My first foray into the murky world of filmmaking came about as a result of a post I made on the Shooting People newsletter. I had responded to a post by one of the members, a writer, who had written a tirade against producers and, in particular, producers who didn’t seem to know what they were doing. My response was published in the next bulletin: it argued that even producers had to start somewhere and that, just as all the aspiring screenwriters would bemoan the fact that they needed to be given a break, so too did those who might want to produce films.

Filmmaking is a bizarre team game played by individuals. From one point of view (namely, the writer’s) the writer is the most important person in the process because without her ideas and without her talent there would be no screenplay and without a screenplay there is no film. Of course, once there is a screenplay, there is still no film unless you have a director – someone with the vision and ability to turn the written word into moving pictures. Of course, you can’t direct unless you’ve got someone to direct so actors are pretty necessary too. The last, but by no means least, of the above-the-line items to consider is the one that writers always seem to despise and that’s the producer.

The truth is that filmmaking is a collaborative process and a film can’t be made unless all these roles are filled. But of these four jobs, the one of producer is the one that’s probably the least understood – certainly by the man on the Clapham omnibus. To my mind, the producer is the enabler, the one who makes it all happen, the project manager if you will. Amongst their responsibilities comes the financing, the budget, the hiring and firing, the scheduling and the organisation. On big shoots that cost megabucks and have a cast of thousands, the producer will have a team of thousands with assistants aplenty and people to take on all of the day to day running of the production (including finance, legal, marketing and production management departments.) On low budget, small scale shoots, it can be left to the producer to do all of this herself as well as anyone she might have conned into helping her.

At the end of the post I made on Shooting People, after standing up for inexperienced producers everywhere, for some unknown reason I said I’d like to be given a chance to produce a short film if anyone was willing to work with someone who had no experience, no funds and not much apart from enthusiasm. I hoped that one or two people might take a chance and say they were willing to work with me or even have a chat and that I might get a script or two to look at.

I was inundated with scripts.

I forget how many but I remember having difficulty trying to keep up with them all. They were of varying quality – some were absolutely terrible, some showed promise but needed a lot of work and some were great but would cost far too much to make. One, however, stood out. It was a clever script, well written and more importantly, could be realistically made for a small budget and with limited resources. It only had a cast of three people and primarily took place in one location but most of all, I really liked the script. I emailed the writer (who was also a director) and we arranged to meet to discuss the idea of working together and, assuming we got on okay, make the film.

My journey into the world of production was about to begin.