Lovers Are Amateurs
Amateur is a word from the French word with the same spelling which means “lover of”, ultimately from the Latin “amator” which means “lover”. During the editing of Third Contact, I was thinking about the fear people have of appearing to be amateurs, and something suddenly occurred to me – if lovers are amateurs, then professionals are whores.
I finished writing Third Contact in 2009 and told people I wanted to just start making it, without any money. The response was pretty unanimous: it would look terrible, and it would be a waste of a great script. I was told I needed some money, but nobody was really sure how much.
I picked a figure out of the air – £50,000 – designed a 6 page marketing pack, and arranged to meet a few producers. That wouldn’t be enough, they said. It would be the waste of a great script. So I got in touch with some guys making a £200,000 feature film and was asked to help them produce it. Thinking this would be a great opportunity to get a sense of how a small budget operation worked, I tagged along.
Everyone gathered around a big table in a meeting room at BBC White City. The team was made up of filmmaking enthusiasts and some top professionals in the industry donating their time for almost nothing. Pretty much the whole discussion focused on how they were going to make their limited budget look like a much bigger one. In their marketing kit, they compared the film to I Am Legend, a film which cost $150,000,000 to make.
Although I thought the team were brilliant, organised and dedicated, I knew this was not how I wanted to make my film. What they were trying to do was make a big budget film but with a tiny percentage of the budget. I didn’t see the point. All they would end up with was a ‘blockbuster-style’ movie, like when you buy ‘oak wood style’ doors for your kitchen cabinets. It’s not oak and everyone knows its not oak.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t go to the cinema to watch a film which looks like it cost more to make than it did. I go to watch a story told by people and hope that it’s an emotional, thought-provoking and/or entertaining ride. Believing all the paraphernalia of a standard filmmaking setup was not required to create great cinema, I wondered ‘does it sometimes get in the way?’
For that reason, I decided to buy the best camera I could afford and start filming. That camera turned out to be a camcorder; a camcorder with a bit of a cult following (Canon HV30) but still, it wasn’t even semi-pro. Added to that, I’d never photographed a film before, and I’d never been to film school. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was an amateur.
But I was an amateur who loved film and I trusted myself to know what was right for the story. To take the words from Dr. Wright in Third Contact: “Instinct – I’m starting to use it again – it feels good.”
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