THE 'GEEKS' GEEK OUT ABOUT THE MOVIES

'GEEKS' FILM CREDIT: Writer, director, creator / short and feature film

It may sound like a cliché, but the cinema has been in my life for as long as I can remember. Ever since I charged up and down the aisles, zapping my invisible blaster throughout RETURN OF THE JEDI, annoying dozens of avid STAR WARS fans, I’ve been in love with the magic, the presence, and the stoic celebration of what the movie theater represents. To be able to sit in a red throned seat, to watch those curtains draw back gracefully, the lights dim, and to feel the energy of a room full of people waiting to be entertained, moved, and distracted. Waiting to be a part of something both personal and yet wholly universal. To be told stories.

I’ve been desperate my whole life to know that feeling from the other side. To be seated one day in a room of strangers ready to judge my own stories. Ready to tear them apart, to challenge, or perhaps, just for a moment, to be distracted and affected. And perhaps, just perhaps, for one single ticket holder to feel a little less alone when they exit. As if they have found a friend. Someone to hold hands with on the way out.

There have been more films than I can name that have affected me in such a way, but two in particular stand out as turning points in my life. Movies that changed my path in dramatic ways. And surprisingly, neither were ones I saw alone (which, I find, is usually the easiest way to be affected in the cinema).

The first was back at the tail-end of 1995 while holidaying with my father in Zermatt, Switzerland. They have a wonderful art cinema there, which still stands to this day (albeit in a slightly modernized form). Nowadays I’ve had the privilege of living in bustling cities and I'm quite used to the broad spectrum of luxurious and boutique-antique cinemas that Western fashion supports, but at the impressionable age of 15 I wasn’t aware of the joys a truly ornate theater could bring. Dark stairs leading down to a red lit bar. Large double doors opening to what I would now compare to a cabaret show room - dotted thin tables, red clothed lazy chairs, towering walls with sculpted pillars, a stage draped in a thicker, darker red cloth and a boastful chandelier, hanging triumphantly in the center of the room.

We were there to see a film that would change my life and would continue to this day to be in my top three titles of all-time. It was David Fincher’s SEVEN. I knew little about it at the time, save for the tantalizingly beautifully ugly teaser and the savvy poster with the seven sins crossed out one-by-one. I was nervous, excited, and slightly fearful. My anticipation was well placed. When the lights dimmed and the chandelier shuddered from its central place to fold away neatly to a side enclave, the curtains drew and those now iconic opening titles began to roll...I was enraptured. Completely absorbed and captured as if all my senses were held hostage by the mood, the enriched cinematography, the strange bitter sweet flavors and sounds of the completely unique world unraveling before my eyes.

I was, in fact, so engrossed that I failed to even notice until after that I was seated the whole time with my father on one side, and to my other - Anthony Hopkins and his mistress.

It was 15 years later, in 2010 that my other truly defining cinematic experience took place. From the age of 3 all I had wanted to do was direct. After the experience in Zermatt at 15 I had a renewed feverish passion and drive which was sadly bullied somewhat out of me during my teen years. I finally entered film school at the age of 19 a cripplingly shy, introspective daydreamer who couldn’t muster enough confidence to wrangle any peers into my obsessively passionate and ridiculously impossible projects.

Then, in 2010, at the age of 30, I attended a screening during a renowned London-based horror festival that I have attended every year for the past 11 save for one. The film was a micro-budget romance/sci-fi/road trip movie from a first time director, shot on prosumer gear with no script and a crew of five. It was called MONSTERS. And it changed my life.

I sat in the theater tired from the usual slew of mediocre to passable to horrendous and occasionally entertaining festival entries (28 films in 5 days can take its toll), but cautiously excited. I could not have been prepared for the experience I was about to encounter. MONSTERS, for me, is one of those incredibly rare films that you watch with your heart in your throat, riveted by the beauty and majesty of it all, while you curse the director for making the film you always wanted to make before you got the chance to.

But instead of being deterred by it, I felt immensely inspired. Getting to talk with the creator/director Gareth Edwards afterwards only filled me with more feverish excitement. He is, without a doubt, the nicest man I’ve ever met in the film industry and undoubtedly the most talented (I’m certain his follow-up, GODZILLA, will prove this to the world at large). I came out of the film and his inspirational speech and immediately spent all my savings on purchasing the same prosumer gear he used to make MONSTERS. I went off and made my first short, a wholly over-ambitious and flawed little film that I’m ashamed of now, but that opened enough doors for me to allow me to keep kidding myself I could be a director. And hopefully one day, one as confident and honest as Gareth.

I’ve been lucky enough to stay in contact with him via e-mail and the occasional press junket over the following years and his kind advice and support of my numerous projects keeps me on track, keeps me inspired, and keeps me feeling that there is hope.

I hope that one day I can indeed be sitting there in a cinema, as the lights go down, and the rustle of popcorn is momentarily self-consciously staggered. The curtains unsheath, the screen flickers and I can wait, with bated breath, to feel that energy - of a room about to put their faith in my film for 90mins. In the hope they can forget the world outside just for a single, tiny, brief moment. And they can feel a little less alone.