In 1998-99, while unemployed, I cobbled together my very first film - a silly 16mm stoner comedy short called Dole Scum, funded by the Prince’s Trust. It was based on an underground comic strip by the great Nigel Auchterlounie, and included music by Warp Records people, but the P.T. hated the end result, insinuating that I’d cheated them out of funding by pitching it as a worthwhile piece of social commentary when it clearly wasn’t.
Dole Scum didn’t exactly blow everyone’s skirts up, but I made it without a crew (armed with Robert Rodriguez’ inspiring Rebel without a Crew as my bible), on a 16mm clockwork Bolex camera that I had no idea how to use properly, and it amused the handful of non-PT people who saw it, so I decided to keep plugging away with film-making...
Tired of being skint, I got a job working the night shift for an evil firm of debt collectors and letter mailers (sorry, a ‘business process outsourcing company’), an outfit which gets paid lots of money to do inept things like *this*
To pass the time there and keep myself sane, I had a crack at writing something surreal, ambitious, and dark – something that might convey the dehumanising tedium of the business process outsourcing workplace, a film that would focus on a pompous arsehole protagonist (based on several of my superiors at the time), as well as something that would make good location use of the scuzzy concrete shit-tip that is Northampton.
A lot of the script material (such as it is, the plot’s a bit threadbare) came about while exploring the nether regions of Northampton on my own, taking pics of its mugger-friendly backstreets, smashed up cars, and abandoned workshops, while listening to electronica music by some very talented people from an online collective that I’d joined, called TEFOSAV (The Electronic Foundation Of Sound And Vision). I decided that this music (along with some specially composed material by the awesome Elleinad and Precenphix) would make a superb soundtrack, and that I’d build a film around the tracks I chose and the creepy locations I wandered around...
I figured it’d be very cheap and easy to have my paranoid yuppie-wannabe character – Alex DeMello - being chased around these locations by psychopaths working for his company superiors, to silence him from telling the world about some dodgy pictures he found in a folder stuffed behind a boardroom cabinet. This was a time when CCTV was becoming more prominent, so to ramp up the character’s paranoia and hysteria I included lots of references to hidden cameras, bugs, and malevolent watchers. He’s also a character who takes a lot of drugs and loses track of what’s real and what isn’t, which meant I could shoehorn in some random Lynchian weirdness.
It didn’t take long before I’d hammered out a draft I thought was filmable, so I cobbled together a few hundred quid, borrowed an office for auditions, and pulled together a largely inexperienced but enthusiastic cast and crew who responded to an impressive-sounding ad I posted on Shooting People, along with Damian, a fellow minion / cog from my office job.
Alex Demello was to be played by Seth Hardwick, a very pleasant and hard-working Brummie, who also kindly offered the use of his Sony PD100 for us to shoot the film on. Just before the main Autopilot shoot, we got permission to run amok in a C&A that was soon to close, where we made a daft little test film called ‘Shirtlifter’ – based on a small press comic strip by the amazing Ralph Kidson. Here it is, in all its glory...
With locations picked, action scenes storyboarded, and over-ambitious script downsized, we ran around shooting Autopilot over 6-7 weekends in Northampton, and then extra bits in Birmingham. We hit some snags, such as getting kicked out of a house because a bored, snitchy student told the landlord that we were trashing the place (we hadn’t), and being threatened by gypsies after they thought we were attacking their kids (who were watching our violent action sequence based around some car wrecks – cars that their dads had perhaps smashed up).
Apart from my piss-poor organisational skills and general inexperience hampering certain elements, things went pretty well. We shot a surprising amount of action-orientated stuff without anyone being killed or maimed, including chucking Damian into a reservoir with his hands tied, and filming Seth falling backwards off a car park roof.
I learned tons in the process - this was my film school. I’d learned fuck all on my BTEC Media course, and had no other training besides an ineffectual 2-day 16mm course at Panico, so was pleased that just getting out there and making my own movie had probably taught me more than any boring and expensive film school could.
I do regret not making things more pleasant for the hard-working cast and crew. Jimmy and Willy went the extra mile as car-wrecking psychos, Beki did a great job on make-up and set design (and co-produced some of my best shorts after that), and John the sound man was a sound man. As is often the way, I had very little money and couldn’t pay or feed them anything besides pizza and crisps. I was a bit surly at times, and almost purposefully disorganised. But I guess as film-making environments go, it wasn’t as bad as a short film I’d helped out on previously, in which the poncy director sat around on the front of a jeep wearing a bandana and got us to chase sheep around a field on the hottest day of the year without supplying any water. (I got sunstroke and quit the production).
The Autopilot edit was a long slog which took place over a year, on and off. I had no editing skills at that point, so brought in two very patient and hard-working people (Eddie Haselden and Anthony Bennett) to cut the 60-minute piece. The edit was built around the soundtrack, an experiment which didn’t really work as the resulting film is overlong and meandering for what is essentially a simple chase flick. There are some nice audio-visual sequences in there (buried amongst some self-indulgent wankery and clunky dialogue) and it has an effective ending. It’s also worth a watch for the TEFOSAV soundtrack and the commitment of Seth and his co-star Mr Buttons.
Also, if you like car parks and underpasses then you might pee your pants with excitement, as there’s plenty of those.
The finished film didn’t really screen anywhere besides Hoxton Hall in Hackney - a packed out showing, but the audience left looking perplexed and annoyed. Then in 2003 it screened at SciencePlusFiction Festival in Trieste, Italy, to an empty cinema - apart from a bickering Italian couple who wandered in halfway through, then left again a few minutes later. I did my first ever nervy Q&A with some other filmmakers in front of Alan Jones and Kim Newman, to whom I said I was going to try and get the budget back on a fruit machine win.
I felt a bit despondent that audiences hadn't taken to Autopilot and recognised my obvious genius. Did they just not get it? Did the film not blow their feeble minds? I deduced that it might take a while for the film to gain its inevitable cult following and be hailed as something or other. Years later, after I'd made more films, I came to the conclusion that audiences don't like to be bored or confused, and perhaps my film had done both.
So anyways, it’s been 10 years since I made it, I figured I’d finally throw it online for posterity, and it serves as a reminder to me that I’ve not made anything substantial in aeons, so I WILL make a proper feature film this year. Something where the audience hopefully won’t leave the cinema feeling perplexed and annoyed..
Many thanks to everyone who supported me on this and following efforts. :)
Achieve synergy. Here’s Autopilot >
Substance is not in the length my dear, but in the content; make something as bad as Autopilot for your next feature and I will [repeat] WILL take all physical evidence of it to the beach and burn it.
ReplyDeleteBut you won't though, will you? :D