Charlie Waterhouse and Margherita Poggiali caught up with local filmmaker Phil Dunn during lockdown, to talk about his new short, About, and his unorthodox route into film.
Since the interview, Phil and the About team have watched it finish up its festival run with a tally of 14 Awards and 15 other nominations around the world, including in Los Angeles, London, Italy, Toronto and New York.
Excitingly, since then they have now been approached by Lift-Off Global Network, based at Pinewood Studios, who want to take the short to the major film markets this year, including Cannes Marché du Film and the American Film Market, with a view to developing it into a feature film or series! This is a huge opportunity for the team and means that the Brixton-based production could be picked up by one of the major streaming platforms (like Netflix, Prime or HBO)!
I feel that ABOUT showcases a great skill in directing actors for film and that the current team are capable of doing something larger and really interesting.
– James Bradley, Co-Founder, Lift-Off Global Network
Phil would love everyone in Brixton to see the short film and be part of the journey to a full length production, so he has made it available to watch for free via their website. They just ask for you to sign up so that they can get data about audience figures before taking it to market. It’s a great opportunity to support this local production in a really simple non-financial way.
Lastly, Phil is passionate about making this a production that gives paid opportunities to people from underprivileged and underrepresented backgrounds, particularly those in Brixton and South London. If you or anyone you know is interested, then get in touch via the website where you can say how you would like to be involved.
Find out more about About here: www.aboutshortfilm.com
Follow on Instagram: @aboutshortfilm
Find more of Phil’s work on Phildunn.uk
And on Instagram: @phildcdunn
Interview Transcript:
Charlie: Hi Phil, thanks ever so much for talking to Make It in Brixton. Because the Creative Enterprise Zone is all about all stages in a creative career, I’d like to start with a bit of background: how did Phil Dunn gets to where Phil Dunn is now?
Phil: I’ve always played with filmmaking ever since I was a kid. I made films with my cousins; we used to make sort of James Bond-style movies together on our summers, and that was really fun. I always had this feeling though that whatever you had to do for living had to be far more serious and more… important and grown up than that. So I actually studied medicine initially at university at Imperial College in London. And it was great. I did two years of it, but I didn’t quite pass the exams at the end of second year.
It made me think, hang on, is this really what I want? And I realized it’s not! So, I went and did some work for a church for a year. Then, I went up to Durham university to try another degree and that was theology. I’ve always thought too deeply and too much about everything. And so theology was kind of like, wow, you can actually study that kind of stuff as a subject? The stuff that, throughout time has always boggled the minds of man! What is God and the universe and the meaning of life and all these huge things that actually hold sway over human history.
I went and studied that, which I loved. But the film thing kept growing. And so during that time I was up there I took some advice from a director. I said, what do I need to do, if I want to get into filmmaking, I’m quite enjoying it, do I need to do a film course? Or something like that. And he was like, no, I don’t think so. You just end up learning somebody else’s techniques rather than finding out your own, finding your own pallet. I’m sure other people might give different advice, but for me that was the right advice. He said, look, watch lots of films, and just get out there and practice as much as possible. So I bought a camera on the credit card that I got as a student.
I spent the entire three grand on a camera, I didn’t realize how long I’d spend paying it off, but I had a camera and then I started making stuff. For my dissertation I made a short film, which was actually based on a poetry book in the Bible called the ‘Song of Songs’ – basically erotic love poetry. It was more of an allegorical exploration of the themes, which were about relationship and connection between human beings. (I didn’t go for the porn film, which would have been really interesting – I think I wasn’t quite brave enough!!). I made it on a train between London and Cambridge. You manage as a student to sort of beg and borrow – and you do puppy eyes, you get away with stuff. So we got onto a train, got a whole carriage for a weekend, and made a short film. It was pretty terrible, but it was great! I gave that as my dissertation, then managed to show it to some friends in a small cinema in Durham.
That whole experience of it just really sold it for me. I loved it. People started asking me to film stuff. And then they said they would pay me; I did some weddings, and I did some stuff for companies. That’s where my production company began, you know, which is basically me and some other freelancers that set up and started doing corporate videos and we made some money out of them. I made a business, and I did that for about 10 years but then got to a point where I was like, okay, this is going really well. – I could become Mr Corporate Video, but everything about that was making me feel ill. I remembered that actually I really enjoy that whole thing of telling a story and working with other people in that way and that’s when I came back and wrote and made, Box Office Smash – rather an audacious title for an abstract and mundane film. That sort of launched me back into: right, yeah, I really want to do this again.
Charlie: So Box Office Smash ended up actually living up to its name didn’t it? Got lots of awards and did the festival circuit. How does that work when you make a short as an outsider? How does one step lead to another?
Phil: What’s exciting is that film festivals in the last few years are much easier to enter – Film Freeway is this online film festival database that you can be part of that helps you submit your film. You put everything onto one thing on there, and then from there you can just click on a film festival and pay a submission fee.
Stuff like that makes it so much easier. That was basically what I thought, I’m going to try this whole process out, I’m going to do the whole thing really well from start to finish. I actually used some of the profits from the corporate video stuff to use on some of the submission fees and also just found you can search which ones are free.
It was really surprising when the first one came back and it had been selected somewhere in Ireland, a festival called ‘Disappear Here Festival’. Yeah, that was just so exciting. I was like: ‘what, someone’s watched my film and thinks its slightly better than other people’s – enough to put in a real-life film festival!’ Then it started getting selected other places, and then it won an award somewhere. Then it kept doing better, and ended up with 14 awards.
The thing is now I’m still an outsider. I’m kind of like, when’s BFI going to come knocking, you know, when’s someone going to go, “hey kid, you got the stuff, come and make movies with us!”?
Charlie: There are obviously a lot of people that do know how it works, and they’ve got access to the right ear, the right commissioners, the right funding and all of that kind of thing. It’s easy to not know where to start, but the important thing is: to start.
Phil: Yes, exactly. I think that can be a real paralyzer for people – they think, Oh, I don’t know where to start so they just give up, and I felt I’ve been in that – you just end up not really doing anything you think, how can I? Actually, it’s amazing, the power of saying, what if I just did it? and just start doing it.
Charlie: So: you’ve got a new film out?!
Phil: Yes – About – so it’s very difficult to talk about!
Charlie: So, what is About about?
Phil: Ha ha! Well, that’s kind of part of it. One of my other things is writing poetry and that’s where Box Office Smash is a play on words – the double entendre of: what if it’s not ‘a box office smash’ but actually an office, that’s a box, that gets smashed?
About is a similar thing, the title unlocks some of what we’re trying to do in the film, which is looking at a word, and the various meanings of it. It’s a taxi ride home, and the word Uber in German means ‘getting around’. So there’s a sense of ‘getting about’ in that. But more importantly, it’s this conversation in the back of the car, and who has the full picture between two women and a person they know in common. It turns out they have a very different idea of who the host of this party is that they’ve just been to. Who has the full picture? That’s the tagline for the film because they both know him, and they both have experience of him, and yet it’s very different.
So, they’re talking about this guy and yet their views about him are very different.
Charlie: You mention you’re a poet as well, and writing poetry and making shorts reminded me of Raymond Carver. He was a poet and a writer of short stories. Do you see your films as a means to an end – to get to make a longer feature – or is the art actually in the short form?
Phil: I do see them as short films. They definitely have their own thing and if I didn’t know that completely when I started making Box Office Smash, I really realised it by the end of it.
With Box Office Smash and About, both of those I didn’t know what they were, or how to make them and turns out they were short films. To me that proves that the short film format serves, you can do something in a short film that you can’t do in a feature film. You can deliver a punch in a short film that leaves people reeling for a few days.
Charlie: It’s like that story about Hemingway being challenged to write a story that could make you cry in six words, and it says, ‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’
Phil: Oh very good. Yeah. That’s quite a thing, that’s quite an amazing gift and very needed, people haven’t got much time. So, if you can do something that really makes them go, Whoa, hang on okay. Or just makes them look at something in a different way as a result – those are the things that do help change the world. More I get into it the more I’m like, this is all I’m going to do, and it keeps scaring me because also I don’t know how to make the money that I’m supposed to make, but I’ve got to do this because it’s the only thing that makes any sense, particularly in the world that we’re living in now, you know?
Margherita: I was reminded of Jim Jarmusch’s Nights on Earth. Was it an inspiration? Also how important is Brixton to you as a filmmaker?
Phil: Actually the main inspiration was Taxi Driver with DeNiro – it was those late-night streetlights, the dark goings-on, the late-night jazz vibes of the streets. For me, that’s kind of what I looked at a lot looking when looking at the visual treatment of it and directing it.
Brixton? For me it’s in Taxi Driver when you hear him talking about the streets and all the people are out at night and all the things that are going on and Brixton can feel like that. Like at night you drive down Coldharbour Lane, and there’s people having some of the best nights of their lives and there’s people having some of the worst nights of their lives and everything in between, and I wanted some of that to be in the film.
Margherita: I know this is just a short film, but it seemed to me that it gave quite a strong view of women in a sense of being constantly sort of misinterpreting men one way or another? Or being swayed by them?
Phil: Yeah. I wanted to have female leads in it. And those two actors, Ellie and Tash are friends of mine, and they’re very good so I just thought it would be great to work with them, so that was in the mix. I wasn’t trying necessarily to say something about female relationships with men. It felt like more of a general human point. I mean, even as we look ourselves in the mirror we still don’t understand or see ourselves as other people see us, because it’s the wrong way round in the mirror to how everybody else sees you.
So, you know, who actually knows anybody really that well? And then it comes back to how much do you know yourself really?
Charlie: I love that. I think that, again, that’s the beauty of the short form, isn’t it? That it enables totally different interpretations and totally different focuses that are dependent on the viewer? And what’s next for Phil Dunn?
Phil: I’ve written another film, a longer short film. It’s at the moment the working title is The Stupid Boy. The sort of brief synopsis is, the tagline is ‘Love in a time of suicide bombing’ to give you a sort of sense of the, kind of the sort of magnitude of stuff in it.
Charlie: Blimey – what a place to end up at the end of an interview! That’s really cool. Perfect. Thanks Phil.
Phil: Oh, it’s been great chatting. Can we do this again?
