high speed digital camera called a Phantom which allowed us to get 3,200 frames a second.

You are based at Ealing Studios, but whereabouts did you decide on for your exterior locations to shoot the film and what governed your choices?We actually shot the interiors at Ealing studios where we built a set on Stage 3 here but the majority of the film was set at a lake and we chose to shoot that within London because we knew we couldnt take the actors outside of London - its one thing asking a named actor to do a few days on a film near to where t hey live, its an entirely different thing to say get on a train and come to the Lake District or Scotland. So we knew we had to find it in London and we ended up with a place called Berry Hill Fisheries, which is just outside the M25 on the south west of London and its an absolutely gorgeous place and we augmented it at various points with a few very simple digital effects to make it look that bit more beautiful.What sort of shooting schedule had you worked out?We had planned to shoot it in 6 days but we did go very behind schedule on the second day because we were shooting with a low-loader thats where you put a car onto a rig and drive the rig around so that you can film in the car. Unfortunately we were shooting in a saloon car that would follow a hearse, and the low-loader was built for a 2-door car and this was a 3-door. So everywhere you tried to open a door there was a metal bar in the way and it became a very serious problem. I distinctly remember hearing someone say, Why dont we just take the doors off the car? and I knew this was a real-life working funeral car so we werent about to take the doors off it. It was pretty intense and that dropped us behind schedule. So we had a further day of shooting after the main shoot where we had a micro crew pick up another fifteen to twenty shots.Can you talk us through a typical Chris Jones directing day when shooting?Everybody knows that shooting a film is a marathon and that means the director is up before everyone else and to bed after, so skipping over that understood stuff I tend to be a fairly hands-off director believing that most of the work is done in pre-production - you get the right cast, the right team. My job is to keep everybody focused and clear about what were doing, everybody pointing in the right direction, and to shepherd people back onto the right track when they go off on a creative tangent. Its also my job to keep rethinking almost every minute, reassessing the situation in terms of how far were going behind schedule or how far ahead and what opportunities that creates. I was extremely lucky on this picture to work with DP Vernon Layton, who is very experienced, and he and I both had a very good understanding of what we were expecting from the image. The one thing I think I do thats different from many other directors (especially new directors) is that I tend to turn off the video assist, the TV that feeds from the camera, because I believe firmly that you should empower your team to do their job. Your camera teams job is to shoot the film and the director should always be with the actors, very close to them, looking them in the eye, giving them the human feedback that they need in order to know that what theyre doing is either good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, and I find if youre with the actors they give so much more than if youre up a hill and round a corner with some headphones on looking at a 4 inch black and white monitor in the rain thats just a disaster.How did your assembled crew perform for the film?Everybody performed extremely well. We used a typical independent-film ethos of hiring an art director in the real world, who would then become the production designer on our film, so somebody who was a junior in the real world would become a department head on GONE FISHING, and we were able to crew up using that ethos. Then because we had people like Vernon Leyton shooting it and similar people in the crew it was quite easy to fill almost every position. Having come from features, one of the sad things about a short film is that just when the crew is really gelling, just when youre hitting your stride, the shoot is over. And on the last day of the shoot I remember thinking that I really would have loved to have gone on for another 6 or 8 weeks. What were your plans for the edit?Eddy Hamilton who cut my third feature film, URBAN GHOST STORY, was always going to cut GONE FISHING. Hed been out in Canada having a great time cutting 50m dollar movies and hed come back to the UK having agreed to cut GONE FISHING and, being an editor myself by trade, I was very much looking forward to that process. Basically, we digitised the material onto his computer and then cloned the media onto one of my hard drives, which meant that whenever he made any editorial changes he could email me a very small project and I could put it on my computer and immediately see his edits. What duration did GONE FISHING finally have?GONE FISHING runs for 13 minutes, 2 mins of which are titles. Do you feel theres something very different, less pressured, about making shorts as compared with the much longer feature shoot? I mean theres nothing like the money riding on it, so is the atmosphere any different, less overtly serious perhaps? Is there some slack for experimentation, try-outs, that sort of thing? Whats your feeling on this?No, I approach features and shorts in exactly the same way, which is the audience is god. Having seen hundreds of short films at different festivals and events, I can say that many other shorts film makers dont always wholly hold the audience. Almost every short film Ive seen couldve been improved by being even shorter. I understand why the film makers make those choices but I think, by virtue of a film being only 10 or 20 minutes long, it can allow itself to be that bit slacker than a feature film. And because there is no commercial performance with a short there is no pressure to deliver a specific experience related to the amount of money somebody has paid for that movie. Consequently, I think short films can end up misinforming the new film maker who is moving from short to feature because they perhaps dont have the discipline of telling the narrative in the most economic time scale available to them.

You have always shared filming experiences with other filmmakers through your handbooks; any tips or techniques that you used successfully you can pass on to other Shooters now?Ive got hundreds of tips and techniques and I guess if I ever write a book about it thats where theyll be! Of course one of the things I did with Gone Fishing was live by my own sword, that is, I applied all my own rules that I been proposing through courses, seminars and books and Im delighted to report that even the ones that I nearly lost my nerve on during the shoot performed as expected. If you want a full blow-by-blow account go to chrisjonesblog.com. Any life-saving must dos that you swear by in filmmaking?Yes, test the film; make sure the audience understands what youre trying to deliver to them and ensure youre doing it in the most effective and economic way possible. Film making and storytelling are about saying the most with the very least. Ironically, even although Hollywood often appears to be this way, more is not more, less is always more. What about must donts!Dont rush to get to set in order to complete your film until you know its really, really, ready and even when you think its finished go back and try trimming stuff out. There is only one great sin I believe a film maker can make and that is to be dull or boring, specifically boring. There are types of films I like and types of film I dont like but what everybody hates is being bored. Therefore, no matter what story you choose to tell I know you can improve it, so commit to doing the very best that you can.

Always the toughest call is getting the film out there and talked about and getting it seen, but you seem to have fallen lucky there, or was it consciously planned? I mean, you took Rhode Island by storm. How great an experience was that?Yes, Rhode Island was extraordinary but on reflection it was the perfect festival to launch GONE FISHING from; its an American festival - a happy, feel-good festival that celebrates life-affirming narratives and doesnt particularly wallow in social-realist, introverted films about crack mothers or the like. The experience was overwhelmingly positive and I shot a video blog of the whole process which you can watch at chrisjonesblog.com. Its a forty-minute behind the scenes of attending a film festival and is both entertaining and educational. I did have an epiphany at the second screening of GONE FISHING when I realised that competitions are in fact a McGuffin - a Red Herring - in other words its never about the competition and its always about the audience reaction. For me that is the greater reward and on the very final night of the festival I completely lost any need or desire to win. But if you want to see how we got on then watch the blog!Just how many awards and applauds has GONE FISHING received up to now?Weve won almost every festival or event weve entered. I do think with some of the festivals or awards weve won, that we won because we aggressively took over the competition. Certainly, with audience awards or internet votes we just levered all the good vibe and targeted my user group, but that is part of the new Wild West - film makers are now having to build up their core viewers and keep them in touch with email. Gone are the days of making a film, putting it in a cinema and plastering it on the side of a bus. I mean, that still happens but we need to go deeper and build a fan or customer base right from the word go. So thats what I did with GONE FISHING and I levered it on several occasions in order to precipitate outcomes that we needed.You have made great use of the internet in documenting the whole GONE FISHING process I must say how important has that been in building expectation and audience and a market for the film?For me the blog started as a means of including people in the process but it developed beyond that and became quite cathartic at times and inspirational and aspirational at others. The choice to start including regular video blogs has significantly increased the viewership and I love the idea of shoot in the morning, edit in the afternoon and distribute in the evening. Ive tried to use all my storytelling tools in the video blogs to keep them short and snappy and, on the whole, I think Ive been quite successful and they make good little seven or eight-minute video clips.What in the end is your ultimate goal for GONE FISHING? I mean what do you intend to do with it?The ultimate goal was set out very clearly in my original quest for support which is this; I want to win the Oscar. I want to win the Oscar for a number of reasons. Firstly, I believe that whenever you enter any kind of endeavour - whether its climbing a mountain, swimming an ocean or making a movie, that if youre really committed to being world class then you must go for the very highest accolade possible and, to my mind, the Oscar is the highest accolade any short film could achieve. Im sure thats debateable but I do know that the Oscar is the only award that pretty much every person on the planet has probably heard of. The other reason I wanted to go for the Oscar was to make it a dream worthy of other peoples involvement. If I needed to get other people to help fund this film then I needed to give them an incentive, and to be part of winning an Oscar was a dream they could buy into. They knew what the Oscar was unlike, say, Sundance which most people just havent heard of outside the film business. So it was very calculated and Id be tickled pink if it got to the point where we had the opportunity to go the Oscars but whether we win or we dont win is not as important to me now. If we get the nomination and go to the Oscars that would be the most incredible reward for this journey that has taken so long and cost so much.In a way, more people may have come to hear about you closely as a filmmaker and about your previous achievements through this short. How can you and your career capitalise on that?In the film making world youre only really ever as good as the last film you made and I have to say its not got any easier I still have to bash the door down to get people to take me or my film seriously. I also think the kind of creature I am is more understood in North America than it is the UK. The audience reactions Ive received from North American film makers and the reaction Ive received from Hollywood-based film production companies has been incredible compared to some of the responses Ive had from the UK. Its not a right/wrong thing but, sadly, I speak to hundreds of other film makers who feel the same way and I only wish the British film industry would attempt to be more inclusive of people who want to make more mainstream films. Of course, the likes of the Film Council pay lip service to this but rarely do much to actually be part of that aside from perhaps the Premier Fund which is available to so few people as to make it unreachable and therefore non-existent. I would really like the short film section of the Film Council and the Micro Budget Feature to be much more commercially oriented, or to at least open themselves up to that possibility.You always have several ideas on the go, but have you one idea that you would really likely to move up to preproduction on the back of your success with GONE FISHING?Yes, again, GONE FISHING was made specifically to promote a feature project called ROCKETBOY that Ive had in development for some time. Its not the same story as GONE FISHING but it is emotionally in the same space. So if you see GONE FISHING, like it and want to know more, then ROCKETMAN is the next production that Ill be pitching to you.Do you think your GONE FISHING exposure might help you get some backing for it?I would like to think that anybody who sees GONE FISHING would be confident that I could handle a large emotional canvass and that I have the ability to reach a very wide audience. Whether thats what pans out, I dont know. I have been doing this long enough now to understand that this is a very political game and people hire their mates. So, I would say to a new film maker; become the mate of a powerful film maker and youll probably get funded.Academy nomination for the Short Film category must be your next hope and not only your cast and crew but Shooters everywhere will be rooting for you, whats the process involved, the dates we need to watch out for and so on?In June I will reveal the entire Academy Award nominations process, some parts of which are completely brutal, but for now I dont really want to reveal anything in case it somehow damages our chances. When its all over, however, Ill be publishing the information on chrisjonesblog.com. As for the dates, the big one were looking at is Mid-December when well either get the call to say were shortlisted or we wont get a call at all. If we get shortlisted well be in a pool of approximately 10 film makers. Then January 22nd well find out whether we have the nomination or not - and of course if we do then were going to the Oscars, baby! After that its February 22nd to see if we pick up the little gold man or not. I can only hope that we will not just for me but for the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been involved in the process and the dream. Right now its a possibility and thats a truly delicious space to live within.Tux dry cleaned, dinner shirt pressed and ready?You bet! And my 75 tux from M&S will be winging its way to the Oscars if we get invited.