1. What Eastenders taught me

I loved soap operas growing up. They get a bad rep sometimes, but clearly something about them resonates for millions of people. I thought they were wonderful... I’d get so wrapped up in the stories. But as I got older, the details began to feel un-lifelike. Art department, pacing… some of the dialogue and performances. There seemed to be this disconnect between the way humans behaved in real life and the way they behaved on TV.

2. Real humans

Later in my adolescence I saw shows like The Street and Clocking Off. They had these incredible British character actors in them and seemed to be endeavouring to portray real humans with real emotion. Looking back, that was a moment for me that probably planted some seed in my mind, though I didn’t know it at the time.

When I left Ipswich and moved to London, friends introduced me to independent and foreign cinema. I started watching films by directors like Mike Leigh, Claire Denis and Jafhar Panahi. They were exhilarating.

3. Getting out of the actors’ way

When I finally made my first short, ‘BEAT’, I had my first opportunity to strive for the kind of realism I’d been so excited by.

I’d lived in London for 7 years, and I was fascinated with the way the city worked like a living organism – with different moods that shift and turn like our own. I wanted to find a way to harness that feeling.

We shot a lot of the coverage on long lenses from the other side of the street, so that the film’s lead, Ben Whishaw, could act without being encumbered by the crew. It also meant that real people on the street would encounter him and react to him as a real person. As if he was just another part of the city.

4. Learning to love interruptions

The original motivation for shooting 'guerrilla-style' was the fact we had such tight budget. But it quickly became an integral part of the approach, regardless of money.

I like that it’s not about trying to craft and control everything, and instead allows reality do its thing with each take.

When you live in a big city like London, you’re constantly braced for some kind of spike in the frequency. Our approach seemed to reflect that. It allowed these unknown, unpredictable elements into the film.

5. Holding back

I made a short film called ‘WORK’, about a young woman who is assaulted on a bus. The film then examines how she carries that with her through the rest of her day. After getting off the bus, she heads to her shift as a waitress, and takes an order from a customer who’s clearly a bit of a bellend.

We didn’t tell him or the other actors at the table what had happened to her character that day. It created a lifelike dissonance between their two worlds. We’re so bad at understanding that other people don’t revolve around us - and that each stranger we meet is arriving at that moment with an entire complex history we can never fully comprehend.

6. Shooting chaos chaotically

I made a short film with Kano for his tracks ‘Trouble / Class of Deja’. It was about street violence, and Kano wanted one key sequence to unfold through footage shot entirely on mobile phones.

I was concerned that this approach could start to feel affected if we did it the wrong way. We started watching witness videos of similar events, and noticed that the most chilling footage was often (unsurprisingly) missing the actual event. You could feel the horror and the chaos reverberating around the attacks, rather than see the attacks themselves.

We gave mobile phones to our actors and extras playing ‘witnesses’. We turned the cameras on, but told them to react to what was happening emotionally, rather than with their phones. If that meant forgetting the camera, they forgot the camera. If they wanted to run, they ran. If they needed to drop the phone, they dropped it.

This meant that it was always feeling motivating the shot, rather than framing.

7. Laying plans and ditching them

Rather than ‘traditional’ scripts, I tend to work films up into a pretty dry Excel spreadsheet*. It’s essentially a ‘beat sheet’. It has basic information about who’s in each scene, where it’s taking place, and a brief description of what’s happening.

The idea is to work scenes up to a point where there is a defined broad structure, but the dialogue isn’t scripted, and neither is the blocking. We know we’re starting at A and will arrive at B, but how we get there is left open.

*WORK is an exception to this

8. Making it a conversation

It’s not that kind of LA comedy style, PURE improv. It’s not, ‘Okay, you’re in a doctors waiting room and a giraffe walks in – GO!’ and expecting a good scene to come (though that does sound quite good actually). It’s just about allowing enough room for nuance, unpredictability and realness.

Instead of doing lots of rehearsing, I’ll use the time I do have with the actors ahead of shooting to have a deeper conversation about their characters. If the actors are playing friends or family, I’ll also try to create time for them to just hang out and get to know one another. If the characters are strangers, then perhaps we’ll make sure they don’t meet until we’re rolling on take one. We did this a lot for Surge.

9. It’s a pain for everyone

It’s all very well me waxing lyrical about “method”. The word feels a bit grandiose in many ways - it’s just an approach that becomes slightly less messy and somewhat focused each time I make something. It relies on everyone to make it work. It cuts away the safety net for the actors, for instance, and it can be thrilling, but also stressful for them. It’s very physical for the DoP - we’ll light pretty 360 and try to be totally responsive to the actors, wherever they want to go. It’s mayhem for the 1st AD. I think the person it puts the most pressure on is actually the editor. There’s no traditional ‘coverage’ per se and continuity goes out the window somewhat. But if you are lucky enough to have someone like Amanda James on it, it can be very beautiful.

Somesuch