Chris
Cooper talks to writer and director Adrian Mead about his varied career
path and his first feature length film, Night People, which
follows a disperate selection of nocturnal Edinburgh folk through one
eventful night.
Hairdresser,
Bouncer, writer, director. An interesting Chain Of Events.
I
lived and worked in New York for years and decided to come to Edinburgh
to train as a criminal psychologist. I signed up to an access course
and while I was in Edinburgh met some students who (laughs) wanted a
stuntman. They couldn’t get one and asked me because I was a bouncer.
I was also the only one they knew who owned a suit. So I did that, loved
it and thought, “yes, this is for me”. I was 33 years old
and worked days as a hairdresser and nights in an Edinburgh night club
to save up about ten grand to put myself through film school.
While I was saving, people I knew would say to me, “Make a film
rather than going to film school. You’ll learn everything you
need about making a film from actually making one”.
When I’d saved the money, I went to New York to make a short film,
“New York Diary” which was shown at The EIFF and also won
an award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.
So
would your advice be to make a film rather than to attend film school?
I’d
say it’s a matter of do what’s best for you.
For me making the film has worked out best but there are many other
people, who’ve succeeded, and feel that film school was definitely
right for them.
It’s strange because a film course isn’t about getting a
qualification. It’s about getting practical film making experience
and learning from people who make films.
Because I didn’t go to film school I’d phone people in the
industry, working screenwriters, and just ask them for help, maybe bribe
them with a few beers. They are all very helpful and approachable people
who do genuinely want people to do well in this industry.
I spoke to one guy who helped me a lot. He said, “If you want
to succeed, you have to have a strategy”. I devised a strategy
and stuck to it.
I’ve even been teaching some part time classes and it’s
not about telling them how to write or how to make a film. It’s
helping them know what they want to do and how to go about doing it.
Any
advice for people who do choose film school?
My
advice would be to do the course. By that I mean actually do the course,
go to everything. There might be a day where a director of photography
comes in to do a class for example and you miss it. That class might
have been the most important and careeer defining class of your career.
Go to everything and learn everything because you don’t know how
valuable missing something might turn out to be.
Do the course, don’t just let the course happen to you.
Night
People is like a series of plays using a lot of dialogue and it
works so it’s obviously very well observed.
Yeah, you have to work hard on the dialogue and if people don’t
notice it’s bad then it must be OK.
You meet a lot of people working in a hairdressers and at night as a
doorman and you get used to the way different people talk and a feel
for different characters.
It was also interesting because once the clubs close at night and people
go home the city becomes very quiet.
It’s the few characters that are left that interests me.
These stories were all about people faced with a life changing event,
drawn out over the course of an entire night and trying to find a solution
by dawn the next day.
How
long did it take you to get from wanting to make a film to making a
film?
As
a screenwriter people always tell you your first five scripts are for
the bin. I was very lucky because I secured an agent with my first spec
script.
I wrote for television as a screenwriter and I also wrote my own stuff.
Everyone always thinks to be a screenwriter you can just write films
and make them but it’s not that simple. Writing for television
is a great way of paying the mortgage. It’s a great living but,
of course, you always need to be writing your own stuff too.
With Night People, we applied to a Scottish Screen scheme which
meant it had to be done very quickly.
There are a series of stages after having your application accepted,
writing the script, developing the script and finally making the film.
We had to have it in by the end of spring so it could be screened in
the EIFF and we were furiously scrambling around trying to get things
going at Christmas. The problem we had was that at Christmas literally
everything shuts down so we had even less time than we initially thought.
We were dashing around theatre groups trying to find actors as late
as February and the film had to be finished a couple of months later.
The shooting was pretty quick, we shot the film over 23 days and nights
and I was thrilled at the acting talent we had found.
Most, if not all, of the actors have found work after Night People
and as a director that’s very satisfying.
Do
you prefer writing or directing?
I
love them both but the odd thing is that writing can be a very solitary
occupation whereas directing is the total opposite and you have to be
there for people and organise what to do. The actors make is easier
for me as a director and for the film to work you have to really respect
what they can do.
What
are you working on now?
I’m
always writing and I tend to have a few things on the go at once. I’m
currently working on a feature as a writer for another director and
I’m also writing a two part episode of Waking The Dead.
Also, Claire (Meade – producer) and I are still working with Night
People because we chose to self distribute the film and look at
where we can get screenings. So far it’s gone very well.
Night
People
Review
