08 February 2011
Posted in Film

Guiding Lights, the British film industry’s highest profile mentoring programme, is now accepting applications. Twelve screenwriters, directors and producers will be selected to take part in the fourth round of the scheme, due to launch in June 2011.

Guiding Lights supports and develops promising UK-based filmmakers through high-level mentoring complemented by a range of training and networking activities. Successful applicants will each be matched with a well-established film industry professional who will provide advice and guidance over a 9-month period. During this time a number of face-to-face meetings will take place with phone or email contact in between as appropriate.

Alongside the one-to-one mentoring, participants will benefit from a number of industry training and networking events, including during the Galway Film Fleadh and London Film Festival. Further access to high-level filmmakers and business professionals will be facilitated by an online networking facility.

Writers are eligible to apply if they: 

• Are a UK resident 
• Have had at least one piece of work produced OR optioned. This can include shorts, features, TV drama, novels and plays for the theatre or radio 
• Have written a minimum of one feature-length script (this does not necessarily need to have been produced) 
• Have at least one other feature-length script in development.

07 February 2011
Posted in Film

Guild member Paul Laverty's new film Even The Rain was on the Oscar long-list as Spain's submission for Best Foreign Film, and has been nomintaed for 13 Spanish Academy Awards. This is an interview he did with Real TV Films. No word yet on a UK release for the film.

25 January 2011
Posted in Film

Mike Leigh nominated for Best Original Screenplay

Congratulations to Guild member Mike Leigh, whose script for Another Year has been nominated for an Oscar for the Best Original Screenplay, it was announced today.

The other nominations in the category are: Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson (screenplay), Keith Dorrington & Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson (story) - The Fighter; Christopher Nolan - Inception; Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg - The Kids Are All Right; David Seidler - The King's Speech.

In the running for the Best Adapted Screenplay are British writer Simon Beaufoy along with writer/director Danny Boyle for 127 Hours. The other nominations are: Aaron Sorkin - The Social Network; Michael Arndt - Toy Story 3; Joel Coen and Ethan Coen - True Grit; Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini - Winter's Bone

08 January 2011
Posted in Film

Sonia Castang on an eventful trip courtesy of the Tribeca Film Institute and the UK Film Council

I absolutely love New York, so when I found out I was going to pitch one of my feature scripts to producers there, I was ecstatic.  It was only later that I started worrying about the fact that I hated pitching.

 I was one of two film-makers from the UK selected to participate in Tribeca All Access (TAA), a fantastic programme to give emerging and established female and black and minority ethnic film-makers access to professionals in the US industry.  The UK Film Council supports two film-makers from the UK with a grant to get out to New York and participate in the week-long event.   

The deal is, producers and other assorted professionals get to read about us, and our projects, and then choose whom they want to meet with. Other things on offer are lots of parties (for networking purposes of course – it’s all work!) and ongoing support from Tribeca, which includes access to digital filming equipment. 

Who am I? Wel,l my route to all this has been a varied one.  Even though I initially started in photography and then trained in film, I got my break in young people’s theatre with two professional writing commissions.  I’ve made short films that have done the festivals circuit but that elusive feature film is still a little way off.  Partly that’s because I don’t like making life easy for myself - I also want to direct.  It’s hard enough as an unknown screenwriter trying to sell work without wanting to direct the damn thing as well.

The script I apply to TAA with is called Windward.  It’s a funny and moving drama about a woman who is forced to take her estranged mother’s dead body back to the Caribbean island of St Lucia where she discovers a family she never knew she had.  

After a conference-call interview, I get through the selection process and then have to deliver a succinct one-page synopsis.  That’s when I realise there are some story issues that need working out, and, of course, this is the stage when I start to panic about pitching.  Thing is, I love meeting new people and, strangely, I love job interviews, but when pitching, I just feel horribly self-conscious. 

08 January 2011
Posted in Film

Jayne Kirkham on how Helen Jacey challenges scriptwriters to put women in the story

Over the past year or so, there has been much niggling about the dearth of great roles for women in film and television: articles have filled the trade papers blaming writers who blame producers who blame the public who blame the writers who blame the producers. Petitions have been started, signed and sent… somewhere. No doubt the niggling will continue, and rightly so.  But perhaps rather than throw our hands in the air at the disgrace as the blame game repeats its cycle, we could take a leaf out of writer Helen Jacey’s book (or better still read the whole thing) and consider whether the reason we don’t have enough great female roles is because the literary and dramatic theories we’re using apply to, and were written by, men.

From Aristotle through to Joseph Campbell and The Hero’s Journey, there has been very little, if any, attention paid to the differences between men’s and women’s lives. Is a female protagonist really just a male protagonist with breasts? Or, as Linda Seger asks in the foreword to Jacey’s book The Woman In The Story: ‘Is there something different operating because of her different physicality and different social influences? If so, what does she look like? Act like?  What are the challenges, obstacles and metaphors that govern her psychology and behaviour?  And how do you express these nuances without sounding like a psychology book or a feminist rant?’

29 November 2010
Posted in Film

Ed Vaizey, minister for Culture and the Creative Industries, has announced that the British Film Institute (BFI) will take on the work previously done by the UK Film Council (UKFC) which will be abolished by 2012.

Olivia Hetreed, Chair of the Writers' Guild Film Committee, reports:

Ed Vaizey spoke to industry this morning at Bafta. He talked of the success of the film industry and of the consultation so far. He namechecked a number of organisations, including producers' organisation PACT and their 'lock box' idea of giving producers funding control. He confirmed what everyone seemed to know, that BFI will take over most functions of the UKFC.

These include: distribution of Lottery funds, which will rise to £43 mill in 2014 (for all outbound not prod fund); certification of British films; media desk and funds for nations and regions. There will be no gap in Lottery funding. Skillset and First Light to continue. Film tax credit will also continue.

The regional screen agencies will be reorganised as Creative England with hubs in the north of England the midlands and the south.

Film London will take on film commission role of selling UK film facilities and personnel abroad.

Bafta, BFI and BBC Worldwide will work together to sell British films abroad.

Ed Vaizey said that he wants a ministerial film forum to meet every six months or so comp of the trade bodies and 'interesting personalities with something to say'. The first step will be an open process to appoint new board members then consultation on the detail.

No specifics were given on what is going from UKFC or how much they plan to save but all done and dusted by spring 2012.

I asked how Creative England would avoid the problems currently besetting Creative Scotland. Vaizey said Creative England will not take on Arts Council functions but be focused on the creative side of film, TV, games, the internet and publishing rather than taking on wider artistic admin.

In a BFI statement its chair, Greg Dyke, said that the production fund will increase from £15m to £18m in 2011/12 thanks to significant savings in overheads.

The UK Film Council has also issued a statement in response to Ed Vaizey's annoucement this morning.

15 October 2010
Posted in Film

Olivia Hetreed, Chair of the Film Committee of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, has written to the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt to express concerns about a range of issues relating to screenwritng in the UK

The main body of the letter is set out below:

The Guild has a number of concerns which we strongly feel should be addressed in rethinking government support for British film-making.

We applaud your commitment to maintaining the current levels of funding and the tax credits, which have proven to be very workable for all sides.

We would urge you to ensure that the new funding arrangements recognise the importance of screenwriters in the film making process by maintaining development funding for screenwriters, and in particular that direct access for screenwriters is protected.

It is important that writers can continue to access such funding without necessarily having a third party (producer or director) attached. This has been a key feature of funding from UKFC, British Screen, and the BFI. The significance of direct funding is that it allows writers to hold onto their Intellectual Property rights in projects that they have created and initiated, maintain some control in the process of development and ensure that the development monies intended for writing the screenplay go fairly to the screenwriter and not elsewhere.

We believe that funding for experimental film-making and new work should be robustly protected, with a discrete fund and gatekeepers.

We feel that it is essential for screenwriters to have a voice at board level on the new body, in the same way that producers and directors were represented at board level at the UKFC. So we request that there is at least one screenwriter on the new board, selected in consultation with the WGGB and other interested parties.

It is also essential that the issue of film-makers’ creative rights should be addressed hand in hand with the principle of producers holding on to the returns from films. The present situation regarding creative rights is deeply unsatisfactory, since it prevents the creators from benefitting from the success of their work and sustaining the long term future of the creative industries in this country.

We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you or one of your team to discuss these and other matters of interest. 

15 September 2010
Posted in Film

Anji Loman Field on making a film in Cambodia to promote family planning

It’s estimated that every day more than four Cambodian women die in childbirth. Put another way, one woman in every 50 here can expect to lose her life giving birth. That’s a pretty damning statistic, especially when the sad fact is that most of these deaths are entirely preventable.

I’m no medical expert but, from my days of writing for Holby City and Doctors, I happen to know that what you need for a post-partum haemorrhage (the most common cause of maternal mortality) is a swift injection of oxytocin and a gentle tummy massage to encourage the expulsion of the placenta. In Cambodia, you are more likely to be covered with a thick blanket, given a woolly hat, gloves and socks to wear, and have a fire lit underneath your bed. It would be difficult to know if there was a bleeding problem going on underneath all that, but even if that didn’t kill you, the chances are that dehydration might, with average temperatures here already in the high thirty degrees centigrade. If you add to this scenario the vile concoction of porcupine stomach tea that new mothers are expected to drink, things do not bode at all well for maternal health in this country.

Qualified midwives are few and far between, and even those who are trained in modern medicine find it difficult to let go of the traditional rituals associated with childbirth. Things are changing slowly in the cities but, in rural Cambodia, having a baby is still a highly dangerous exercise. So what’s the answer?

Having fewer babies is one solution, and would probably be the quickest and easiest way of reducing maternal (and child) mortality rates. But in a country where contraception is either too complicated for poorly educated women to understand, too misunderstood or simply too difficult to get hold of, it’s not so easy.

In September 2009, InDevelopment Productions, which I set up last year, was commissioned by a British NGO based in Phnom Penh to make an hour-long drama aimed at encouraging Cambodian women to plan their families more effectively and to seek family-planning advice from reputable, responsible medical practitioners. The film also seeks to discourage women from seeking back-street abortions. Early abortion is legal here, but it’s not widely promoted and a lot of women look for help outside the (woefully inadequate) system. There are horror stories involving the use of a sharp stick to bring on spontaneous miscarriage, pouring acid into the woman’s vagina or simply giving her dodgy tablets that do not complete the job, leading to dangerous complications. Due to the understandable problems with reporting methods here there are no statistics at all for the numbers of deaths caused by backstreet and DIY abortions, but they are likely to be high.

23 June 2010
Posted in Film

James McCreadie on co-writing a film about love, life and speed-dating

 ‘A romantic comedy setin Glasgow’? I was concealing my doubts very well when Scottish actor and director Carter Ferguson pitched the project for my wife, Debbie May, and myself to write. It was the sort of thing that hadn’t been done in a long time. The last hit Scottish romcom was the wonderful Gregory’s Girl, written and directed by Bill Forsyth and released in 1981. Since then, our country has produced some terrific films, real stay-with-you flicks, but, as a recent newspaper article about our project mentioned, most have ‘left the outside world with the lasting impression that all we Scots do for recreation is chib (knife) each other’.

Carter, a massive fan of Forsyth’s films, was clearly out to change that. As the founding member of Ickleflix Ltd, the company that would produce the project, he had three short

 films to his name and knew his stuff. His energy and enthusiasm captivated us as he explained how he came up with the concept. Two years previously, seven different characters and the theme of speed dating had developed during a workshop he had organised. Afterwards, Carter moulded the idea of the seven meeting at one of these events and the possible aftermath. He handed us a partial storyline telling us to ‘go nuts’. Despite his boundless enthusiasm for the project, I had a niggle. A feature is a very different animal from a short – was this guy for real or just another dreamer wanting to tell his drinking buddies he had a feature film in development?

Then Carter told us he was offering the seven leads (it’s an ensemble piece) to the seven actors from the workshop. He thought, in addition to them all being capable, it was right to stay loyal and give them first refusal. In a business where taking advantage of others is second nature to most, Carter uttering the ‘L-word’ made us look at him in a very different light. Debbie and I were in, backing the underdog, determined to help make this happen.

21 December 2009
Posted in Film

Roy Boulter explains how a community writing project resulted in a critically acclaimed feature film, Under The Mud

So there I was with John Travolta, striding down the red carpet, heading into the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel, while trying to suppress a big stupid grin. He’s the legendary star of Grease, Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction – I’m the producer of Under The Mud, a feature film written collaboratively with a group of Liverpool teenagers that cost just £45,000 to shoot (less than a month’s fuel bill for Danny Zucko’s private jet).

Five years earlier, and a few thousand miles away in the slightly less glamorous South Liverpool suburb of Garston, Under The Mud started as a writing workshop at a youth drop-in centre. The area – politely described as ‘deprived’ – had the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe, but, despite potential ‘distractions’, we managed to attract a group of interested participants. At the first session I and my fellow producers Sol Papadopoulos and Julie Currie were disappointed by the group’s reticence, which we put down to shyness. In fact, they thought we might be undercover police – who else would ask them all these questions? The issue was quickly resolved after the session when my name came up on the credits of Brookside. We suddenly had credibility.

Over the following months we assembled a group of enthusiastic teenage first-time writers and developed an outline. The story, which The Times would later describe as ‘an energetic and surreal account of 24 hours in the life of a dysfunctional family’, featured characters based on the writers’ friends, families and neighbours. However, it owed a lot more to the imagination, with its aeroplane boarding-steps chase sequence, a holy-communion dress with mechanical fairy wings and an ‘imaginary friend’ as the central character (based on one of our writers’ real imaginary friend).

The story really started to take shape over three residential writing weekends. We sat around the table discussing, arguing about and laughing through every scene, character and plotline. Eventually we had a 60-page treatment and a story that we were all happy with.

The problem was how to write dialogue with 15 writers. Improvisation worked well for some scenes and characters, but not others. We tried working in groups of two or three on individual scenes, which I would then give notes on. After countless rewrites, our production line eventually delivered a final draft that the actor and director Kathy Burke, an avid supporter of the project, described as the most enjoyable script she’d read in a long time.

16 June 2009
Posted in Film

Myles McLeod (right) on making his red carpet debut with his animator brother Greg 

I don’t usually receive phone calls from the other half of The Brothers McLeod before 9.30am. My older brother Greg knows that before this time it’s likely I won’t have eaten breakfast and will therefore be rather cranky. 

However, on the 15th January, Greg phoned me at 8.30am. Something was up. It was either terrible or wonderful. On this occasion it was, thankfully, wonderful. We had been nominated for a BAFTA in the Short Animation category for our film Codswallop. Wow! 

Codswallop features a collection of uncanny characters at crucial moments in their briefly glimpsed stories. There are always two stories unfolding on screen at any one moment. And compared to the other two contenders in the category it’s also very short at three-and-a-half minutes, which explains why the other main accolade the film has won so far is Best Short Short. 

The project originated in 2007 when Greg started sending postcards to his son, Louis. Greg bought some blank postcards, drew extraordinary characters at interesting or crucial moments – a man with a shelf-like head wondering if his head looked wide in two hats; a giant elf lost in the woods; a multi-eyed fiend riding a bicycle – and sent them back to his house for Louis to receive. Needless to say, Louis loved them. 

03 March 2009
Posted in Film

Edward Windus recounts the experience of taking a script to the 32nd éQuinoxe screenwriters’ workshop

The recent cull of screenwriting programmes has brought down many of the key players on the European development scene, including Arista, North by Northwest and Moonstone. But perhaps not unsurprisingly, given France’s particular love for cinema, over the last years a Gallic one, run by the very well-connected Noëlle Deschamps, has not only survived but thrived. 

In 2007 éQuinoxe celebrated its 30th workshop in 15 years, attended by such luminaries as Bond writers Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Spiderman producer Laura Ziskin. In 2008 it doubled in size to include sections for beginners and the more experienced. More importantly, with 40% of projects going into production, including Jacques Audiard’s impressive Read My Lips and Oscar-winning The Counterfeiters, it boasts a solid industry record. 

For a European screenwriter a chance to have a three-hour session with the likes of David Peoples, Ron Bass, Simon Beaufoy or Paul Haggis is a sort of Holy Grail and this is the third successive year I have applied, this time with my most offbeat project, Franco: The Movie. It’s a comedy set in 1960s Spain about a censor who is forced to direct General Franco’s biopic and runs into David Lean shooting Lawrence Of Arabia and Sergio Leone helming Fistful Of Dollars and accidentally influences the creation of those two classics, falls in love and alters Iberian history into the bargain. 

In October there’s a ping on my computer and I discover I have been selected as one of the eight elite in the advanced section. Another bonus is it is totally free: flights and accommodation in a five-star hotel in Evian, on the French side of Lake Geneva, are generously met by the organisation. 

Established, like Moonstone, on the model of the Sundance screenwriters’ labs, the structure of the week-long programme is simplicity itself: each writer gets a one-to-one morning or afternoon session with around half-dozen of the advisors. I’ve worked with a maximum of three story editors on a screenplay, which I found fried my head, so six (or more) diverse points of view is going to be tough; this is why the programme requests second draft scripts. Luckily there’s a lot of champagne, good food, a sauna, Jacuzzi and steam room - in a complex that has hosted Bush, Blair and Zidane - to act as punctuation to the sessions.