Mostly Brutal is your second feature film that you shot in America. So why America?
Because I haven’t been able to do it here, I think the attitude is different. I’m lucky enough to have friends pretty much everywhere, so I see the pros and cons of most cities I’d want to live in. London still has the best balance for me, but I can get more energy from people in New York than I can here.
We’re very negative over here. When I’m trying to make something, the first response is often all the reasons I can’t do it — how much it’s going to cost, why it won’t work, what I’d need. It’s got to the point where people seem to have lost the ability to imagine anything outside the commercial world.
I’ll get people saying, “Oh, I want to make a DIY short film like yours.” And I’m thinking, Why are you calling it DIY? The only thing DIY about it is that the lighting isn’t the lighting you were taught at film school. The performances aren’t DIY. The script isn’t DIY.
Then I’ll see these beautifully lit short films that cost £30, £40, £50 grand with a crew of 30 plus— and the actual filmmaking is DIY. The script is DIY. The ideas are DIY. They’ve spent all the money making it look expensive and nothing making it interesting or anything which feels unique to them.
I see some incredibly good-looking films these days, but they’re boring as fuck.
And the independent films that get pushed the most seem to be relentlessly depressing. There’s not much that’s funny anymore. It’s just trauma. Trauma, beautifully shot.
The world is literally on fire. Everything feels hopeless. I just needed something funny. I needed to run around with my friends, have them yell at each other, and watch them act out some bizarre, completely ridiculous script.
That’s what I needed to make. And, honestly, that felt like a pretty good reason to do it.
I thought you purposely made it, in quotes, “un-cinematic.”
Yeah, I did. I’d spent three years developing a TV show through a studio system. It was structured, even though the people around me were great and let my writing go for it.
But I wanted to make my own little punk album. Get a group of friends together, do some little gigs, hand-draw the cover, make a fanzine. Six tracks. When you look back, that’s the best time of your life.
I don’t make music, so this was as close as I could get to making the music I would make if I were a musician.
I knew the edit style when I was writing it. That’s partly why I called it Mostly Brutal. The subject matter is brutal, but so is the style. It’s jumpy and chaotic. The chaos is supposed to be there.
Just before filming, I had Slag, Slates, Etc. by The Fall going through my head. That was the tone. That and the first Raincoats album.
I went out there specifically not targeting anyone other than people I actually like hanging out with. That was it.
Production companies will pay for directors to make shorts because it makes sense for how they get commercials. I understand that. But I come from painting. If I have an idea, I paint it. Film is the same for me.
It’s been my entire career. If I have an idea, I have to make it. I’ve got to get it out of my system and most of the time it’s not based on commercial reasons.
And this was one of those things. I just don’t care anymore. I’ve got a kid, and I’m lucky enough to be able to say I don’t have an entire career of biscuit commercials — although my first biscuit commercial did pay for my first feature.
My track record is good. But more than anything, I want my kid to know, when I’m gone, that you can build a pretty good life by running around with your friends and making whatever you can with whatever you’ve got.
This group of people are like your band. Kat Clements was part of Goldbricks in Bloom too?
She’s my producing partner for the features. We have our little production company called Constance Fry, and we started that with Goldbricks In Bloom. For Mostly Brutal, we partnered up again and she’s in it, but she also produced it with me. I’ve lost count how much stuff we’ve done together. She’s very much the reason I was able to make this film.
Tell me about the French films. I love them.
I started out doing French films because a French production company wanted to take me on and I said, “Well, I write comedy and I don’t speak French, so I’m not sure what you can do with me.” They went, “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry about that.”
Then I won my first commercial and said, “Let me write a short for next week. When I’m in Paris, we’ll just make a short film in a day.” So we did Odile and Michel. I wrote it so it would have to be subtitled. There was a reason for the subtitles.
The way I direct in a language that isn’t my own has changed over the years. At the beginning it was very precise because I also edit them, which is strange when you don’t speak the language. But the more you listen to it, the more you hear the rhythms of it.
I was like, “Well, I’m in France. Why would they be speaking English?” French films are why I make films. Also maybe I’m just a snob and thought French sounded cooler.
Why limit yourself to one language?
And those calls with your producer on Instagram — how real are they?
Really real. He’s my actual EP in LA, and they’re mostly based on stuff that actually happened in real life.
Obviously some stuff is embellished — no one’s asked me to film gorillas. But pretty much most of the other stuff is real. Occasionally I’ll make things seem a bit more absurd, but even some of the absurd stuff is really real.
I remember I was up against this guy who’d just done some big action movie and I was thinking, “Why the fuck am I in this pitch? I would choose the other guy.”
I think loads of people resonate with it because they’ve all been in the same situation. It’s a good way to vent.
Just talking generally, do the ideas arrive as stories, characters, lines of dialogue or just a strange situation? Are you constantly observing things?
I’m an only child, so I spent a lot of time observing. And I’m from an era when kids just had to shut up and listen to adults.
Would you be in your parents’ hairdressing salons quite a bit?
Yeah, it was all from salons because people talk differently in hair salons. You have your initial, “Hello, how’s it going?” And if you’re in there for a long time, you forget you’re in a public place.
You hear the shifts in tone. I’m not talking about the stories, but you hear the pattern shifts, you hear the beat shifts, you hear someone’s guard drop. I think that makes you understand people more.
And I think people don’t think I’m listening. I seem quite slow, quite lethargic but my work output is pretty intense. I only put my energy into the things I want to do.
What about pitching for commercials?
In the UK I’m at Rogue. I have my consistent clients, but I also have another career. It’s not the only thing that I do. Surprisingly I actually quite like pitching.
Do people select you because you’re coming up with creative ideas as well? The Answear one for instance?
You picked a very interesting subject there.
When that came in, it was a totally different concept. We filmed and edited a totally different concept. But when I was shooting it, there were a bunch of scenes I really liked and I thought, “I don’t want this to be one of those jobs that I just have to hide.”
There’s a few of those where you go in with the best intentions, but then they get torn apart by a group of people who are too scared to have an opinion. They all bounce off each other and you just get nothing. It’s a very watered-down version.
While we were editing it, I thought, “I’m just going to do the call loosely based on what the calls were.” That way I got to keep the visuals. It was a last-minute concept shift.
I just did it myself and put it out. Luckily for me, it got everywhere. It was one of the most viewed things I’ve ever put out, which I wasn’t expecting.
I think I used to get brought in to develop the idea more. Most of the time now the concepts are brought because the agencies have spent months developing a concept and gaining the brand’s trust. I’m not going to come in and shred it all.
I can offer different approaches or ways of shooting it. I usually get involved in humour, where I can help push that in ways that maybe a non-director hasn’t thought about.
You seem slightly outside the conventional commercial-director world. Is that fair?
I never really did music videos. I did some, but I never liked them unless they were for friends. I think this held me back early on.
I don’t think my work has the look that makes the regular commercial person feel like, “This is a regular commercial kind of thing.” But the creative directors tend to get my work.
Maybe I just don’t come across as one of those directors who really love commercials. The one’s who fucking love it. And all their work is centred around getting a Christmas commercial or something like that.
Do you think the lack of creativity at the moment is down to AI?
No. I think it happened during Covid.
Agencies were scared of losing their clients because there wasn’t as much money, so they started saying yes to everything with no pushback. During Covid they were agreeing to every single demand because they were so scared of losing the client. Post-Covid, the client got used to that. But you need experience to be able to push back in the right way, and a lot of those people lost their jobs in that period.
Was that particularly important with Mostly Brutal?
A really good friend of mine, who’s a producer, saw an early cut and said, “Let me give you some notes.” I was like, “You can, but I truly don’t care.”
If I have an exhibition, no one’s ever come up to me and said, “You should paint a flower in the top right-hand corner.” So why is it different?
If I can’t do the thing I want to do when I’ve got no money, what do you think I’m going to do when someone’s giving me a million dollars, or half a million dollars, or even 50 grand?
The rule about Mostly Brutal, the way we cast it and got everyone involved, was if you had any hesitancy, you just weren’t in it. That was it. Because you’re not paying anyone, so you have to be respectful to the people you’re working with.
You mentioned doing work for George Harrison and the Harrison family. Is that how the Beatles animation came about?
I’ve been doing bits of stuff for George that no one really knows about. If you go to All Things Must Pass remastered on Spotify, you get the canvases. I’ve done pretty much all the ones for that album.
That’s how the Beatles thing came about. I only had six days to make the Beatles animation. They’d already made something that didn’t quite work the way they wanted it to work. I was waiting for the approval to say, “Start now.” Then I messaged Dhani and Olivia and said, “Let me know when you want me to start.” They said, “No, no, just send me today what you’ve done.”
By that point I only had six days, and I just had the kid, so I had a baby in the house. It was boiling hot. Six days to do that whole animation for the full video.
I’ve always loved The Beatles. I was hyped to do it. I just wish I’d had more time.
I’ve done some things which no one will ever know, but certain people do, and that’s what counts, I guess.
When did you make Nobody Needed, the AI film?
It started during Covid, just after Covid, when AI was still early. Someone said, “We should make a short film because AI can handle the voices, we can shoot it with AI, AI’s pretty good with scripts.”
And I said, “Have you ever made a film before? Because you’re cutting out everything that’s fun.”
I waited years, and then I got my friend Robin, who I think is one of the funniest people ever. She’s incredible. I wrote the whole thing for her based on AI taking everything over because I knew she could handle that.
I got told, “You could just keep this in the boardroom.” And I said, “Yeah, I could. It’d be funny. It’d be a good little funny piece of content.”
But I wanted to let her leave the boardroom and have the conversation at the end. I let Cassavetes do the talking to remind people these are just films.
We can have a good life with our friends making these things. Even if you’re making a sad film, it’s fun on set. We’re not working in a pit.
Margaret and Tim seem to be part of your band too.
Massively. I think I write Maggie the most like me. There are elements of me in all the characters, but with Maggie, I probably write closest to how I’d actually behave in that situation.
Although Tim has literally played versions of me in my films, so maybe, as I’m saying this, I’m having some kind of awakening in a therapy session.
With the short films and your mates, how does the process work? Do you come up with an idea and say, “Okay, let’s do this”?
I’m like a really friendly dictator. I’m the friendliest dictator you can imagine. I come up with the concept, I write the script, I get everyone together, and then they do what’s on the paper. That’s it.
But I mostly write for my friends, so there’s a difference. Often I don’t even know if it’s a male or female because I don’t really tend to write that way. You could mix-match pretty much most of my characters. It doesn’t matter. It’s just whatever I think is funny and whoever I think can land that kind of joke.
With Zosia, I know exactly how she speaks and where she’s going to be funniest. She can even work in the background like a soundtrack, building this level of chaos. She understood where to fill in the gaps in Mostly Brutal — where to jump into these people’s conversations and make the scene feel more chaotic than it actually is.
Kat, I wrote sections of dialogue for her. She doesn’t act professionally, but I just knew she could handle it. She tells stories like this in real life in regular conversation.
Vinny is one of my closest friends in New York and one of the funniest people I know. He’s one of the few people I can’t write for because he comes out with stuff that I can’t come out with. But I know I can set scenarios for him to play in.
If it’s a bigger project, I get everyone together for a table read.
For Mostly Brutal I said, “There’s not one of you on this call that I wouldn’t trust. So you can all trust each other. If anyone feels silly or whatever, it doesn’t matter because you’re with the right group of people.” You could see that trust between everyone develop very quickly.
The table read is the first moment where everyone goes, “All right, we can do this.” Then you pray everyone can be on the right schedule. That’s the hardest thing when you’re working for nothing or very little.
The group scenes were shot in five days, we shot everything in seven days. We wrapped a day early.
Then I sit with all the rushes and cut it. Patrick Rowland does all my sound work, Jack McGinnty has been my colourist for 15, 16 years, and Jose Saudinos does a lot of my musical compositions. Same group of collaborators.
The Michelin film was much slicker. Was that a completely different process?
Similar process in terms of attitude to performances but this was a commercial which came through BETC in Paris. I had loads of fun with that. We built the whole kitchen. I got to play with the bigger toys, camera moves and I had a much bigger budget to work with.
And the commercial work enables the other films?
Yeah. For one commercial I can make four or five of my own things.
So what’s coming up next?
My aim was to make five features over the next few years. We started the next one already in London. Let’s see.
Do you spend much time talking to other directors about filmmaking?
I like talking to people who don’t do what I do. I don’t really have many director friends. I can only think of a couple in my closest circle.
I want to know about stuff I have no idea about. My kid’s friend’s dad is in chambers and he tells me all about the Old Bailey. I’m like, “How does that work?”
It’s really boring talking to another director about making a film. Just fucking make the film.
Don’t talk about, “I’ve got this idea for a short film. I’ve just got to raise funds.” Just make the fucking thing.
Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares.
Just make it for you. Just make it.
