I hadn’t even left school when I fell for my first love. Infatuated with the extensive ‘behind the scenes’ content that came out of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, my oldest friend and I set about making an hour-long ‘medieval romantic tragedy’ picture, replete with horses, knights and castles. This was long before YouTube existed, so everything we knew (which wasn’t a lot) we had learned from watching and re-watching Peter Jackson and his merry band of Kiwi rogues. My media studies teacher laughed and told me there was no way we could pull it off (this was, and is, like a red rag to a bull for me). We borrowed £4000 from the bank to feed the crew and pay for the costumes and camera hire, and spent what will always be a close contender for ‘greatest summer of my life’ roaming around Devon with our crew of friends, utterly dedicated to the dream of making a movie of our own. I met the second love of my life shortly afterwards (during a brief misadventure at film school) and she helped me assemble the hot mess of amateur footage into something resembling a coherent picture. Eventually we paid the budget back with DVD sales and local screenings, and that was that. But it wasn’t over – I was hooked.
What followed were almost twenty years of pursuing that dream. I didn’t want to simply work in the film industry, I wanted to keep making movies with my friends – the bigger the better. We got up to all sorts of mischief: an hour long zombie action movie with motorbike chases and airstrikes, an urban fantasy retelling of the Arthurian myth, a series of short films spanning two thousand years of Atlantean history – shot entirely underwater. We had a hell of a time, we met our heroes: Stephen Speilberg, Sir Richard Taylor, Kevin Smith, Robert Roriguez, and we made some great inroads. But whenever things got serious – whenever we were pitching some big, ambitious original project that required major industry investment we always came up against the same problem: the age of original content was dying. It didn’t matter how exciting the script was, or how novel the world building – it wasn’t an established franchise. Audiences wouldn’t recognise the name, there was no video-game or best-selling book series to justify a $50m budget.
‘Why don’t you go and write the book – then we can adapt it into a movie’ they would joke. I don’t know how many times I heard that from agents, managers, and development execs.
After a while, it didn’t sound like such a bad idea.
Only trouble was: I didn’t write. I was the one who came up with the stories and the worlds, I produced the projects, built the teams, and directed the films, but not once did I dare to put pen to paper and get involved in the actual words. I didn’t know if I even could. The thought was frankly terrifying.
What started out as a vague ‘fuck you, I will then’ to a hundred smug LA suits, very quickly blossomed into the third love of my life. It turned out that I could do it (longer blog post coming about that). Not just that: I loved to do it. Not just that: I wondered how I had spent so many years existing without doing it. In novel writing I had found a way to finally be free of the endless compromises that necessitate filmmaking – no longer did I have to worry about the budget, or the daylight, or the temperature of the water, or some department having a flap. It was as if someone had skewered my skull with a spout that allowed ideas to pour, undiluted, from my imagination onto the page. And what came out wasn’t a script – not just a blueprint with which we’d go forth and try to make something else – it was the finished product (well not quite – but the fate of that first novel is a long story for another day…).
One great piece of advice I read in my late teens was ‘start by calling yourself a filmmaker’ – it’s a great way to shift your perspective and fortify yourself against fear and imposter syndrome. Now, though, it felt almost like a betrayal of those 20 years to start calling myself a writer (not least of all because it begs the horrifying question ‘what have you written?’). But I couldn’t help it. Something in my DNA had mutated, it wasn’t simply that I was currently enacting the verb to write, I had become the noun writer.
After a while, I started to realise there was a power less tangible, but even greater to the act of novel writing, beyond the lack of compromise. In film, however hard we strove to aim big and compete at the highest possible level, there was always a temptation to bow to the reality that we simply didn’t have the same resources as the big boys. We spent two years making 30 minutes of underwater cinema with less money than Avatar spent on coffee. For what we had, we did great. Only that doesn’t matter to the audience – the ticket price is the same, the cost of their attention is the same – they quite rightly want the best entertainment they can get for their time and money. However hard you try, it’s never possible to completely silence the voice that says ‘well, yeah, we can’t do that though – we haven’t got $200m’ – to let yourself off the hook, to give yourself an excuse (however valid) for not being as good as the very best.
But with a novel? With a novel those stubborn little excuse-goblins that cling in the dark recesses of your mind are burned away by the scorching white-hot light of a blank page staring out of your word-processor at 5am. All you have is a keyboard and a coffee. But guess what, that’s all anyone has.
All that matters is: what are you going to do with it?
