The short film Cashback was nominated for an academy award. What made you decide to turn it into a feature length film?

It was the success of the film festivals during the 2004 period. I went to these festivals, saw the film play and had a lot of people come up to me afterwards and say, I really liked the short, I thought Ben was a great character and I loved the look of it. The more I heard this the more I thought maybe there’s a market for this to be turned into a feature film. I think for the rest of that year I was thinking about it. I was thinking: If I was going to turn it into a feature film, how could I do it. The short was actually pretty self contained, it had a beginning, middle and an end. So it was like, how do I get back in there and open it back up? When I fist started saying I’m thinking of expanding it people said, what you’re just going to shoot what you’ve got but make it 90 minutes? It won’t work. It’ll be too long and slow. So I started thinking more and more about this and then I started to think if I was going to turn it into a feature film, would I reshoot what I’ve done? I thought, well no because that’s what everyone seems to like, and I wouldn’t change anything, so it’s probably a question of adding to it.

Therefore what I’ve got is two things that you don’t normally have when writing a script… the pace of the film which is normally dictated by the director and the editor. I had that already, so I knew what pace the script would need to be written in. It would have to carry on the same way that the short has, i.e. it has a lot of seamless transitions, we’re going to need more of them, a lot of back and forth in time, we’re going to need more of them and an overall arc. So Ben’s working in a supermarket, why is he working in a supermarket and what’s going to happen to him?

And the other thing that you don’t have when you’re writing a script is your characters. You write them as a writer but it’s at the casting stage when faces start getting put to names and then those faces start developing the internal workings of their character. They were already there for me in the short so I knew how these people were going to react. It was just a question of say the middle part of the film, writing scenes where we could put the characters in interesting situations that would be amusing. Or have more development for us as a story to find out where it was all going. But I knew where the characters were, it was just a question of putting them up a tree and throwing rocks at them.

What would you say where some of the challenges of opening up the short? Was it mostly about story or were there any technical issues like matching up the film?

We were going to go back and add to this short two years later, so there is a lot of technical challenges there, but it’s also a testament to how malleable film can be. A lot of people who know the short said to me, I don’t understand where did the short start and end again? Which was a compliment in the sense that [the short] embedded itself into the feature without sticking out like a sore thumb. We were very conscious of that.

I mean obviously you’ve got the short for a great framework for continuity. So you go back, watch the short and you have all the same haircuts yeah? The biggest problem is trying to get all the cast back at the same time and getting them all in the same place at the same date… The first time that they were all available was [in] seven weeks and I hadn’t written the script at that point. So if it was going to get made, we had to go really quick. I had to write the script within seven days for us to have it out for them (the actors) to read, then for us to send the script to financiers to see if we could get some money to actually shoot it. Yeah, from writing the script to actually shooting it was seven weeks.

Was funding a challenge then?

It was a big challenge because I had twenty minutes which was the short film. So if one page represents one minute of film, I needed to write 70 pages. So I wrote 10 pages a day for seven days that left us with six weeks before the start date. So we had six weeks to go and get some money and in actual fact, we didn’t get a lot of support from a lot of financial companies that were promising to help. We ended up financing it through private money. By the time we turned up on the first day, we secured just enough money to physically shoot the film. There wasn’t enough money at that point to do post or edit. Which is a very dangerous way of doing it because you might never even get anymore money at that point. People (investors) are going to want to see the rushes at that point and if they don’t like the rushes then you might have a problem getting any finishing funds. And I’ll have to go back and do a lots of work to try to finance it myself. But at least we’d have the film in the can. So we just said, let’s get it in the can and then take it from there. Luckily, people saw the rushes, liked them and we managed to get the rest of the financing, so we were able to then go into edit and do the post and the music.

It sounds like the clock was really beating down on you.

Yeah. Yeah there was a few sleepless nights. And [you know] the golden rule, Never spend your own money? If this didn’t work, I was going to lose my house. I remortgaged my house for this, so it was a big gamble. I remember having a good chat with my Dad and he said, you know I don’t think you should’ve done that, because you could lose your house. And I said, Yeah but you know what Dad, I came to London 15 years ago with absolutely nothing… I can always come back. At least I would’ve had a shot at my dream. You know what I mean? I could keep my house but not have my dream? So it was a gamble, but luckily one that paid off because we screened the film and sold it.

We spoke before about your experience as a fashion photo-grapher… What was it that turned you on to filmmaking?

I think I was always a frustrated filmmaker who worked in the medium of photography… I think these days it’s become easier to become a filmmaker because with the invention of high def or home video or DV cameras. If you’ve got an idea for a story, you can pretty much go and shoot it. Whereas fifteen or twenty years ago people weren’t into looking at home video films. And I guess I have expensive tastes as well and I thought well if you’re going to do it, you should do it properly and it’s going to be difficult for me to do it at a young age and talk people into giving me money to make feature films. So I thought one way of getting into the medium would be to do photography. I’ve had a great love of photography since a very young age of eleven. I became a fashion photographer in 1994 or 1995 and a lot of my fashion photography was lit very much like a film still. They were almost film stills for a movie I hadn’t made. For me, it always felt like at one point I’ll be able to cross over and do film. I started toying with the idea of doing pop videos and then commercials and then I did my first short film and then Cashback was my second short film. I think the two mediums are obviously very different. One you’re dealing with a point where you work to a fraction of a second and at the top of that pyramid is a still photograph. Whereas [with] film you’re dealing with a journey from A to B which is an expanse of time or an experience that you present and it has the added sense of sound which you don’t have from stills. I’m very obsessed with that whole aspect of moviemaking.

So you really enjoyed finding music for the film?

Yeah, it’s the lovely part of filmmaking. It’s like you’re teaching your kid to talk… It’s the only time really that I was allowed to second guess myself because the schedule for the feature film was at such a pace. We shot it in 20 days so we were running and gunning. At the end of it, you’ve got this thing that you edit and then you can spend the time with the sound design. I spent a lot of time looking at other movies with my sound designer and coming up with sounds for the film that I thought I liked. It’s a nice bubble to be in when you’re putting all that sound together.

When I’m writing the script I’m very aware of the sound of the film. Often in my scripts I talk about the sound of whatever we’re watching. So when I’m writing, I’m visualizing and then translating the visuals into words for other people to go and read. Oh, that’s all a bit backwards but that’s kind of how it is.

Were you picking out music while you were writing?

I had what I called a bag of goodies (temp tracks) that we put on the film when we finished it. But often when you have an idea for temp tracks, when you actually put it up to picture sometimes it doesn’t work. In fact most of the time it doesn’t work. You get the idea of what it’s supposed to be saying but it’s not quite right. So then there’s the whole process of replacing it or trying to find other stuff. Then sometimes the music you really love and you really want you just can’t have. It’s too expensive [so] you can’t have it. So there’s that whole tantrum throwing aspect that you do for a few weeks and then you come to terms with it and you go ok what else can we use. So then you go back and you do it again.

There were some great transitions in the film. Especially the scene where Ben’s on the phone with his ex-girlfriend and when he hangs up, you see him kind of falling away from the phone into his bed all in one shot.

I’m glad you asked my that actually because to be honest with you, you’re the first person that’s actually picked that up in any of the interviews that I’ve done, and it’s the bit I’m most proud of in the film!

It’s one of those shots that if you’re technically minded you suddenly realize what’s happened. You’re aware of it. If you’re not, it doesn’t matter but at the same time it says the same thing, it’s the falling point of Bens character. He’s falling in to the hole of his character. I wanted [the transition] to represent that but also at the same time I want the shot to be one of those shots that if you were technical minded you’d look at it and go, wow that’s an interesting shot. In actual fact, out of the twenty days that we had for the whole shooting of the movie that one particular shot took one day of that schedule. So it was a very, intricate planned shot and I was absolutely adamant it had to all be done in-camera. No cgi.

For me it went hand in hand with a lot of the transitions that you just mentioned. The seamless transitions between the past and the present of the story or even the imagined. I think very much so, filmmakers have always tried new ways of doing a flashbacks. Whether it's a whiteout or a blurry you know you can name all the tricks in the book. I was trying to think how could we [do it] because the film is a constant stream of Ben’s consciousness. So I wanted the flashbacks to have that feeling of continual stream of consciousness… that you’re maybe not aware that you’re being taken back in time but you are. So they were done so that all the camera shots were done with slow tracks from one scene to a past scene in one seamless edit. For me it felt like the best way of going back and forth in time.

So there wasn’t any motion control or anything like that huh?

No we didn’t have the budget for motion control. I wish! (laughs) Just the old fashioned way of doing stuff. Even the end scene when they run out in the snow, originally my idea for that was to shoot it all in-camera and use sheets of glass where you would paint snowflakes on the sheets of glass and shoot as they were walking through the sheets of glass. Now that’s actually a very doable way of doing it. The production designer did tests with models and sheets of glass and showed with a little DV camera that it could work.

So cut to the production meeting, we find that because we’re shooting the movie in the middle of summer, in actual fact, the shortest night of summer was one night on either side of the night we were supposed to shoot the night-time snow scene. Now in England it gets dark at 11pm and then it gets light at 3am. So that gives us four hours of night-time and we only had one night to shoot the scene. So there was going to be no way of us being able to set all that glass up and shoot, I think it was five shots that the end sequence makes up, there was going to be now way we were going to be able to shoot five shots in four hours with that intricate… and we’re talking cranes hanging sheets of glass.

So in the end we had to push that over to the cgi department and it was one of the expenditures that we had to find for the movie. But they came and mapped out the whole area that we shot stuff in and they basically cgi-ed all the snow in. I gave them such a hard time. I mean I threw so many of those shots back because the one thing I hate about cgi is that you see it. You can see when it’s being used… That took the longest amount of time as far as the cgi stuff.

There was some other little cgi stuff that we ended up doing… For instance one of the girls in the short, she had the perfect body but she had laser treatment on her pubic hair. So she was like, shaved. It was one of the things that sort of peeved me about the whole short because I wanted it to be quite naturalistic and I wanted her to have pubic hair. Also it has a more retro feeling when there’s pubic hair. There all sorts of connotations towards modern day pornography where the girls shave themselves so I didn't want that. So one of the things I got the cgi boys to do was to go back to those shots with the naked girls and digitally put on pubic hair and again it was another one [of those times] where I kept saying, I think you can do better. The pubic hair’s moving, it looks like she’s got a pet or something! (laughs)

How do you think your photographer’s eye affected the rest of the film?

Well they say a films never finished it’s merely ripped from your fingers and in a sense this was[too]. There’s a certain point where you go, I can’t work on that anymore I have to let that go. A couple of times the cgi boys had done stuff and they just said, we’re not going to get any better than that. And you have to take it on face value and accept the work as it being finished. But obviously I’m a stickler for detail and so at some point you have to put on your producer hat on and say, yeah you’re going to have to live with that one!

Would you say that’s the thing that you learned the most while making the film?

Yeah. I guess. I think they say that art is knowing when to stop. You know and I think coming from that background and especially with the experience that I had on retouching images. You know when you can get better and you instinctively know when it’s not right. So you are applying the same principles to your film, but also you’re hoping that you’re starting off with a good idea to begin with. Because cgi doesn’t replace bad ideas. It doesn’t matter how hard you try it, if the idea was weak in the beginning and you’re holding on to it then there’s a problem. But I think at the end of the day Cashback’s very much a small budget film and I hope people see it with the same kind of energy that we made it with. I mean it’s not high art, it’s just a fun movie. It’s the sort of movie that I’d probably want to go and see. I kept to that all the time. It’s a sweet little movie and it’s got some visual moments and it’s got some poignant moments, hopefully some funny moments and at the end of the day hopefully everyone will identify with it on some level.

What kind of advice would you give to new filmmakers working on their first feature?

I’m starting to be aware now that there’s a certain element of ignorance that you have, which is actual bliss, when you’re making your first film. It’s a nice thing because you’re not aware of too much. I think that after you’ve made your third of fourth movie, I think you’re aware of a certain thing that you’re not aware of when you’re making your first film and I think that ignorance gives you strength in a weird way. They say, ignorance is bliss and it is! Because there can be an enormous amount of pressure on you as a filmmaker. When you’ve got certain things to live up to or certain budgets… I was very lucky that the film was very contained and very personal. I didn’t have too much interference and we put it in the can for not a lot of money.

I think you’ve just got to be fearless… Get as many people as you can that are just going to help you, so that you can point a camera and tell your story because I think that’s what’s important, not the budget. Oh yeah but these people have this amount of budget or they have these kinds of stars. You know, that doesn’t make a movie, the person with the idea and the drive to go and point the camera at something that will tell the idea in a form where people can go and see it… that’s the art form, that’s the end product. Not the budget, not the stars, not the location. You do what you can, you shoot what you can and you make best with what you have. That’s definitely what I did with Cashback. Yeah I look at it and go, god I wish we had more time there or god it would be nice to have a crane shot there or a bigger budget there, but at the end of the day it is what it is. You’ve given birth to something and it goes out there and hopefully it makes some friends.

You said something in the Q & A that I thought was good advice. Somebody had asked you how you felt about your difficulty dealing with the US rating board to get distribution and you said you made the film that you wanted to make and you can’t worry about those things during production.

You can’t. You make the film that you believe in. You make the film that you believe that you want it to be and if that hits problems then it hits problems. I mean I remember meeting Adrian Lyne once and he said “I just found out today that Lolita’s not going to get distribution in America.” And he says, “I think it’s one of the most beautiful films that I’ve ever made.” I’ve thought about that in subsequent years and I just thought in the grand scheme of things the fact that it didn’t get distribution in America is not what’s important. What is important is Adrian Lyne made what he thought was his most beautiful film. It’s a sad day when people stop making films that they feel are beautiful just so that they can appease a marketplace.