Report from The London Screenwriters Festival 2025
I’d not been to the London Screenwriters’ Festival for some years, maybe not since 2017. As you might expect, it’s changed. The venue is the same—Regent University, neatly hidden in London’s Regent’s Park—but the tone is different, or perhaps just more noticeable. It’s fun.
Whether it’s a festival or a film set, the tone filters down from the top, and presiding over the Screenwriters’ Festival is one of the most distinctive personalities of the British indy scene: Chris Jones. A big-hearted Mancunian with Labrador energy, Jones imbues everything in the festival with a sense of tongue-in-cheek blockbuster epic. Introducing speakers to the stage: “Now I want you to imagine that a helicopter is landing in the square outside. John and Eileen step out. They’re dressed head to foot in black leather. We see them walk in slow motion. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage…”
The playfulness continues in Q&As with a microphone in a foam cube which can be thrown across the auditorium to anyone with their hand up. And across the festival with games like the Elevator Pitch, where delegates are put in a lift with an unknown executive and are given one trip up and one trip down to pitch to them. We’re here to learn and to network, but we’re also here to play.
While the festival is for writers at various stages of their career, from ‘complete newbie’ to ‘finally getting somewhere’, the tone is firmly pitched at the plucky outsider. There’s also a bias towards commercial filmmaking, albeit mainly the low-budget end of commercial. Fenella Greenfield tells us how she made her sci-fi film Lucy 2.0 for £37k. Bob Schultz does live surgery on delegates’ loglines while telling us about his spec scripts Sasquad—yes, it’s about a squad of Sasquatches—and Hitlersaurus—let your imagination do the work.
Saturday night is movie night and screenwriter Graham Jost gives a live DVD-style commentary on his 1994 popcorn classic Speed. Jost—a self-effacing, dry Canadian, who keeps reminding us that he’s not American—shamelessly picks apart the flaws in his action classic:
“Look at that, the way the nose of the bus goes up as it leaves the edge: why is it doing that?!”
“LA buses don’t have hatches in the floor, and the axle would get in the way anyway”.
He tells us how he had to be talked out of the original title of the script: Minimum Speed. He also describes the awkwardness around how only one line of his dialogue is in the final film – the rest is by Joss Whedon. Jost got a sole screen credit, a reminder of how brutal this business can be. But Jost is not just in London to do Speed. Since he hit 50 himself, he’s floored the brakes and is now giving us Slow Horses, which he also talks us through.
For me, the best session was given by Tammy Riley-Smith, teacher of ‘Screenwriting: Finding Your Voice’ at the National Film School. She challenged the audience to question why we write, and to examine what themes we find ourselves drawn to again and again. Taking Christopher Nolan as an example, she showed how almost all of his films are about obsessed men who are looking for revenge for the death of a loved one, a death for which they themselves are really responsible. Why he should revisit such a specific theme so constantly, is far from clear.
From deep meaning to deep margins, veteran script guru Scott Myers opted to answer questions on script formatting, by taking us through the history of how screen stories have been expressed on the page from the first known screenplay Trip to the Moon (1902), through Psycho, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Anora. Catnip to this writer (sad, I know).
Other sessions covered the business side of screenwriting, from how writers’ rooms work, to how to get an agent. Crucially, Pitchfest offers writers the opportunity to flaunt their wares to flesh-and-blood producers and agents. I was pitching three projects and found myself marshaled through their complex but highly efficient system of queuing to meet the great and the good. We gossip amongst ourselves in the queue, swapping tips “So-and-so is just looking for comedy”, “The guy from X films nods in a weird way that reveals that he’s not really listening”. Two producers express interest in one of my pilots and another gets excited about my feature. After that point, everything else in the festival is a bonus.
That said, not every session was a hit. One speaker seemed not to have noticed that it was specifically a screenwriting festival and tried to encompass every aspect of writing scripts, both the art and the business. Another speaker put a logline up on screen for a movie and asked who in the audience would go to see that film. Four hands went up. Not the response she was expecting: it was her own logline. Awkward. I leave one session early as the character archtypes in The Wizard of Oz are being discussed and return to that room an hour later to find different speakers discussing the character archtypes in The Wizard of Oz. But for each flop session there are at least two hits, so I don’t feel short-changed.
The festival drew to a climax on Sunday night with an award ceremony, known as The Fucking Awesome Awards—a Chris Jones touch?—, which went to Grand Theft Hamlet (did that really have a screenplay? Never mind). Jones signs off the festival by getting us to close our eyes as he delivers an inspirational speech with stirring music, a peroration worthy of Maximus in Gladiator; in fact he calls us ‘film gladiators’ (don’t think too hard about the parallels). Opening our eyes, we stumble out into the dying light of Regent’s Park, ready to write our next screenplay that will echo in eternity…
London Screenwriters’ Festival 2026 will be from 10-12th April. £349 Early Bird.
Copyright © Guy Ducker 2025 // Edited by Dr Sara Lodge
Dedicated to making the world a slightly stranger and more mysterious place. I’m a freelance film-maker, working mainly in post-production, editing small projects and assistant editor on bigger feature films. I’ve written five feature film scripts (as yet unproduced) and directed a number of short films. All this is pretty much an excuse for watching more films than is strictly healthy. When not watching movies I’m either taking long walks around London or acting in a louche manner in Soho somewhere.
