Week Two
June 29 - July 5, 2026.
This week the heatwave broke, and so I was able to be more productive in the edit suite. I received quarterly sales and royalty statements against my back catalogue - the numbers were disappointing, and led to a moment of self-doubt, followed by some reflections on my recent choices. I discovered the documentary & filmmaking community here on Substack, which was gratifying, and thought about where I might go after this film is completed. It’s a time of great uncertainty.
29.06.26
The heat has finally lifted. It’s still hot, just not third-circle-of-hell hot, which means life can approach normality, and I can aim for a productive week of work.
The weather broke in high drama - a huge thunderstorm over the weekend, and relief as the air thinned out. But, of course, heavy rain means sewage discharges into the sea, so no going anywhere near the beach, which meant that part of my daughter’s ninth birthday was cancelled, and of course, all the children were very disappointed.
We had a barbecue at home instead, and in a neat metaphorical twist, I found myself outside at 6am, trying to light the barbecue under an umbrella, while lightning strobed the skies, and rain beat down remorselessly.
Sunday, and yet another barbecue during what is, of course, barbecue season, but this time I was a guest. I got talking to a very interesting lawyer who asked me what I was up to at the moment; I explained that I had just exited my business, and I wasn’t yet sure. He looked at me like I was absolutely insane, fear in his eyes, as if proximity to me might pitch him into jeopardy, like I’m some sort of terrible oracle, spreading bad karma and cosmic ruin.
It gave me pause. Momentarily seeing your circumstances through someone else’s eyes can cause a kind of rupture in the way that you’re looking at things - my God, is something that seems natural and logical to me, objectively nuts? Am I living in a giant delusion, while careering recklessly towards oblivion?
He asked whether the exit was acrimonious (no, at least not from my side and not as far as I’m aware), and what plans I had to rescue myself from this dire turn. He was genuinely curious and asked me with good faith and generosity, and it proved to be a useful exchange. It’s good to be pulled out of the solipsism into which we can all sink from time to time, and re-evaluate my circumstances.
I reflected that the whole point about stepping out of my business after all these years is that I haven’t really stepped out of it at all. It was my business, it was something that I built. Yes, there were other people involved, there were joint resources, some infrastructure, existing revenue channels and a business plan but, fundamentally, I had to build it, run it day-to-day, identify sources of revenue and do all the work. And in that sense, nothing has changed. I haven’t gone from a paid employment to losing my job, I’m just ending one business in order to start another one; the truth of the matter is all that I’ve really given up is a particular business plan and some relationships.
But I’ve discarded a business plan which I felt would show diminishing returns, not just creatively, which was the prime motivation for me to leave, but also financially. The film business has become more and more difficult as independents are increasingly squeezed by the both the new cartel of streamers and the death throes of linear TV. I expect it to become more difficult, and I do not intend to be the frog ignoring that the water’s getting warmer. Just because you don’t know what the next thing is, it doesn’t mean the current thing is therefore worth sticking with.
There has to be the obscure, intermediate zone where the old dies so that the new can be born – that’s where I am, I don’t think it’s crazy. It changes nothing fundamental about the challenges that I’ve confronted my entire career, they all remain the same, they have just assumed a different incarnation.
I thought about it while looking at the sea this morning (glorious – clear, flat, horizon like a blade, glinting). Even when you are making a drastic change, there is much that remains the same, and it’s good to remind yourself that you’re not just flailing, pulled out to sea by the current. Most of us do have a boat, however small and leaky it might be, and a compass.
30.06.26
One of the most rewarding things about this project has been exercising old muscles that haven’t been exercised for a little while, and rediscovering old inspirations.
The COVID period was difficult because (at my former studio) we couldn’t produce. Most of our shoots took place overseas, and because of the restrictions on travel, because of the issues with securing insurance, because of the lockdowns, there were a couple of years during which we were unable to be in production.
From an economic standpoint, the situation wasn’t as damaging as it could have been. We’d released several new feature films just as the pandemic started, so we had movies coming to market at a time when everyone was at home looking for things to watch. The timing was a fluke, had the virus hit a few months earlier, we would have been in serious trouble, but, as it turned out, we were well placed to weather the initial phases of the pandemic.
As time wore on, the route back to production remained unclear. There were lots of conversations with distributors and other industry people; I went to Cannes, the first one after the world started to reopen, just to see how the land lay, and it was clear that things were shifting very fast.
While filmmaking remained impractical, we pivoted to finding other revenue sources: publishing, physical media sales, some ecommerce. And so there came to be a wide expanse of time in which I just didn’t make films.
As I make this one I am reminded that “it’s been a minute”, as our American cousins like to say.
After a long career and numberless projects, I’d always assumed that filmmaking is a business that I know so well that I can pick it up effortlessly at any time of my choosing. In fact, production had been so intensive running into the pandemic that the early stages of lockdown were a welcome chance to step back, re-evaluate, and maybe do something a bit different. But what I have found is that, no, it’s not effortless - like all muscles, if you don’t exercise them, they start to weaken.
Of course, all truisms have an inverse, and any muscle that you work very frequently soon starts to activate from habit and memory, which is a different form of weakness. It’s easy to fall into routine, patterns, reflexes which make the work easy to complete but which can also make it feel stale.
As I reawaken these muscles, I’m trying to be conscious of the risk of falling into old patterns and habits, rather than responding creatively to the material as I shape it. I can feel those muscles pulling me to do the same things that I’ve done in the past, and sometimes that may be with good reason, but I’m careful to ask myself whether those decisions really are the best ones, and not just the easy ones.
I’ve spent some time looking back at reference films, and refreshing myself on where I have found inspiration in the past, asking myself whether I’m thinking as creatively as I could be, albeit in the teeth of enormous limitations. Those limitations are definitely something that I have been grappling with this week.
One of the things I always find essential in post is to have a big screen on hand. If you are just looking at your film on a computer, you will not see it properly; you will not have the sense of it, the sense of its rhythm and feel. A couple of weeks ago, I felt that there was something wrong with a sequence that I was working on but I couldn’t quite place why. I reminded myself that I’ve known this principle for twenty years: I’m not seeing it properly. I went and bought myself a big new 4K display, watched the sequence, and spent the rest of the day completely recutting it. Once I pulled myself off the computer monitor and watched it on a proper screen, I could instantly see that it wasn’t right, wasn’t working.
That has been the experience of coming back to my core craft after “a minute”: the muscles ache, but in a good way.
01.07.26
This has been the week in which the limitations finally started to bite. I knew it would happen at some point.
When I started out on this film, I revisited some of the documentaries that I’ve admired in recent years, in particular Asif Kapadia’s work (Senna (2010), Amy (2015), Diego Maradona (2019)) and some of Alex Gibney’s films, which are a bit hit-and-miss, but the best of them are useful references. This was just about finding some inspiration, looking at well-constructed films and clarifying some of my own thoughts.
Like most documentaries, including my own back catalogue, Gibney’s work makes extensive use of on-screen interviews, which occupy a hell of a lot of screen time and reduce the need for other visual material – you just run the interviews and arrange a relatively light amount of b-roll and archive around them.
Asif takes the opposite approach: there are no on-screen interviews, the visuals are drawn exclusively from archive. Asif’s approach is much more difficult, and far more expensive; I found it incredibly inspiring.
I’ve written before about the concept behind the film I’m making, which is to try and achieve a kind of audio-visual poem where the primary driver of the story would be the audio track – voices and music - and the visual layer would float on top, impressionistic and abstracted.
When thinking about that visual layer, I naturally returned to Asif’s films. I remember first raising the potential of his technique back in my former company, and immediately hitting a wall of objections: it would require far too much archive, it would be prohibitively expensive, it would be impractical and time-consuming. Although at the time I could see the logic of those arguments, I also felt that you don’t really know until you try, and as a creative I want to stretch myself, and explore new ideas, rather than immediately dismissing them out of hand. That type of siloed thinking ultimately contributed to my decision to leave the company.
But those objections were voiced in the context of having large accounts with the archive agencies, with wide access and researchers on hand. Whereas I’m now trying to apply this idea when there are maximum limitations, and when something that was once deemed to be too expensive, too impractical, too time-consuming now has no money, few practical resources, no time-saving assistants.
And I’m well aware that I’m not going to be able to pull off anything even barely close to what Asif achieves - he marshals enormous resources, Maradona had over five hundred hours of archive, a massive budget, a team of archive researchers and, naturally, you see it on-screen. In fact, when he was making Amy, his team reached out to me, because they thought some of my previous work may be of use and wanted to explore licensing, so I got some sense of the scale of his production.
What’s interesting about Asif’s use of archive is its coherence. He is able to obtain a whole sequence that someone has shot on Maradona for a news report in the 1970s or 80s, various angles, matched action, same light and lenses and so on, which enables him to construct visually consistent sequences which in turn produces a film that feels as coherent as it can be.
I’m dealing with material which is far more scattered and threadbare, most often single shots, so it will feel disjointed - more of a montage or collage – and even there I’m running up against limits in available archive. I’ve been dragging in a mix from libraries, public institutions, public records, and I’m relying heavily on public domain content. As I’ve mentioned previously, this is not a crime film, but there is a criminal justice angle to it, and so there’s been a lot from courts, sheriff’s departments, and other state agencies which are very slow to respond to requests.
So I’m struggling for pictures, having to think creatively of how I can overcome that issue, and finding myself filled with doubt as to whether this film is even going to work, doubt which I also need to overcome. I need to not become discouraged, I need to get to the end and see what the complete film looks and feels like, which was always the aim in the first place.
There was a point, a couple of weeks back, when I realised I was not going to have enough, and so I pivoted to building some animated sequences, rendered in a particular style which I think complements the thematic layer of the film. I’m optimistic that that might help solve problems as well as forming a genuinely compelling part of the visual register, but I’m also conscious that every time I hit a wall, I can’t just pull the animation chain as an all-purpose escape route – it adds a hell of a lot of work.
When I was first starting out amongst other young and passionate filmmakers, all of us trying to produce in constrained circumstances and without much experience, I would often hear critical problems dismissed with the phrase “we’ll fix it in post”. Now, I would always edit my own films and, as a consequence, I always had an advanced working knowledge of post. So when I’d hear “we’ll fix it in post” I always thought, “OK, how? How are you going to sort this issue out in post? You can’t just make this announcement and expect that the magic post fairy is going to fill the hole in your film. What is your detailed plan?” I developed a heightened awareness of that trap, and so on this film I am trying not to address every problem with “an animation sequence will sort it out!” – firstly, I don’t want this to turn into an animated film; secondly, I want the animations to earn their place, rather than act as some universal panacea which somehow avoids hard choices; and finally I don’t want get to the end and find that I have months of animating to do.
I’m continuing to try and work through this limitation crunch: more archive hunts, chasing up sources, thinking as creatively as possible, using abstract imagery, but trying to maintain a visual logic which runs through the film and aids its coherence.
I really don’t know whether any of this is going to work, or whether it’s a giant waste of time when I really need to be looking for income. But that was, in its way, the whole point of making the film in the first place – to find out. I’m going to try; both failure and success depend on that, so I’m never deterred by the prospect of failure.
02.07.26
Yesterday I received quarterly sales reports from my main distributor (I have catalogue with various distributors, but one major one). My studio was self-financed, didn’t work on commission, almost never entered into co-productions, and although we do have traditional sales agents and distribution (a topic for another day), our catalogue belongs exclusively to us, all the rights. Minus distribution cuts, all the revenues come to us.
I read yesterday’s statements and was immediately seized by anxiety. My runway to build something new may be shorter than I’d hoped. These royalties, and I think this will be familiar to those working in the commercial film space, have been declining precipitously for years. Amazon are one of the worst offenders, if not the worst, they pay a fraction of what they paid five years ago, even though the product remains the same and audiences are just as interested in it as they ever were.
I can see the underlying data; I can see the numbers that Amazon is driving in terms of watches, some of this is also T-VOD, it’s not just ads and subscriptions – some people are actually paying to watch our films, and yet what the producer, the rights-holder, ultimately ends up with is a pittance.
I first grasped this phenomenon about ten years back. We had a film which did very well - television all over the world, it keeps on running even now, routinely relicensed by one of the major European broadcasters, streaming worldwide. And I remember seeing the numbers back then, and being astonished both by the number of people who’d watched the film on Amazon (hundreds of thousands, into millions over time) and by what we received for it. It just looked like piracy and theft to me.
It seemed clear at that time that a cartel was forming (which has now formed), and that independent producers had no power to challenge the inequity of this, the only option was to swallow it. Today, the situation has degraded even further.
Whenever you embark on something new, it is often in the teeth of doubt and apprehension, your mind embraces any opportunity to tell you that you’re doing exactly the wrong thing – disastrous, foolish. Stephen Pressfield readers will recognise the resistance that attends any attempt to find your higher calling. And so looking at yesterday’s statements, I found myself asking “what have I done?”.
The films on these statements are commercial projects. The whole motivation behind leaving my company was that I no longer wanted to be focused on the commercial value of what I made – we’re talking some of the biggest subjects in the world here, subjects that people are searching for round the clock, which market and sell themselves; and yet the money that’s coming back from it is pathetic.
My internal voice berated me: “My god man! You’ve left this to try and do something less commercial? Are you insane? You have chosen to head into penury; your family is going to be out on the street. What twisted thinking could have polluted your mind so drastically?”
After regathering myself, I eventually drew precisely the opposite conclusion. I am not exchanging a comfortable situation for an uncomfortable one. These statements are telling the story of a struggling industry, and it’s been struggling for some time. If even the commercially orientated business looks uncommercial, then what’s the point of it? We are basically involved in a largely uncommercial industry, there’s got to be easier ways to make money.
Last year I went to the offices of one of the biggest YouTube channel networks there is. Several of our films, and one in particular, are the best performers on their channels, so they were keen to take the meeting. We came to discuss how we might capitalise on the success, and explore opportunities to grow the partnership. The top people in the organisation came into the meeting, and the first thing that one of them said was, “so, it’s not all bad news!”. Now, if someone you’ve never previously met in person, in opening a meeting to discuss recent successes, comes out with “it’s not all bad news”, that tells you, immediately, that it’s horrendous news. Something’s profoundly wrong here.
So the question that (re)asserted itself to me yesterday is whether I want to make something that’s uncommercial but which I’m passionate about, and feel strongly about, and is authentic to me. Or whether I want to make something designed to maximise revenue, and yet the revenues will be pretty paltry anyway?
I know that I asked and answered this question several years ago, and the objective facts are not going to change anytime soon. I am doing my own thing, but as far as where the revenue comes from… I return to it: there must be better ways to make money, but I don’t yet know what they are. I’m going to have to find out.
And so the anxiety dissipated. Thinking through the situation clarified for me that I am doing the right thing, I’m not crazy. It’s everything else that is mad, and it should have stopped before now.
03.07.26
Post-production continues slowly, slower than I’d like.
I’m getting a bit concerned about the number of animation sequences that I’m sketching in, potentially storing up a lot of work. I’ve been trying to be conscious about over-reliance on animation sequences, but the film’s calling for them; we’ll see how it shakes out.
I discovered the documentary and filmmaking community on Substack this week, and I’ve enjoyed reading through the posts. This one was a particular standout:
it’s instructive on the mechanics of YouTube, which is something that I’ve been thinking about. I have a bit of an ambivalent relationship with YouTube, I started on it early on - we built a channel in 2011 and spent about six weeks uploading a fair bit of content. But the returns were so paltry that we judged it to be a waste of time and dropped it almost immediately.
It was my initiative to give it a go, I’d heard from others that the brand new YouTube monetisation might be the future; I felt that was possible and I wanted to get into it. This was right at the start of YouTube monetisation and the strategies for how to build a successful channel remained unclear. I think we probably didn’t have exactly the right content, nor the right format, but it was a tremendous amount of work that seemed not to pay off and, fearing that it was a grand waste of time, we abandoned it.
In hindsight that was a mistake. I was up for persevering a bit longer, but I didn’t put up too much resistance when the suggestion came that we should drop it. I think part of the problem was that we went all-in to see whether, if we got a lot of content up quickly, we could find equally quick success. Once there wasn’t an instant payoff, and it wasn’t clear what the path would be to a stable return, it just seemed like a misallocation of resources.
It’s easy to say now, but we should have just kept it bubbling under on a much lighter schedule. As time wore on, and it became clear that YouTube was going to become increasingly important to filmmakers, we should have given it a second look. A frustration for me at this point is that that monetised channel still exists, doing nothing, but I don’t have access to it. Anything I build from here is going to have to be a clean channel and go through the threshold of watch hours and follower counts that’s required for monetisation. But them’s the breaks.
YouTube did eventually become one of the best performing platforms for our work, but our films go out on the big channels, not on our own channel. The advantage of that is that a large audience is already there and the channels get more favourable royalty rates from YouTube that we would be able to achieve ourselves – at least that’s what they claim. The type of films that we make could not be produced simply for YouTube, they take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; it just wouldn’t be economical if relying purely on YouTube revenues, it only works as an embellishment to all of the sales generated elsewhere - linear television, territory licences and streaming platforms.
So what might work on YouTube? The article returned me to that question, I still haven’t settled it in my own mind, but I think it’s going to be part of the story over the next year. What’s clear is that the films that I made in the past and the film that I’m making currently will not work for that format. It’s going to have to be something more modest in scale which can be done more regularly. That’s the balance that I’m going to have to find.