Written & directed by Ed Willey
ProduceD BY Rachel Foster
When Simon knocks on a couples door, he brings news that will turn their world upside down.
ABOUT THE FILM
SIMON was produced as part of the LAMDA 48hr Film Fest where it was shortlisted among Top 11. It also won the Audience Award at Super Shorts Hackney and played at other national and international film festivals.
ABOUT THE FILMmaker
ED WILLEY After a revelation that he wanted to get into filmmaking right when the pandemic hit, Ed has discovered a love of writing and directing. After studying at MetFilm Ed is now a regular competitor in the London 48-hour film competition where his films have won several awards and this year was invited to be part of the jury. Ed likes to embrace the sillier side of things but also enjoys creating a bit of tension. Ed is currently deep in pre-production on a sci-fi/dark comedy short and is writing his first feature.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH ed
Welcome back to our Short of the Week series. What have you been up to since we last featured your film A Real Pair?
Thanks, it's great to be back! Including Simon, we've done three 48-hour competitions (I do love a challenge!) and was just on the jury for this year's London 48-hour. I'm also now deep in pre-production for a (non-48hour) Sci-fi/Dark Comedy short which makes a nice change and I'm very excited about.
Tell us about the genesis of Simon and your motivation for making this film.
Simon was created for the inaugural LAMDA 48-hour competition, which we found out about literally as we landed back in the UK coming home from Filmapalooza in Lisbon, where we'd been attending the global 48hr festival (definitely not addicted to this form of filmmaking...). Being another 48-hour film, we knew we wanted to keep the story as simple as possible and hit upon the 'long lost child' idea almost straight away and ran with it.
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making Simon and how did you overcome them?
The first thing is just creating something on such a tight deadline with so few people, as this competition had a limit of eight people per team. Trying to get a complete narrative into so few pages in just a few hours is a tough task. The first draft ended up being too 'funny' all the way through, and we knew if we wanted the ending to land we had to play it straight for as long as possible.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences and some of the festival circuit highlights.
Once the competition ended, we really felt we had something that could play well at festivals so decided to give it a big push. Despite already being available online (due to the competition) we've had a great number of selections and picked up a good few nominations and most pleasing won a few audience awards, which are by far the most gratifying :) I like to try and travel to screenings whenever I can and getting to visit different places around the UK and experience other people seeing your work on the big screen is pretty special.
What do you think is the biggest challenge short filmmakers face trying to break into the industry?
It feels like it's becoming increasingly harder to stand out in what is a rapidly growing space. With filmmaking now so accessible (which of course is great!) some of the mid-large festivals are taking in 1000s of submissions, meaning loads of great films are missing out. Leveraging genres can definitely help you reach viewers hungry for stuff to watch, but it feels like we need something more than festivals to showcase work, which is why something like this that runs year-round is so great.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
I'm generally rubbish at keeping up with the latest releases so have only just watched Jordan Peele's NOPE which was incredible, great visuals, great performances and great storytelling. Also, thanks to one of the big summer blockbusters we recently revisited Blade which still has a banging opening scene which is up there as one of my favourite movie openings.
