Cannes is the place for free gifts. I’ve already collected a huge amount of merchandising and magazines so far, from BFI badges to half a dozen DVDs from an independent US production company I’ve been a fan of for years. I now have so much junk, in fact, that my new blue (and also free) Cannes satchel is straining under the weight. I shudder to think how heavy my luggage will be by the end of the festival!

I’m sure everyone knows about the film-making triangle (it’s in the Guerilla Film Maker’s Handbook, after all) which dictates that of the three qualities “Good”, “Fast”, and “Cheap”, you can only ever have two.  A case in point is a short I made a couple of years ago called “Milky Thursday”. I needed some CGI work doing for it, but I was on a deadline, and having no funds, I couldn’t entice a CGI artist to work on it for me. As a result, I had to do it all myself (in a hurry), and it looks terrible. One thing I’d like to say about this triangle, however, is that it indirectly leads to one of the most controversial topics in low-budget film-making today – that of paying your crew.  Going back to Milky Thursday again, The budget was about £300, because that’s what I spent on fuel, costumes, props and consumables (fuel was the biggest cost). However, that doesn’t count the donations I received in terms of time and expertise from the cast and crew. If I had been able to pay them the going rate, I would have been looking at upwards of £1000. Obviously this would have been the ideal situation, but for practical reasons it couldn’t happen – film making was always a province of the rich elite, and to pay your crew the going rate it still is.

Obviously, this places me in the position of not paying cast or crew for shorts, which lies at odds with several campaigns, but that’s not to say I disagree with them. There are several examples of films that have been made cheaply where it’s clear that the producers have exploited their crews in order to use  more expensive equipment, or avoided paying expenses, or kept any profits for themselves, and this cannot be condoned. However, when it’s a collective who have made the film, the rules are and should be different. If a film maker can generate a community spirit for the film – if the cast and crew want to be involved in the film for its own sake – then this should be perfectly acceptable. Obviously, it’s beholden upon the producers to make sure that any wealth is shared fairly amongst its collaborators.

I fall into this second category, as pretty much all of my films have been made for buttons and string. Once you have people excited about your project, it’s not difficult to get the best from them without waving a chequebook under their nose. There are, however, some important guidelines:

1. Expenses. If you can offer expenses, do so, even if it’s only a token payment. Some may refuse any money (if they’re passionate about the project, for example), but this is the exception rather than the rule.
2. Food. An army marches on its stomach, a film crew doubly so. There’s nothing worse than working on a project without any catering – you get tired and hungry, and you don’t want to be there the next day. What’s amazing is that this is the easiest and cheapest perk to provide, and the most often overlooked.
3. DVD.  If you’ve offered someone a DVD at the end, provide it. There are several people I won’t work for again, as they can’t even extend this courtesy. You know who you are…
4. Professionalism. This is key. Your cast and crew may be working for free, but this does not mean that they’re amateurs. Treat them and the project with the respect they deserve.

Follow these, and you won’t go far wrong.

Back in 2007, I co-wrote SLEEPER, a feature screenplay with two colleagues, Paul Blinkhorn and Steven Hutchinson. It received quite a buzz at the time, with some big Hollywood names expressing an interest in attaching themselves to the project. Unfortunately, the director proved to be the wrong man for the job, so we took our script from him. since then he’s been rather forcefully claiming that the screenplay is his, as he “copyrighted it according to UK law”, and that we were trying to steal it from him. It’s been pretty nasty.
Now, one thing I already knew about intellectual property was that copyright lies with the creator of the work, but the difficulty lies in proving authorship. You can’t post a screenplay to yourself, as this proves nothing, so you need a paper trail. What I didn’t know was that a digital paper trail is perfectly acceptable, and this we have in abundance.
However, my concern was this: The director had come up with the original idea – “A man (ex-Special Forces) uncovers a terrorist plot and his wife and daughter are killed in retribution. Teaming up with a pretty CIA agent, the man has to stop the terrorists and achieve revenge”. He then wrote a screenplay which had been sent to various agents. It so happens that I considered the screenplay unfilmable, and barely readable. Those of us still attached to the project after reading it decided that the only course of action was to throw it out and start again, which we did. The new screenplay had some similar names, and the basic idea, but the rest was completely original. Ultimately though, the original idea (nebulous as it was) was the director’s.
I figured that this would be a problem if things ever came to court, but some interesting facts were revealed in the seminar. The most important is this: you cannot copyright an idea. You can only copyright the expression of that idea. Therefore, even though it was the original idea of the director, the script is the intellectual property of my colleagues and me (copyright remains with the creator, you can only transfer the rights to use that property). If we wanted to, we could easily prove in a court of law that the screenplay was ours.

As of writing, the project has been renamed, and currently has a “hot new director” attached. We’ve decided to let it go for now, as it’s not worth the trouble unless the project starts getting somewhere – as the media lawyer says “you could get an injunction, but they’re not cheap!”

Oh well, Duty Calls. It’s time to plunge into the film market again. Ciao…

Paul had already arranged accreditation for Cannes just in case, but it turned out he was accepted on an artists exchange, so he’s in Romania for the duration. I asked NWVM if they could accredit me for Cannes instead, but I didn’t hear for ages, so I thought that was that.

On Friday, however, I received an email telling me that it was all sorted. After all their efforts I couldn’t very well leave it, so since yesterday morning I’ve been rushing around in a state of semi-panic, trying to organise the trip. Most of the events I’d wanted to attend are already closed to applications, so I’ve added myself to immense waiting lists in the hope that lots of people forget to turn up. At least I have the flights and hotel sorted, which I was expecting to be impossible or cost prohibitive. Now I just need to find a tux…