I’m sat in the living room of my house share, suddenly aware of the mess that surrounds me. It’s simply not fit for a BAFTA nominee to sit in. To save myself embarrassment, I frantically rummage around the cupboards and find two throws to cover the white sofas and make the place look ‘professional’. The proverbial cats and dogs are hammering down outside as we set up our podcast gear. For two men, like Ieuan and I, who struggle with tech, this has been one of the biggest challenges of running our podcast. We have, however, after many months, mastered the setup. Amit sends an email to say he’s arrived early but that he can wait in the rain under his brolly if we aren’t ready. This politeness and his charm are not an act, as we find out throughout the episode. We all enjoy a brew and a brief chat in my kitchen. Is it me, or does the kitchen seem like it’s in a complete state now too? We’ve sent some of the questions to Amit in advance, and he’s raring to go.

Let's dive in! 

"For me it’s exciting to work with people who have new ideas."

SFBQ: 

I suppose a good reason to continue doing shorts, even for an actor in your position is that you can develop a relationship with a filmmaker that you believe in and hopefully things will progress down the line as you do bigger and better stuff together. So it’s a good investment of your time in that way? 

AS: 

I don’t necessarily look at it in a business perspective like that but you just don’t know where someone’s career might go. For me it’s exciting to work with people who have new ideas. Its much the same with agents. If I were to move agents I would go for a younger agent who is starting out, is really hungry and wants to prove something. I guess in a similar way with filmmakers. They have something to prove and its exciting to be in their world and be involved in their project. 

SFBQ:

As an actor are you potentially more free to experiment and explore new things and break new ground for yourself in your craft on shorts? 

AS: 

Yes! Definitely. To take risks and try new things and to really experiment. I always find that I have the confidence to do that on the set of a shorts. 

When you’re on a slightly larger project, where there’s 20 execs sitting by the monitor. The stakes are a bit high and you don’t have that confidence possibly, or you’re not given that opportunity or there’s just not the time to do that. With shorts you have that opportunity much more. 

SFBQ: 

Do you think that you’re not given the opportunity or is there a possibility that you have to suppress these instincts as everyone’s got an opinion. Whereas on shorts everyone is just there to experiment and you feel you can just go for it? 

AS: 

Yeah, maybe it is the fact that a short is very much a writer-director’s kind of medium and on larger projects, there’s just so many people involved. There are just so many voice and it is very rarely about the actor and director working on the script. 

"I think you just have to be very efficient and, well, develop the confidence to embrace your interpretation and really express it."

SFBQ:

I’m so curious about that. How does that affect your performance? 

AS: 

I think you just have to be very efficient and, well, develop the confidence to embrace your interpretation and really express it. And if there’s pushback, then fine. At least you’ve tried. But I think now I’m getting older. I have more confidence. And maybe it’s the type of roles I’m going up for now to say, you know, this is my interpretation and there’s more opportunity to collaborate. Whereas when I was younger, it was more a case of, okay, just do this, stand here and say a line and you’re very functional. 

SFBQ: 

So the older you’ve become the more you can look at the scene and work out the different ways to play the scene and actually have the confidence to go in and do that? 

AS: 

I guess you’re developing your instinct, by working with other actors and directors and putting yourself in those situations. And yeah, embracing yourself. For example, ‘Big Ears’ is about my ears that I was extremely insecure about when I was a child. It’s very much a statement of embracing your weaknesses or what you thought were your weaknesses and using it to create work, I guess. 

—————-

This is just an excerpt of our conversation. You can check out the full episode here.

It was an absolute delight to have Amit on the show and the first time that my parents had heard of the person we were interviewing. 

Ieuan and I are sat on zoom waiting for Mark to arrive. There is a nervous, excited tension in the air. We've both jumped on the call early to check and then triple check our audio and headphones. Mark only has an hour to chat and we want to make the most of it. A buzz sounds "Mark Jenkin is in the waiting room." We take a breath and accept him into the call. Immediately he puts us at ease and asks us a few questions about where we are and what we do and without knowing it we're off to the races.

I was getting to a point where I'd had a project in development for five years and I was asking myself "Am I still a filmmaker? Or am I just a bloke who talks about making a film one day?".

SFBQ: We both read that you still make Super 8 short films. We were wondering why you still do this? Are you making them just to make them or is it informing the bigger projects that you work on? 

MJ: I've come at it from quite a strange direction. I started off not making short films. The first film I made was a feature film or I attempted to make a feature film at least. It ended up being about sixty minutes and isn't a feature and doesn't feel like one. It was never released or anything either. I left university where the emphasis had been on making shorts. When I left I just thought well if you are going to bother with the hassle of making a short you may as well make a feature and I didn't recognise the value of short films. I saw them as a way to make a film while I had feature films in development. 

I then got to a stage that is known in the industry as "development hell". When you have a film in development that year after year doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Around that time I picked up a Super 8 camera for the first time in a while and decided to just make a short with it. There was a cost involved with the film stock and I was a bit scared as I'd been working with video which seemed to be foolproof. All these thoughts were running through my head; "If I shoot on film is it going to come out. Am I going to expose it right?". I was very precious about it but I wasn't counting on having a final film come out at the end of it. When I got the footage back it just looked amazing and I cut together this sort of experimental narrative short film. I showed it to people and they really responded to it. That was only in 2015 so not that long ago. I had this epiphany that actually making short films is a whole separate art form. That's why I love the London Short Film Festival as they really do celebrate short films as a form within themselves. Short Films don't have to be the poor relation of feature films. I've just made two short films for the BFI. They are just short films and they couldn't be expanded into features. 

So in answer to your question I made these short films to release some of the pressure of being in "development hell" where you're just having meetings about hypothetical projects. I was getting to a point where I'd had a project in development for five years and I was asking myself "Am I still a filmmaker? Or am I just a bloke who talks about making a film one day?". The short films allowed me to have that creative freedom and I didn't have to get the OK from anybody. I was doing it off my own back. I did a bit of teaching and with that money I'd buy some film stock and some time to go and make a short. The real value, however, was how I was making the short films. I designed the process which was shooting on film, quite often hand processing the film, then editing it and creating a soundtrack. It made me realise that if I ever got to make a feature film I'd like to make it in this way because this is what excites me. Luckily I had two very supportive producers at Early Day Films who encouraged me to pursue this and that ended up being "Bait". 

"When I was in London I presumed everything had to be going on in London."

SFBQ: By going back to Super 8 was there an element of trying to be self sufficient and not having to rely on lots of crew to make your films happen? 

MJ: No I don't think so. I grew up here (Cornwall) and then went away to university in Bournemouth and then I ended up in London working in the industry as an editor. I ended up moving back to Cornwall almost by chance. There was some European money here in Cornwall to develop a film industry so I moved back to get involved in that. As soon as I moved home I was immersed in the world that was very familiar to me, it was a very self sufficient world. When I was in London I presumed everything had to be going on in London. Actually a couple of films I made were screened in Cornwall while I was still living in London and I went home to see them screened. They were screened in village halls and I would turn up to a village hall thinking "oh god the film is going to screen to two people and a dog" and I'd open up the door and there would be two hundred people there watching films for three hours with food and drink. I just thought "Well actually this is the centre of the film industry that I want to be in."

That self sufficiency had run through the industry all along. The people who really did the groundwork in Cornwall were people like George Green, Paul Farmer and Antal Kovacs. They were all working in Cornwall a long time before I came back. There was already a support network that was born out of this self sufficiency that came from not being at the centre of the industry. It's a real benefit to have that. To be cut off. To not know the right ways to do stuff. To not quite have the "right" equipment. People here are making really individual idiosyncratic work because they are making up their own rules and making it with the equipment that is available to them. 

To check out the rest of our conversation with Mark, head to our podcast "Short Films, Big Questions". 

“It’s kind of like getting the keys to a Ferrari after just passing your test”

We’re sat in the understated Slick Films office, attached to the side of a church, a detail we missed in Chris’ email, which led to a priest questioning why we were setting up podcast gear in the pews. Chris makes us feel at home immediately and takes us on a mini tour. The rain is pattering down outside but that doesn't ruin the mood. There are shelves full of camera and lighting gear and right in front of us sits the Rhode Island Grand Jury Prize. There are posters of upcoming short films and off on a ledge just out of sight is Chris' Oscar. Spoiler alert - he did allow us to pose with it. 

Chris, our welcoming host, who rocks a beard and man bun, is chatting all about what Slick Films are trying to achieve and questioning us about our own films. We dive straight into his journey and the conversation is flowing. 

SFBQ: How did you get ‘The Silent Child’ (your Oscar winning Short Film) made? There is a myth that these Oscar winning films have a big funding body behind them and lots of money to fall back on but you self funded this?

CO: No. It was so hard to get it made. It really was. We got less than £10,000 to shoot with. We crowd funded. It was a long road before that though. It felt like we tried it all. We applied to all the funding bodies. We went everywhere and we just go told ‘no’. It was just rejection after rejection and we got to the end of that road and decided, as scary as it is, that we were going to have to do a crowd funding campaign. Then that turned out to be even harder! Somehow we managed to get the money up and then we looked at each other and said ‘Well crap! We are going to have to make this now’! It was done with so much blood sweat and tears and I don’t honestly know how we did it looking back.

It was done on a lot of favours. I produce everything that I direct which is a big money saver. The core members of the team and a lot of the crew gave up their time to tell this story and I owe a lot to everyone who helped me get it made.

“We didn’t even know when we were filming it that you could win an Oscar for a short film.”

SFBQ: So skipping ahead a little. You had massive success with The Silent Child. We were curious as to what happened after you won the Oscar. Was it everything you expected? Were all the doors thrown wide open for you?

CO: If I look back I think it was the best experience I possibly could have had. We went from an idea in Rachel’s (Rachel Shenton - Writer/Actress) head to the Oscar stage. It allowed us to experience every single nook and cranny of making a short film. Most filmmakers only get to do 70% of it, they never get the chance to do that next bit. It’s only when a film becomes that successful that you get to see the other side of the filmmaking journey that exists perhaps a bit more in the feature filmmaking world.

The truth is that we were not prepared at all. It was the first thing we did and we had nothing lined up. A lot of people would be asking us ‘What’s next?’ and the only answer we had was “Well we are just taking this film around.” So naïve. Obviously the whole point of getting the success is so that you can pitch your next project. We weren’t ready. That’s the truth. But honestly we never planned to win an Oscar. We didn’t even know when we were filming it that you could win an Oscar for a short film.

When we were filming the DOP (director of photography) had these glasses he would wear and this joke came up that he would take them to the Oscars. We would all laugh thinking how ridiculous it was and then he did take them to the Oscars!

We won the Grand Jury Prize at Rhode Island which meant that we could submit for the Oscars. And again we didn’t really know what that meant or how the process was going to go either. Rhode Island submitted us as their Oscar Qualifying film which meant we were added to the long list for the Oscars. It is a list of 100-150 films that have all won the Grand Jury Prize of their Oscar Qualifying film festival. That then gets short listed down to 10 films. To get down to the final 10 the odds are just crazy, so when we did, we just thought that is enough. They announce it and then your email box goes absolutely bonkers. It’s quite insane really and quite intimidating. Those 10 films become 5 and then you get to bloody go to the Oscars. For us, more than anything, it was being able to take Maisie, the little girl who starred in the film. Giving her that opportunity was amazing. And then we won and it’s just crazy really.

“I could have ended up doing a couple of feature films that wouldn’t have meant anything to me.”

SFBQ: The aftermath of that must have been very positive? You must have been approached by everyone. Was it this moment that made you able to bring Slick Films (Chris’ production company) to what it is today?

CO: Because we didn’t have anything prepared when everyone would ask us what’s next we would just say ‘errrr the Silent Child feature film’ with no thought really. Then what you get is this humongous amount of pressure and it’s kind of like getting the keys to a Ferrari after just passing your test. Honestly that is the best way that I can describe it. Suddenly we are in these rooms with these big companies that you dream of working with and some of those relationships that we built up are advantageous today.

I think that Rachel and I were a little bit paralysed by it. It was very daunting and we had huge imposter syndrome. You are offered a lot. I had an American agent straight away and they were saying can we attach you to this feature film and this feature film and this feature film and I was reading the scripts and they all started in this vein “Johnny opens the door of his Mustang” and I’m just thinking ‘I can’t do that!’.

Looking back I am very proud of myself for not taking that. I could have ended up doing a couple of feature films that wouldn’t have meant anything to me. We both decided to go back and learn our craft. We went away and learned what it’s like to be a filmmaker. We went away and made more short films and now I can say I am ready to make a feature film.

To check out the rest of our conversation with Chris head over to our podcast 'Short Films Big Questions'.