Marty vs Marvel: the Flaw in the Argument

Listen Marty, some friends of ours—not me—are concerned about what you’ve been saying recently. They’re very concerned. The guys at Marvel have asked me to tell you… ‘it is what it is’. [Apologies to those who haven’t yet seen The Irishman.] After Martin Scorsese doubled-down on his comments about Marvel films not being cinema in […]

The Heart of the Matter

The Primacy of Emotion in Screenwriting ☛ Emotion is at the heart of every story. This statement won’t sound controversial if you write relationship dramas or rom-coms, but those of you who pen complex political thrillers or action movies will probably disagree. If you do, you’re wrong and I’ll tell you why. In a bit. […]

Don’t Forget to Pack Your Editor

Cutting on Location ☛ I’ve written before about the advantages of cutting during the shoot, but on my last job – a lovely British feature called Me, Myself & Di – I went a step further and was cutting on location with the crew. I learnt some interesting things to share with you. To clarify, […]

Not ‘How’ but ‘What’

There’s a question that’s on the lips of virtually no screenwriter. So how is that a good subject for a blog? Because, while they rarely ask it openly, it’s a question all writers will have asked themselves privately at some point in their career. And it is: What should I write? Whether you take that […]

When is a Movie not a Movie?

The Spielberg Supremacy ☛ Last week Steven Spielberg called for a tightening of the rules of the American Academy, which awards the Oscars, to prevent films like Roma, which is backed by Netflix, being eligible in future. Now BAFTA is also feeling the pressure, with two cinema chains – VUE and Cineworld – protesting over the eligibility […]

PRODUCT REVIEW G-Drive mobile SSD Rugged

As camera resolutions improve and file sizes increase, filmmakers need more and bigger hard drives. But we have a variety of requirements of a device to store our media, for example: It needs to have the capacity to hold a lot of very large files. It needs to have a fast read speed, so […]

How to Travel in Time

The Art of the Flashback ☛ Flashbacks are on my mind at the moment. I’m currently working on two feature projects – one as writer, the other as editor – which are structured around multiple time periods, so my brain has got well-used to jumping around in time. Flashbacks are pretty common these days, but […]

“One for Lloyds”?

How many takes to shoot ☛ “One for Lloyds…” is a phrase often heard on movie sets in the UK. It means shooting a second take, even if take one was perfect; y’know, just in case. Lloyds is the centre of the British insurance market – I believe their policies once demanded that a minimum of […]

The Return of the Reel

In Which the Writer has a Kodak Moment ☛ Film is dead. It was coming for a time: when I left film school I got a lot of work as a 1st assistant editor because I was good at hand-holding editors who were being forced to stop cutting on 35mm. That was the late 90s. […]

How Long You’ll Need to Edit…

…and When You Should Stop ☛ One question that I’m often asked when interviewing for a low-budget feature is: “how long do you think you’ll need?” The answer is… it’s complicated. There used to be a rule of thumb for feature films: 1.5 times the length of the shoot. This was based on the assumption […]