'Support the director, don?t let anything else that?s happening in the film break the relationship between you and the director, that?s absolutely fundamental, that?s very, very strong advice.'

Andrew Bonner wanted to develop a career as a film producer. Meeting writer Bernard MacLaverty and learning they shared a favourite poem by Seamus Heaney gave him an idea for a first film that was good enough to earn a BAFTA nomination.

The first glimmerings of the project began in 1996, how did a poem inspire the film?Way, way back I trained as a teacher and Bye Child was the first poem I ever taught, in the first crit lesson I ever took. I started to get involved with very low budget filmmaking in Glasgow and I was hanging out with low budget filmmakers, messing about with lots of different projects, but at the same time I was trying to get a radio programme up on WB Yeats. I was interviewing Seamus Heaney for this radio programme and it just happened that on the day I was to meet Seamus Heaney I suddenly thought Bye Child would be a great short film, it just suddenly hit me. So it came from the mix of seeing Seamus Heaney and the previous couple of years doing short films kind of things. It seemed to make sense, you know? So I mentioned it to him at the end of that interview and his reaction was ?Fine, fire away, off you go, ? sort of thing. In the period just before that, I had got to know Bernard a little bit from a Grace Notes night, when he was reading from his book. He mentioned the words bye child, so I knew that Bye Child was in his sort of world if you like. I had also been in contact with some film production companies and I had enough contacts to seriously develop the idea. Seamus Heaney gave me the permission and I went to Bernard and said Seamus Heaney?s up for this, would you be? Do you want to give it a try?

Why did you think Bernard was the right person to write & direct Bye-Child?I had seen his feature films Lamb and Cal. The subject matter seemed very similar; the Irish background, the relationship of the mother to her child, which come up all the time in Bernard?s stories. Cal was about a boy and his father, but it was also about the absence of a mother. There were a load of these sort of things at the back of my mind. I just thought Bernard is brilliant at dealing with children. He understands and gets to the heart of what a child might be feeling. I had seen his screenplays and I just thought they were great. This screenplay was so detailed, it was almost like a director had written it. I have shown it to other directors and they have all said it was too detailed for them, because the vision of the writer was so strong. And Bernard had written it with enough information to make me think he had seen this so clearly he wouldn?t have a problem with directing, because it was so strongly imagined.

The task ahead of you was bound to be a steep learning curve, so what personal preparation did you make?I spent a lot of time talking to other more experienced producers. Paddy Higson, at Antonine, who were our first co-producers, was fantastic. Later, I was helped a great deal by David Griffith and Garfield Kennedy of Posh Pictures (www.poshpic.com), our second co-producers. They made an awful lot of contributions in the production management process. I spent a lot of time talking to directors of photography, other directors, production managers, friends and colleagues who had produced short films. I just asked them all constantly for information and advice. They were all saying about the importance of organisation and staying very close to your director. ?Always stay close to your director,? was very important advice that came through. Support the director, don?t let anything else that?s happening in the film break the relationship between you and the director, that?s absolutely fundamental, that?s very, very strong advice.

You were advised to keep close to the director, so on location, what kind of director did Bernard turn out to be?I thought he was brilliant. Exactly the right sort of mixture of confidence and enquiry. You know, he would ask for help. So there was no kind of arrogance or whatever, to get the backs of the crew up. And he totally used the crew to help him achieve the vision.Whenever there was a problem, his storyboard, his preparations and the whole strength of his vision was able to pull him through. So they might say ?Look, we can?t achieve such and such an effect at this point. Is there something else that you want to do?? He was able to come up with things practically on the spot and they would go ?Right, fine,? and they would just carry on with it. My impression is, he is just a natural. Really good at working with people.Getting the location right and getting the right actors meant everyone felt this was the right film to be making, do you know what I mean? I don?t think anyone came away with any feeling that that was a half-arsed production that nobody really cared about. Everyone knew this was going to be a good script and the right actors were there and this was a serious piece of work. We kept things moving fairly smoothly and we finished pretty much an afternoon ahead of the schedule. Because I had not seen issues come up before, I wasn?t able to predict them as well as an experienced producer would. That?s caused me some of nervousness at times. A more experienced producer would see it coming and would have sorted it out, or if it did come up, it would not have been much of an issue. We had quite a short prep time and because of that, we had to do a lot of rushing around, which apparently is perfectly normal on a short film, but I would have preferred a little bit longer. A little bit more time over the prep and we would not have had that feeling of chaos in that previous week-and-a-half.

How did you keep a check on the production spending and what lessons did you learn?We had to have a production accountant and we have a production manager and I was in the office all the time in prep time, so everything that was coming through would be checked by three of us and that would be the main way of dealing with it. There would be times when maybe, say the production co-ordinator would be saying, ?Look I can?t give you this at that price, ?and would come to me and say ?Can we deal with this, can we go another fifty quid or a hundred?? There was always information coming back to me, so I was always able to make a decision and I knew what was coming in under budget, so I knew what we could afford to go a little bit over budget on. The main thing that as a new producer I will do differently next time, is to make sure that my budget is a hell of a lot more detailed, particularly the post production budget. I didn?t know that some things were going to come up as they were not even appearing as lines on my budget. Some might say you can take care of that with your contingency or whatever, but I would prefer to have it lined up and clearly marked so that you know exactly what?s going to come through. When you are new producer, you don?t know the little things. When you get a quote from a lab and they have a few lines at the bottom of the page: ?This has nothing to do with our standard charges? or whatever. If you are inexperienced you won?t know what these are. They didn?t bust the budget, but it meant things worked out a little higher than we had originally expected.

What campaign plan do you have to get Bye-Child to an audience?We are going to try and get lots of festivals. So far we?ve been at four and there?s two more to go. We?ll probably have DVDs and VHSs and we are trying to turn the film into some kind of educational package that we hope will be bought and distributed to schools.We are talking to the British Council, which is interested in representing it overseas and we?re hoping that we?ll get screenings on some of the more specialist film channels. Scottish Screen are taking over the distribution of the print and will help with sales at film festival screenings. They are not a sales agent or distributor in themselves, but they have got some money and a department that works very hard to get the film screened, so it has been at market screenings at Claremont Ferrand and it will be going to the other short film markets hopefully, this year. We had approaches very early on, before we had shot the film, from sales agencies who liked the script and were interested in getting it done. We?ve not really had much contact with them since, purely because we have been so busy. Hopefully, after the BAFTA thing dies down we can actually start getting sales agents on board and start sorting that out. Advice though? most people have given us advice that we?ve ignored, because most people have said, if you want to make a short film, it?s got to be less than ten minutes. But we thought, no, our film?s not going to be that short, so we thought we had just better make the best film that we can and adapt the marketing to the length of the film.

The film now has a website www.byechildfilm.com set up as an educational resource around the film. It is the portal to purchase DVD packages of the film. The package supplied includes a booklet with log on details for special access to further web pages. These include scripts and storyboards.There are also open-access pages on the website that feature the Seamus Heaney poem, inspired by the discovery of the boy found living in a hen house, that was the basis of the Bye-child film; press comments; making of the film account from development to London Film Festival and finally, an article on writer/director Bernard MacLaverty reprinted from the Sunday Times.Producer Andrew Bonner, a teacher before he moved into film production, says they are now doing interesting training events for teachers and students, and working with the British Film Institute to get their resources out to all kinds of places.