Written Produced & Directed by NEIL LINPOW
Four women race a ticking clock across a bustling city, readying themselves for the ultimate Smash and Grab showdown.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH NEIL
Welcome back to our Short of the Week series. What have you been up to since we featured your film Lesson 7?
It’s been a pretty amazing year to be fair, and it’s in no small part thanks to the support I received from platforms like Kino.
After screening ‘Lesson 7’ on Kino and at a number of Bafta and Oscar qualifying film festivals, I was approached with the opportunity to write a feature film project through Warner Bros and Tea Shop films. It was an interesting process, and I feel like I learned a lot along the way. We shot the film in Feb-March this year and it’s currently finishing up in post. It’s a contained thriller set in one location with only a handful of actors, so it feels in the same tone of voice as my previous shorts too.
What inspired you to make Smash and Grab?
Working in commercial production I’ve found that the despite it being a keen discussion point, there is still very little pro-active engagement to develop new and diverse talent. It’s not enough to just support existing filmmakers, we have to be looking to create projects and routes into film for people that don’t have an initial in. For the people that don’t even realise it’s a possibility.
This film was born out of a frustration that there is too much lip service, and not enough action.
I am a volunteer mentor for a UK organisation called ‘Creative Mentor Network.’ It looks to support people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and find them routes into the business. But, as much as I love working with my mentee, I still felt like I could be doing more to create my own opportunities to get him and others practical work experience.
I created this project and then reached out to my local community centres. We had 10 young people on set that had never been on a film shoot before, but wanted to get into the industry. All of them were partnered up with an experienced crew member that was lending us their time.
The film was self financed, and all of the young people were paid full rates. I’ve also invited them onto paid commercial shoots afterwards too. One of them recently won a mentor scholarship with John Boyega’s Converse campaign to find the next crop of young diverse filmmakers. So, if nothing else, it’s felt worth it for that.
What obstacles did you overcome while in the making of this film?
To be honest, I think most notably we encountered the familiar ones that almost all short film makers can relate to. Time and money.
When you have no money, you can’t be pushy with peoples time. Especially when you have incredibly talented people offering to get involved in your project. I knew that the film would be immeasurably better by having these amazing collaborators pushing it to be the best film it could be, but it also meant that the post production timeline of the film was very slow.
I had this (optimistic) idea to get the film turned around within a couple of months of shooting, but in the end it took almost a year. A mix of lockdowns, family bereavements and other Covid complications meant that the film bubbled along slowly in the background as my feature film also developed.
That said, I am immensely grateful for everything everybody did to get this film together, and I am very proud of what we achieved.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences.
Unlike with ‘Time’ and ‘Lesson 7’ I didn’t make this film to go into festivals, so I didn’t really have a plan on what to do with it. I just wanted to create a community project, so I assumed that it would just live online, and perhaps that’s exactly what it will do. I have been approached by a couple of sports brands that liked the film and wondered if there was interest in them using it as a branded piece with a little reworking of the ending, so I will see how that plays out. But I am very happy to have the film on Kino where the short film audience can check it out.
In your experience, what's been the biggest or most surprising difference about making a feature vs a short. Is it just the difference between a sprint and a marathon, or how much does the craft change?
That’s such an interesting question. Broadly speaking, it’s obviously much slower. Decisions that you can usually make on your own in short form now take weeks or months for someone to feed back on. You are always at the mercy of someone else, which can be a frustrating place to be. If I wanted to make a short film next month, and asked you if you wanted to be involved, it’s a tangible thing that you can board or not. Often with a feature, it’s not really a real thing until the money is in place and you are in pre production. And the money is not really in place until you have cast secured. So you are mostly talking about this thing that you can never be sure will happen. It takes a minute to accept that.
In terms of the craft, I’d say that the development process is certainly very different. Interrogating and fine tuning the dramatic beats so that you have your story working before you start writing your script is arguably the hardest part of the creative journey. For me, I can’t start writing until I have my entire story blocked. I think in short form, you have slightly more scope to explore moments and allow the story beats to develop on the page.
I think probably the most exciting and frustrating process is the casting. So much of it is dictated by financing, and perceived ‘commercial value.’ It can potentially force you down a road that you perhaps didn’t want to go, and even when you do align with the financiers, it comes down to availability and schedule. Casting a feature during Covid wasn’t easy.
That said, we were very lucky that we got a cast that we would have absolutley cut our hands off to get. It definitely felt at times though that it could have been pushed another way, so I feel blessed to have gotten the talent we wanted.
What do you think is the biggest challenge short filmmakers face trying to break into the industry?
That’s a tricky one, and I wish I had the answer, but I think depending on where you are in your career, the answer is different. For filmmakers like me, the hardest part is financing. If I hadn’t financed my own short films, they wouldn’t have been made. There are no platforms that would finance me, so I never have the backing of any accredited film bodies that could then help me push my films afterwards, or develop future projects with. I had to go a bit ‘one man band’ in my approach.
Equally though, as I touched on above, I think another major problem for a lot of young filmmakers is access. There’s not enough grass roots outreach to find diverse new voices and a reluctance to invest in initiatives to change that. It took me until I was in my 30’s to have the connections and a tiny bit of money to put into my films, and I fear that we will lose so many potential talents because this is indicative of the industry as a whole. Perhaps there needs to be more ways to try and monetise short films so that there is a commercial value in making them for financiers.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
Hmm… I’ve been watching some good TV recently. Severance was great, and perhaps the best thing I’ve seen was Midnight Mass. It was a brilliantly subversive take on a classic myth, through a different lens and I loved that it was allowed to be slow-burn at times. 15 minute long scenes of two people just discussing existential ideas alone in a room, all the while still being at it’s core in the horror genre.
Film wise, I’d go back further. Check out ‘Wind River’ by the brilliant Taylor Sheridan if you are looking for something new and perhaps little seen. Great performances across the board and a nice cameo from one of my favourite actors, Jon Bernthal.