From a different perspective

I've always been fond of film, although I wouldn't exactly call myself a film buff. I've certainly seen less mainstream Hollywood movies than most people, including Olga, who regularly surprises me by flicking through the cable channels and picking out mildly inoffensive films that I've never heard of but she's watched three times.

Nonetheless, I'm quite passionate about film. I've done too much literary criticism in my time to be able to switch off the brain and watch most standard Hollywood fare, but I love a fair proportion of the stuff that finds its way into the more alternative/independent cinemas. Beyond which, I'm a fairly obsessive listener of Mark Kermode's film reviews, largely because we share similar views on about 90% of films - much to the consternation of my poor wife, who cannot now mention a film without me parroting large lumps of the good doctor's reviews at her.

Still, I'd never really considered trying to write a film before, until very recently. When I moved up to Newcastle early this year, I decided to sign up for a film course at the local independent cinema, the Tyneside, partly as a way to get out the house and meet people and partly because it seemed to be a good way to deepen my appreciation of film. But I'm not entirely sure why I chose to do the Introduction to Screenwriting course rather than one of the other, easier ones where I could have just sat and watched a film each week and then discussed it. Still, it was a fairly good decision.

I know I'm not the first person to say it, so I won't go on about it, but it's still an instructive experience to try and write something yourself. It's a good way to appreciate the craft of screenwriting a lot more, and it's also opened up my eyes to various other aspects of film-making about which I had only the blurriest of understandings. And it's been particularly instructive to write something and then really have no concept of quite how bad (or good?!) it is - which starts to explain how truly terrible films can get made so easily, because everyone loses perspective on how much it stinks.

So, I've written my first short film (it's bad, I'm sure, but I'm quite pleased with myself nonetheless) and am now trying to write something longer after being inspired by an extremely good course that I attended at Northern Film and Media last week. I doubt that I shall be getting anything commissioned any time soon, or indeed ever, but you never know - it's an interesting, if slightly lonely, hobby and I hope to learn a lot from it over the next few years...