LondonSWF Labs Case Study: I am buzzing! By Neil Weatherall

I’ve just come out of an Advanced Mentoring Script Lab, part of this year’s London Screenwriters Festival and I’m just buzzing.

The two mentors were Pat Higgins, dubbed the ‘Essex Auteur’ by Empire magazine and ‘one of the masters of horror’ by The Dark Side, and Marcus Markou whose brilliant debut feature film Papadopoulos & Sons, he wrote, directed AND distributed himself,  achieving the second highest screen average of any film in its opening  weekend, and going on to be shown by the BBC and Netflix.

Pat and Marcus got me and the other five attendees to talk them through a project we were working on and what he were hoping to achieve, and then gave us the benefit of their experience. Pat and Marcus are pretty much superheroes of the indie world, and the other attendees – whose bios and scripts LSF’s Emily Monaghan had circulated in advance – were quite impressive as well, so I went into the Zoom session with every intention to keep my head down and my mouth shut and to just listen and learn.

But Pat and Marcus’s enthusiasm for our projects was an instant ice breaker and it was really easy for everyone to chip in with comments and questions as we went along.

I took three pages of notes. Like a lot of good advice, a lot of it is that stuff that you’ve heard before but you can’t be told often enough, and some of it was totally new to me and mind-blowing. Here’s a little summary of my notes:

A big takeaway was that especially on low and ultra low budget projects it’s essential that you make the film you really love, not the film you think the market wants. It’s your enthusiasm, your vision that will carry people through the long days and the inevitable setbacks that you get on any film shoot. If you’re crazily obsessed about how your film needs desperately to get out into the world, other people are more likely to be crazy enough to come along for the ride.

On the same subject, if you know you can’t afford to pay people as much as you’d like, it’s sometimes better to persuade people to work for free than to work for less than they usually earn. Working for free can make people feel heroic while working for a pittance can breed resentment.

You can get big names at low rates if you use a big casting director. The big casting directors often make the big bucks from big factory style productions that don’t really satisfy them artistically and to compensate, they like to run the odd free range indie project as a side hustle for their credibility and even their sanity. These big shot casting directors can sometimes pull in big shot talent for you.

A crafty way to get around big named actors’ agents is to go through the agent initially, hiring the big name on a generous daily rate for a recorded table reading which you run at a cool but cheap fringe theatre venue. And you get an up-and-coming fringe theatre director to direct the reading. Most theatre directors would like to try their hand at film so helping you out with the development of your film is a very easy, risk-free way for them to dip their toe, and their presence at the reading will be a draw for savvy actors who know that today’s hot fringe director is tomorrow’s West End legend. This table read gets you into the big name’s inbox, diary and address book, and you into theirs. If by the end of the reading they’ve fallen in love with your project, the few grand you might have spent on the whole day will be saved manyfold by getting the talent for a discounted rate, which you can negotiate now that the agent is no longer the gatekeeper. And you can take the recording of the reading, drop it into your editing software and populate it with storyboard images to create a ‘skeleton edit’ which will lift your script off the page and show you how your film will feel in terms of pacing and mood. (I thought that was a GENIUS idea, can’t wait to try that!)

Another way to get good talent on the cheap is to use standup comics. They’re hard working, they understand nuance, mood, tone and intonation and they have a feel for what engages and moves an audience, and some of them would really love to do drama. And they come with a following.

That last part is really important. Having talent who have a following or some connection to a contactable community is really useful when it comes to marketing your film. Marcus’s debut Papadopoulos & Sons famously benefited greatly from positive word of mouth from north London’s Greek orthodox church community. Pat told a story of a horror film in which the antagonists were murderous Morris Dancers! The Morris Dancing community may not have been entirely pleased to be portrayed in this way but obviously they talked about the film and a lot of them turned up and enjoyed it!

Although the session was primarily about film making, I squeezed in a question at the end about story structure, Papadopoulos & Sons being one of the most satisfyingly constructed films I’ve enjoyed for a while. As well as McKee and Vogler, Marcus recommends returning often to The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller by John Truby.

An easy rule of thumb: make sure that your story is *culturally specific* – but *universally humane*. That one went straight onto a post-it note on the bottom of my screen.

Another gem: make sure every scene has a transfer of energy. Basically if it starts happy it has to end a bit unhappy, or vice versa. Otherwise it’s just exposition or -worse – padding. The drama *is* the energy transfer.

Lastly – and this is one I know I’ve been told a million times in different words – make sure every scene is linked by what Lucy Hay calls the Story Chain. Pat suggested a great way to check for this, which he got from a talk by Trey Parker and Matt Stone off Southpark fame. You put your beat sheet up on a board and see if any of the beats can be linked by the words ‘and then…’, and if they can, then the story chain is broken and needs fixing. It’s fixed when the linking words are ‘and therefore…’ or ‘however…’.

So simple. Brilliant.

Pat and Marcus ended the session by saying that they look forward to watching our next films. I felt very honoured to hear that – and energised and confident as never before.

If you ever get a chance to hear Pat Higgins and Marcus Markou speak do take it. They’re proper legends.