Stuart Kershaw - Extreme Filmmaker

Full transcript: Stuart Kershaw on London Real

8:23 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. We are sponsored today by Bulletproof Coffee, which is the official drink of London Real. I just want to thank Dave Asprey, the Bulletproof exec. We’re all drinking Bulletproof Coffee, and Stuart’s a fan on his first sip, so that’s always good.

8:39 My co-host today is entrepreneur Colin Pyle, who comes to us in London via Toronto and China and India. A lot of times you’re riding a motorcycle, usually collecting world records on the way. Sometimes not as much as him, though. As him, we’re gonna hear about Stuart’s world records. Jesus, I don’t know how many you have, but we’re gonna get to that.

8:59 Colin’s also the co-host of Silicon Real, which is our new hit series. I love saying that. And we just finished our 10th episode. It’s every week. It’s dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene.

9:11 There’s so many cool ideas, fun people. Like, everyone’s excited about their job, so that’s really cool. Thanks for being here. For London Real, thank you. Cool.

9:19 Our guest today is Mr. Stuart Kershaw, who is an award-winning hostile environment filmmaker. That just sounds badass, doesn’t it? I would be when he, like, goes out for the night. I should put that on my dating profile. Yeah, it just sounds like meme.

9:35 You studied Film Production at Penn State before moving to the West Coast to LA, where I think you worked for Paramount and 20th Century Fox. You came back to the UK in 2003, you set up in the Dark Productions, which is your production company. Then you started doing crazy stuff. You spent a year in Bangkok documenting the sex trade and produced a movie called The Virgin Trade. Then you rowed across the Atlantic with Marines and filmed it.

9:59 It was called What Ocean 14. That’s right. Okay, I’m going to keep going here, because there’s a lot we got to get through, and then you sailed across the Pacific from China to San Francisco, and you did all of these things in one weekend, about eight and a half hours, if I cast my mind back, something like that for the whole thing. All right, well, there’s more. You’ve recently just gotten back from rowing across the Indian Ocean with, I think, what Max CH and Lavar Nstead was the two guys, and you broke the existing world record for this venture with the time of, wait for it, I asked I asked the girls at home.

10:31 I was like, asked a nine-year-old how long do you think it took, and she was like, I don’t know, two weeks, 57 days it took you to get across the Indian Ocean. You documented the whole thing. You rowed. You’ve also, I think, done some crazy, like, I think you might have attempted seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. Seven days, that’s right.

10:48 Jesus. And he can also leap tall buildings in a single bound. Stuart, welcome to London Real. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

10:56 Gosh, I don’t think we’re going to run out of stuff to talk about. You know, so, so let’s just start. You just got back recently from the Indian Ocean. You’re back on land. That must feel kind of strange.

11:06 Yeah, it certainly does. I think I’ve been back now three weeks, and of course initially when you hit dry land, especially on an ocean row, you never really stand up at sea, so your legs atrophy, and you reach dry land and you’re staggering around like a drunk, crawling along like a crab along the beach. You know, we rowed land to land, so it was a very surreal experience to be back on dry land, and certainly a little bit of land sickness that’s hit me.

11:32 Is that like the opposite of seasickness? Just that’s right. Yeah, just general, exact general disorientation, and every time you look in a mirror and try and wash your face it’s kind of spinning a little bit. How long does that last for? Ah, you know, really, the physical effects of it probably last a week, but what I’m still really dealing with is the psychological effects of only listening to two other voices for, um, the best part of, well, you know, two months, and now re-immerse myself back into the real world.

11:59 When you’re at sea there’s a complete lack of color. Everything is either gray or it’s blue or it’s white or it’s black. There’s no smells apart from the smell of the food and, you know, the stench of human bodies that haven’t been washed for a couple of months. So, you know, when we hit that beach and suddenly all these people came piling at us with their foreign accents and their alien smells. It was actually, yeah, it was quite mind-boggling.

12:22 I turned around, went back into the boat and sort of hid, which you know, I’m not an introverted character, so it was quite out of character for me to do that. It was just a complete culture shock. Just didn’t want to deal with all those people. It was just probably agoraphobia in some way. Absolutely.

12:39 And just absolutely overwhelmed, I think, by that. That’s the best way I can describe that experience. For two oceans, physically, they were, you know, the first one was much tougher. It was much more regimented. It was the Atlantic, you’re talking.

12:54 Yeah, it was running in a more military fashion, direct chain of command, and very strict, two hours on, two hours off, 24 hours a day, around the clock for 33 days. 7 hours and 15 minutes. Where, how many of you were on that trip? 14 of us, on that 14. Okay, completely different vibe.

13:15 Exactly. You know, you had lots of alpha male characters all thrust together in this tiny environment, whereas the Indian Ocean was three guys, and so inevitably there’s a greater degree of flexibility in terms of, you know, the hours that you put in when you’re rowing, and if you want to stop for a minute to tie your shoelaces, you can. You know, that just wasn’t even possible on the Atlantic. But the Indian was psychologically more difficult, greater sense of deprivation, a much more isolated stretch of ocean, obviously twice as long, and three guys from completely different backgrounds, completely different cultures and different continents.

13:53 So, you know, it was a trial by fire, and you’re there to film it, but obviously you can’t just stand around and take the glamour shots. I mean, did you know that you would be rowing the whole time? You know, that’s how I got the job, really. You know, as a single male with no dependents, I’m that guy who’s cheap to insure, to send to hostile locations. And I suppose the ocean is hostile, certainly where cameras are involved.

14:16 Anywhere you combine in camera equipment and salt water is a potential hazard. But you know, from the minute we got out there, the Indian Ocean didn’t go lightly on us. You know, our watermaker failed after a week. We were hand-pumping from an emergency desalinator. The boat we discovered had some holes in it, in the ballast tanks, which made us at risk of capsize and spoiled a lot of our food.

14:40 We were living on almost a kilo of chocolate a day by the last sort of fortnight. Our satellite navigation equipment failed in a storm, very limited battery power, so it was, you know, it went back to sort of rowing in the dark ages, is how my Viking compadre Lar described it. And who makes the call whether you abort the mission? Like, who says, all right, this is ridiculous? I mean, I mentioned to someone you had holes in your boat and they’re like, you know, that’s…

15:06 We came very close. That you know, I don’t take credit for us breaking that world record. 80% of it comes down to good weather, good conditions, you know, but 20% of it comes down to good experience, and Lar and I had both rowed oceans before. And there was a couple of points where Skipper kind of turned to us hesitantly and said, you know, we might have to prepare to abandon ship here. I don’t know how much more of this we can take.

15:30 Our autohelm failed. We tied pieces of rope onto the rudder, and we’re steering by hand manually in the dark with no equipment to warn of us. Warn us of tankers coming. We at one stage came within three minutes of a collision course with a unmanned Chinese vessel that had no one on the VHF. So you know, it was life and death out there.

15:49 Absolutely, no doubt about it. But we did have that experience to turn to the skipper and sort of say, you know, we we’re still making water. We’re having the hand pump for a couple of extra hours a day, but until that goes I say we keep going, and if we call for rescue, it could take anywhere up to a week for someone to reach us. So I felt that we were safer on the boat. Lar and Max felt the same, and you know, at least we were in charge of our own destinies to some extent.

16:17 There must be a really strange environment when you’re with each other 24 hours a day, and like, there’s technically a leadership structure, but like, you know, I’m sure all it takes is a little power of suggestion, or you getting frustrated, the other guy is getting pissed off, and the captain’s like, well, Jesus, I don’t have a crew anymore. Absolutely. It was much more fluid, and you had a situation where the skipper had not rowed an ocean before, and he had less experience of ocean rowing than well, than either myself or particularly Lar, who was a lifetime mariner.

16:47 So you were put in a situation where decision-making was a more fluid process. And also, you know, that meant there was a lot of disagreements. You know, there was times where actually I had to drop the camera and run at the two guys, because I didn’t want it to escalate into a physical situation. And please, to say that it didn’t, but there was some really, really tough times and some real screaming matches that I filmed. So I’m going to have to exercise, you know, as much impartiality as possible when it comes to editing that material together, because obviously, you know, I’m there, and to some extent I guess I’m biased.

17:26 Yeah, you. What are the disagreements primarily over? The running of the boat. Yeah, how the shift system should operate. You know, in a traditional ocean row there’s never been a crossing by three men before.

17:38 That was how we got one of the world records. It was the first three-man team ever to row ocean, but usually it’s two hours on, two hours off. It’s very regimented, it’s very structured. We had this problem, this inflexibility, or also potentially this opportunity to exploit a different shift cycle, because there were three of us, and in the end we settled. Instead of the traditional 12 hours a day rowing, we settled on an 11-hour row day, and that enabled every man to get something called dog shift, where you’d have an uninterrupted break of three, three and a half hours to rest, rather than just 9-minute to 2-hour increments.

18:16 And I think that was a massive advantage to us, actually, because you know, the body on and the mind under the duress of sleep deprivation doesn’t behave normally, and that can… that was one of the greatest difficulties that we faced on the first ocean row crossing on the Atlantic. The difficulty was that it was hard to keep track sometimes. You never really knew when you were on shift or not. Um, and so there was, you know, there was a lot of arguments about that, and just the general things, the day-to-day running of the boat and the degree of selflessness that was required.

18:46 Some people were better team players than others, should we say. On the big, on the big, um, journey, on on the small journey on the Atlantic, you had tough guys who were ex-Olympians paired with people who were just middle-aged and wanted to have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So, um, you know, it was like a whole society on that, about 14 guys there. But, you know, after an initial period where you know there was a few revolts, and it felt like a little bit like Lost Boys, we gelled very well and we came together very strongly as a team.

19:18 On the Indian, you know, it was much more complex because of the three personalities on board, and because ultimately we were much more like brothers than teammates. You know, we shouted and we snapped and people said things that they should, you know, probably look back on, which they’d never said. And, you know, that’s just the nature of the trip, I suppose. And then at the same time it’s weird, because the two guys rowing, it probably want the smoothest, fastest mission possible, and then you got Stuart here, who’s, like, any director, film director, is thinking this is a f***ing gem.

19:51 I’m going to use this in the first part of the half-hour series. I mean, you know, ultimately people love conflict. That’s why they watch anything that needs conflict. You’ve got to have conflict, and there were situations initially where there were, um, you know, there were arguments brewing between the other two crew members, and I’d grab the camera, and the skipper would be like, put the camera down, you know, everything’s fine. I’d be like, come on, you know, we’re not making a propaganda movie here.

20:14 This is what people want to watch. You know, conflict requires drama, and, um, you know, I had to fight my corner on that. And that’s something that’s not a typically British thing to do. You know, you tend to be more polite about that, and you can’t afford that as an adventure cameraman, but you know, within a week or two people forgot the camera was there. You know, and that’s the beauty of spending 57 days in a confined environment.

20:36 People are going to show their true colors, and you’re going to have the opportunity to demonstrate that visually. Did you have a talk before you went on the trip and just said, look, here are the rules, everything is good, I can film anything? Was there a protocol, like in the military, like, ultimately, is this guy’s call, or was all this kind of fluid? Well, first the filming stuff. Is there anything you said to him, “I won’t film this” or “I won’t do this”?

20:59 I told him I’d film everything. You know, we were as I say, we were 3 minutes from abandoning ship. You know, less than… I was grabbing it. You know, I was grabbing emergency kit when this Chinese vessel was just bearing down on us, and it was unmanned, or there was just no one on the VHF.

21:13 There was no one on a system called the AIS, which all major tankers have to use to alert other boats. We were carrying it as a rowing vessel. This ship was probably trafficking. It was very dilapidated. There was no one on the helm, and they were just bearing down on us, and whilst the guys were frantically trying to grab water makers and spare food, I was thinking, SD cards, lights, you know, what am I going to need in that raft?

21:39 Which, because, you know, it was… I was going to, and I was filming it the whole way. I was running around screaming like a girl while they were frantically trying to hail it down on the VHF. You know, it’s something my greatest fear had always been: being mowed down. Ocean rowing incidents where people have died on ocean rows, the boats just vanished.

21:59 They’ve just completely vanished, so they were, reason being, they were mowed down by a boat that was far larger than them. You know, I just thought, statistically there’s nothing going on but the rent in the middle of the ocean, and this is what Lar argued with me. He turned to me and said, stude, relax. There’s more chance of us getting, you know, more chance of you running across the Sahara Desert and getting hit by a 4×4. Like, this is the biggest desert in the world.

22:22 We’re not going to see another ship. And you know, I remember knocking on his door and waking up Lar, you’ve got to take a look at this, and then he pops his head out and he’s like, yeah, it’s going to miss us, and I was like, really? He’s like, well, that’s wishful thinking, because it’s coming right at us. And, uh, I was like, what are we going to do? He’s like, if it doesn’t move out of the way, we’re going to have to get the life raft out and hope that we can swim far enough away from the flotsam, and then swim back and climb into the life raft.

22:49 What’s a flotsam? Just, well, you know, when the boat would hit there’d be there’d be loads of, um, debris. The boat would be completely annihilated. The jetsam and flotsam is the stuff that would just kind of float on the top, and we’d have to hope that we’d be able to see the life raft, which in theory would self-inflate. Okay, theory.

23:08 In theory. And it could, you… how far away could you see this ship? Um, this was coming out, as it was about, you know, 100 meters away, I guess. So you saw it at the last minute, uh, or could you see it for like miles out? No.

23:19 I saw it from about probably 10 minutes away, and then we immediately started hailing it, you know, and grabbing flares to set off, and so forth, but it just didn’t answer, and it just kept coming right at us. And then, you know, periodically, you know, the waves, the prevailing swell was coming on that day from the west, so it would kind of tilt off as if it was going to just miss our stern, but then it would just straighten back up again. Um, and eventually, you know, when somebody on the helm, somebody actually walking along the side of the boat on the gunwale, did see us, and they must have redirected, but they were kind of, you know, curious at the same time, so they’d obviously stayed quite close to us, and they were only, you know, 50 m or so away from us.

24:02 What can you do? I mean, you can’t jump out and swim, because that’d be a worse fate. You just stay on the boat, and then you jump left to right. I mean, it’s a big… that’s what that was. My plan was just to have a grab bag of emergencies and jump off when it became inevitable that it was going to hit, and then swim back to the wreckage and try and inflate that life raft, but that’s pretty optimistic.

24:24 That’s coming from a cameraman who spent a lot of time filming at sea. The mariner told me, well, he just clambered back into the cabin to go back to sleep, because he said if it hits us we’re all dead. So I’m, that’s really what he did. Yeah, he just climbed back in the cabin. He was like, there’s nothing we can do about it.

24:40 Just climb back in, and this is probably a couple of last hours of sleep. He’s probably the toughest guy I’ve ever met. You know, he’s the first man on the planet to ever row two oceans in a year, potentially a third later this year. He was pulling eight-hour shifts at the end, rowing, rowing. I was doing four hours on, one hour off, hours on as we got closer to that record.

25:00 Um, you know, I used to stretch after every two-hour shift to try and keep myself a bit nimble, and I remember him turning, “Stuart, I stretch once after each ocean row. He’s just a big ball of gristle.” And do you have to pace yourself on the row? Is there, like, a kind of timing you do? Or absolutely.

25:21 You know, on the Atlantic, there was a division between the young fit guys who left Gran Canaria to cross the Atlantic for Barbados, and after two weeks physically they were depleted, one after another after another. And, you know, those old guys who we’d written off, who were 50 years old, 45 years old, they were like diesel engines. They just kept going, and they’re the ones who pulled us into the home straight and got us the world record. On the Indian, I was much better prepared, and I knew that, you know, I wasn’t going to go in there all cocky.

25:50 This young fit guy I was, you know, 10 years younger than Levar, 20 years younger than Max. I went in thinking it’s a long haul, so I always tried to pace myself, and I was much, much happier with my physical performance. You know, I never dropped shift, anything like that. So, Jesus, is this something you search out? I mean, is this something you’re like, I want to do one of these this year, cuz I can’t, looking at your CV, are you an adrenaline junkie?

26:13 I mean, like, you know, if someone really not… I’ve never jumped out of a plane. I would never do a bungee jump, as long. I want to be in control of my own feet and know that I feel like I’ve got some control over my own destiny. The initial ocean row, I was a bizarre story that my then girlfriend, a girl called actually, I probably shouldn’t even say her name.

26:34 She wouldn’t mind. Mariana. She was Brazilian, lived in the States. I was a starving artist filmmaker at the time. This is about eight years ago now, and I didn’t have…

26:44 I’d run out of money to fly out and see her, and I remember walking along my beach. I lived in Liverpool on the coast of England, in the Northwest, and I remember thinking, well, I guess boats sail there. I wonder if anyone has ever rowed across the ocean, you know, since like Viking times. And that night I Googled ocean row, and it came up. Le Brown recruiting crew for this year’s ocean row, and I was like, that’s an amazing story, and I dropped him an email and said look, I’m a filmmaker, you know, are you documenting this?

27:11 And he said, amazingly, I’ve been thinking about that for so long now. No, I’m not. If you can come up to Scotland, we’re having the team run through their paces. We’ve got like 600 guys. We’ve whittled them down to like the last 50.

27:23 They’re going to be put through their paces up in Scotland, in the hills. The last 14 men standing will be on that boat. If you’re there with that last 14, I’ll give you a spot for free. And I was like, right, so I, you know, I went up to train, and you know, with these marines and these ex-SAS boys. And, um, you know, we basically we started walking on a Thursday, and by Tuesday there was 14 guys left.

27:46 And that, you know, initially no one wanted to drop out, and then, you know, slowly but surely hands had start to go up. And this guy’d be like, so anybody, anybody ready to quit? We, you know, we have a van around the corner. We’ve got hot dogs waiting. Hot tea.

27:58 Anybody ready to go? Camera boy, ready to go yet? Camera boy. And I’d be like, no, and, uh, you know eventually, uh, you know, there was 15 guys left, and then there was another long break before the last guy was going to go, and they said, right, take all your clothes off. Like, what?

28:13 Take all your clothes off. We want you to break through this ice here on this lake, and we want you to go for a swim. And this one guy said, that’s crazy, we’ll get hypothermia and die. I’m not doing that. And they went, oh, you want to drop out?

28:24 He said, I’m not doing that. That’s crazy. They said, okay, rest of you, that’s it. It was just a psychological test. So you were hugging him, you’re like, thank you, thank you.

28:33 Uh, and then, yeah, the last of us were on that boat, so that’s how I became involved. And then it’s sort of, you know, a rolling stone effect after that. You know, I did that adventure, and there was some PR, I suppose, around it, and I made a film about it that won the Adventure film festival, and it screened in 40 cinemas across the UK as a part of winning that festival, and then I was invited on to subsequent expeditions. And you know, we ever there’s a guy doing an adventure these days, there’s probably a cameraman dangling just above him trying to capture it on a film, and that was my niche, I guess.

29:05 Yeah, it’s crucial. I mean, you know, Colin, you did that, you know, 60-day trip around China, and you guys filmed the hell out of that thing. But a lot of people, you know, wouldn’t think about that, cuz they’re too worried about, Jesus Christ, just getting through the days. Right? Yeah, it’s tough, but you know, we, again, like riding around China, the most difficult part was filming illegally because we weren’t allowed to film.

29:26 But, like, riding on motorcycles is a lot easier to film than like a boat, I would think. But yeah, you know, it’s hard and, but you want to capture it. I think you just want to share that experience with people who don’t have the opportunity to be as fortunate as you are to go and do it. You guys still have the logistical problems, though. I mean, like putting cameras on helmets, guys talking while they’re on, uh, you know, moving along at 60 mph in the middle of nowhere, in the wastelands.

29:52 That must have been really difficult. Yeah, you can’t interview me. Come on, this is about you. But yeah, no, it’s crazy, but, uh, but I guess there’s a lot more moving parts, but then again, we had so much footage. Right?

30:04 So you, and a lot of stuff, you can just strap a GoPro on and leave it for a few hours and hope you get something. But so when you went to film this, did you know, uh, it was going to be… is it going to be purchased? Are you going to put this together as a movie? You know, a lot of people don’t even know how this business works. Well, because it’s changing so quickly.

30:21 This is, you know, the democratization of the film industry that we’re experiencing right now. You wanted to shoot a feature film 15 years ago, you needed a million-pound 35mm rig. Uh, you know, you were going to rent that for thousands of pounds a day. Now there are people shooting films that, you know, win at Sundance that shot on a DSLR, you know, or an iPhone. You know, and the best camera that you can have on an expedition is the one that you’ve got with you.

30:46 So in contrast to previous expeditions, where I’ve tried to throw the latest technology at things, and subsequently missed crucial events, now I was looking for a small camera with a decent sensor, with professional audio, so that I could pick up guys shouting at one end of the boat in 50 knots of wind, in a hurricane, while I’m at the other side of the boat. And fortunately, you know, there are cameras out there that will do a reasonably good job of that these days, and in good light, which you have in open ocean, particularly in the day. You know, they give you a really startlingly good image, so you can buy, you know, a camera for less than £5,000 that’s going to accomplish that.

31:23 And how hard is it keeping your gear wet, keeping your gear charged? People aren’t miked up the whole time, but you must have stacks of cards and memories. And yeah, we had two laptops and three drives, and I backed up the drives every second day pretty much, and they one was stored in the grab bag, and the grab bag aboard a boat is the thing that has the satellite phone and it has a location transponder, so that if we did have to abandon ship, at least I would have all the footage we’d shot up until that point.

31:53 Um, and also the camera itself now shoots simultaneously to both card and hard drive, so there was kind of some contingency there as well. Um, but I only used radio mics during the fixed interviews in Mauritius when we arrived, and in Australia before we departed. Whilst at sea, I had really, um, voice sensitive directional mics, some really good 400b mics with, as I say, professional XLR inputs, and, uh, you know, a decent thorough windjammer so that I could hear guys.

32:24 And I told them all, you know, if we’re out in some hulie you know, some big storm, don’t whisper, you know, just shout. And these guys didn’t have any trouble shouting, you know, often at each other, but where necessary to describe what was happening to me. And the problem I see in most adventure films is that there’s an awful lot of retrospective footage, so you have guys talking to a handycam or a GoPro and they’ll be saying, well, this amazing thing just happened or we were just involved in, and you know, you may as well be on a radio, you may as well be on a podcast.

32:54 You’ve got to show what’s happening, and, uh, well, you know, they have their place. They have their place, but when you’re at sea and the something dramatic happens, you don’t want guys talking about it after the fact. You want to show it, and you know, it was great, I think, for the team to have somebody aboard who was pulling their weight on the oars, but knew that the second anything happened they knew I was going to grab that camera and I was going to film it.

33:20 And if they shouted at me and winged and said, “Turn that bloody camera off,” well, I let them, and I just kept rolling. And afterwards they would apologize for it. They knew that was, you know, my role. So did you miss anything? You know, I’ve, I’ve cast back now.

33:35 There wasn’t a day that went by when we didn’t have a systems failure from a pretty significant piece of kit aboard that boat, whether it was seven days of failure every single day. I mean, by the time we limped into Mauritius we had a boat that had holes in it, failing satellite navigation equipment. We were pumping water out almost constantly. We had no autohelm anymore, so as I say, we’re steering by, and chocolate around your mouth, yeah. You know, running out of proper decent food.

34:03 So I had no lack of drama. Did I miss things? For sure. There were moments I wish I could have captured. Inevitably there was some ships that passed quite close to us when I was sleeping and whatnot, but the guys also knew, you know, if there was something of significance they’d wake me, even if I was on my sleep shift.

34:23 However, they were also, um, I’d given them the basic autofocus function, and that’s the other great thing about these new handicams, you know, they get a pretty good image if you whack it on auto and you don’t know what you’re doing. So I could hand those cameras to those guys at certain times, and they could, 50% of the time, they’d capture something I might miss. Okay, so I think we caught pretty much everything. Have you looked at any of the footage yet?

34:45 I’ve been through the rushes, and it’s undoubtedly the best thing I’ve ever shot, really, undoubtedly. I can’t wait to see it. And you beat the previous world record by 23 hours, is that right? Yeah, I… that was, was that on your mind after 57 days, or were you just like f***ing hell? I just want to get… you got two records, right?

35:01 Yeah, first, uh, first row across the Indian Ocean by first row across any ocean by a three-man team, and it was the speed. Fastest. I’ve now got… well, we broke the Indian. The Atlantic was the fastest row across the Atlantic Ocean, and now the fastest row across the Indian Ocean. The Atlantic’s subsequently being beaten.

35:17 The Indian is a new world record, and that record won’t last long, you know. As I say, we had very strong wind, 25 knots on our back, you know, most days apart from a few days when we were on Sanka, and that made it very uncomfortable on board, because you were constantly wet, almost to the point where you want to cry when you wake up, and you know you’re on shift in 10 minutes, and you look out and it’s absolutely hailing it down, and you try to pull on wet underwear that you’ve been wearing solidly for two weeks, and then put wet, you know, nylon trousers on over those, or, you know, Merino wool pants, and then soaking wet waterproofs for no purpose whatsoever that are just so stain full of salt that they’ve lost any breathability. And it’s really demoralizing.

35:59 That’s on the Atlantic, that’s on the Indian. The Indian, oh yeah. But you know, the weather was just like that constantly, but the benefit was that, you know, as a result of all that bad weather we went fast. Okay, so that’s a trade-off. Yeah.

36:11 And you survived on chocolate for the last 10 days? Like, seriously? Yeah, we still did have some food left, but we were rowing extra shifts, all three of us, uh, and you’re just craving, uh, fast-release energy, and you often don’t have time to cook a meal. The weather was so bad. There were times where I tried to make myself… you know, I hadn’t eaten for like 12 hours, and I tried to make myself this little bit of space food.

36:35 It’s, like, you know, chicken-flavored slop, and you add desalinated seawater to it, and then you stir it up, and it’s like, you know, 1,500 calories or something. We, we, you know, we existed on a diet that was upward of almost 9,000 calories a day. I’m still in a calorie deficit of 2 or 3,000 calories a day, so we’re emaciated. The skipper barely managed to eat a meal for two weeks. So, you know, he looks like he’s just come out of, you know, a labour camp or something.

37:00 He’s in such a bad way. And I finally managed to make this meal, and I put down a chocolate bar that’s completely water, you know, stained with saltwater, and I’m just like, oh, proper food. Whoosh, big wave comes in and everything just goes overboard. Your whole, your whole meal goes. Ah, the whole meal just goes, and you just want a… so how do you mentally keep it together, like, when you’re physically drained and you’re not getting, you know, the right food in?

37:25 And I mean, like, the human brain is remarkably adaptable, and, um, this is where your survival instinct kicks in, because you know that somewhere at the other side of that ocean there is somebody waiting who loves you, with a cold beer and a warm bed, and the little things that you take for granted, like turning on a tap, suddenly holds so much resonance. At, you know, the minute you step off and you turn that tap on and you run your hand on the running water that’s warm, or you step under a shower and you watch the dirt just wash down the drain. You appreciate life so much more.

37:58 And whilst you’re on the boat, you hold on to those little moments of joy, uh, that you manage to engender between each other, and particularly, you know, myself and Lar. We bonded very, very closely. Never a bad word spoken between either of us. I’d bought one cigar and a half-litre, a little half-litre bottle of whiskey, and we made that damn bottle of whiskey last 57 days, and we made that cigar last about four weeks, and we’d just smoke a couple of puffs each, and now we’d smoke it out, and suddenly we’d be like, full of the joys of spring for the next, you know, four or five hours.

38:37 And you know, we’d have these romantic moments together, where I’d come out on night shift and he’d be like, I’ve made you some food, and you’d just be like, thank you, brother, thank you, and you’d eat together, and then he’d be like, should we have a bit of whiskey? And I remember looking out and being like, there’s a rainbow. It’s 1:00 in the morning. What is that? And there’s this, like, moonbow that’s illuminated.

38:56 There’s so little light pollution that you’ve got the stars and the moon illuminating this clear rainbow, and you just sat there, and you pour the whiskey into the cap, and you just sip out of the cap of whiskey, and you’re just like, oh, that felt good, and you feel the warmth in your loins, and you warm up a little, and then he, he buggers off to bed, and it’s the start of my two-hour rowing shift, and you plug some good music in and, um, and it passes a whole lot quicker. Sounds just like, you know, we talk about psychedelic experiences here a lot, and, and part of that is because you don’t really have near-death experiences, but you go to some uncomfortable places and you come back, and yeah, the little things are really precious to you. So how much of something like that is a really deeply life-changing experience?

39:36 And was this more so than the Atlantic? It sounds like it. I think it was less commer camaraderie. I mean, did you have to, really? Yeah, I mean, I, um, was physically more depleted on the Atlantic, and maybe that changed me more because I hadn’t experienced it before.

39:52 But also, when I came on to the Indian I was in kind of a rough place. I’d just come out of another relationship, because it’s really difficult dating the guy who’s at the other side of the world for three months of a year. And, um, so I I was looking for some spiritual solace. What’s frightening is just how quickly you fall back into everyday life. You know, you step on dry land, you’ve got a thousand emails, and you know, somebody likes your comment on Facebook, and you know you’re suddenly readily accessible again to the world, and it’s really important that you step back and think about what you just did and where you were and what you went through and how you want to be a better person as a result of that experience, because I… because I do, I really genuinely do.

40:30 But there’s a chance of you losing it and not remembering those lessons you learned. Yeah, you know, I… the first day I came back into London I was you know, losing my temper because I was stuck in bad traffic, and I just remember thinking, what am I doing? You know, I didn’t lose my temper when that boat nearly hit us. I didn’t lose my temper when I thought we got holes in the boat. This is dodgy, we need to start trying to seal these up.

40:50 In an impossible environment I just got on and did it, because I had to do it to survive. And you can’t, you know, you can’t extrapolate sometimes, and it’s just so easy to get wound up by the small things. I mean, certainly, certainly for me, I think I’m, you know, I have that type of a personality, and sometimes, you know, I allow the little things in life to get under my… under my skin. Um, but you know, I reflect back. Do you have, uh, like, post-trip depression?

41:18 Almost. Sometimes, no, I don’t think I do. Um, I’m just so happy, right, to be alive, and I… I actually love dry land. I get very bad seasickness, ironically.

41:28 Um, does that pass after a certain amount of time, or is it… it does, but in a big storm you’re still going to feel a little bit dodgy. But you know, you’re only physically vomiting for maybe a week. The skipper was real bad. You know, he and I had it pretty rough, and there’s nothing much worse than getting sea sickness where you’re not on a ferry, and you know you’ll be there in eight hours. You’re just like, this is it, this is my life for weeks.

41:50 You know, that’s really demoralizing. So when you know, I love… I love coffee, for example. Like, I’m drinking this Bulletproof now, and I’m thinking one of life’s little joys, and it’s the same about good food or a good bottle of wine, and I’m, you know, I’m taking time to appreciate those. I I get pre-trip depression, where I know what I’m about to go through, and but only because you’ve done it before.

42:12 Only because, yeah, I’m… I’m often with guys who are planning to trek to the South Pole. I’m, you know, I’m doing an Antarctic expedition in February, or these guys who were jet-skiing London to Sydney, and they’ll be like, my God, this is going to be amazing, and I’m like, it is going to be amazing, but you’re going to enjoy it until you’re looking at the photos, or I’m editing the footage and reliving the experience again. In the moment it’s a lot of it’s going to suck.

42:35 So you’re getting ready, like, this is going to be a really hard thing. It’s not going to be the most fun, and I’m living at the gym, and I’m listening to audiobooks on mindfulness and how I’m going to, you know, handle conflict, because I know there’s going to be moments where people who you could never imagine having an argument with, right? Like Colin and I, right? He’s such a chilled-out guy, the most chilled-out person on the planet is going to lose their temper on an ocean row when they’ve been trying to pee into a bottle for 40 minutes, but they can’t get anything out because you’re moving so much.

43:05 You’re just, you’re so exasperated and frustrated all the time, or even worse, your pee bottle’s leaked all over your sleeping bag. You know, these are just the kind of things that get you down. It’s just a normal day. It’s Steward, you know, you’ve got a crap in a bucket, and you’ve just put on fresh boxer shorts, um, for the first time in two weeks, and that you’re desperate to keep them dry. It is life and death, because you put those boxer shorts on and they get wet, you’re going to get saltwater wounds.

43:32 They’re going to get deeper and deeper, and they can go down to the bone, and you can get septicemia, and you can die. You know, it’s really important, you’ve got very little toilet roll. We ran out of toilet roll in the Atlantic. You end up wiping your rear with your hand, uh, and then trying to wash it off with seawater, so you want to keep yourself dry. And then you sit on that bucket, and it’s flat calm, and just as you’re rapidly trying to get, you know, make that ecstatic movement from bowel to bow, nature intervenes and just drenches you in saltwater, and it really winds you up.

44:03 So everybody loses their temper, and, uh, it’s, you know, it’s just one of those things you’ve just got to prepare yourself for. All right, when can we watch this? And then, and just to go back, what’s the dynamic? Was this trip funded? Are you going to have to fund it by selling it to someone like the BBC?

44:17 Will this be a documentary film? What’s the next step? Cuz I, I know a lot of people listening are probably filmmakers, and or want to be filmmakers. Yeah, this is where, you know, as I say, the industry is changing, because you know, you take this idea and pitch it to a broadcaster now, and unless it’s got some naked blonde who’s, you know, a D-list star, and she’s, you know, being covered in insects in a forest somewhere for our viewing pleasure, they’re just not really interested.

44:41 And the adventure field is something that unless you’re a well-known household name, I don’t think they often want to run with. So more often than not, it’s the sponsors of an expedition who will align a part of their budget to pay for the film, because that’s a way that they can see they can derive value from sponsoring an expedition in the first place. So Max, who has various sponsors in the Middle East, uh, he allotted a certain element of that to the production of the film, and then we, you know, have a separate relationship with regards to the distribution of that film.

45:11 So, stretching back to when I made The Virgin Trade, a film that I made when I was 21, with very little experience, and no one was willing to take a punt on me. I managed to raise some money privately, and I ended up making a film that was quite a unique perspective of a young Western couple, uh, filming, you know, in the brothels of Thailand for a year, with, like, 100 hours of footage. We had like a 100-to-1 shooting ratio on that film. It’s like Apocalypse Now.

45:35 Yeah, um, we ended up creating a film that people ended up wanting to buy. And that’s what I would say to any filmmakers who were listening, you know, particularly if you’ve not made anything before: you’ve just got to go out and do it. You’ve just got to go out and make it, because no one’s going to really put much money into you until you’ve done that, and then you can take the film to the various film markets and the festivals, like Cannes, and that’s where you can align yourself with a sales agent who will stop you getting bullied by distributors, and you’ll be able to find a market for your film that way.

46:01 Okay. And what’s going to happen with your footage? What? Yeah, I’m, uh, actually speaking to, uh, the funders tomorrow at noon, um, to, you know, sort out the post-production budget. It’s a limited budget, but inevitably these experiences are, to some degree, a labour of love.

46:16 It’ll cover my costs, and we’ll, you know, we’ll recruit the rest in distribution. So it should be finished by the end of the year. Is it a doc or series? Three-part series, half hour each, for broadcast, which, like, 24 minutes each. And where will it possibly be seen?

46:33 Like, what kind of channels? Nat Geo Middle East, uh, have expressed interest, because of Max, who is quite a popular figure there. He’s been on a Discovery series about his ascent of Everest, and, um, you know, he’s very well known out there. But then, like, the documentary channel in the US gets a lot of my stuff. In the US, quite big in Scandinavia, but in theory this, uh, UK as well.

46:53 They’re a tough market, like Germany for terrestrial broadcast. It tends to be more the satellite commissioners. Current TV did a lot of docs in the UK. Al Jazeera even commissioned a lot of great docs these days. They’re quite independently minded, but what’s great about it from a filmmaker’s perspective is there are almost limitless territories for you to exploit.

47:12 You know, every country you can sell to, and the budgets you get off them for acquisitions are smaller, but there are more of them. Okay, everyone’s talking these days about how, you know, movies are going on demand, and the web is bringing this whole new market, but all you’re talking really is TV. I mean, is there any money if you were to broadcast it online? Yeah, one of my great film um film making friends, Claudio von Planta, who shot The Long Way Down, A Long Way Around, with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman.

47:36 He introduced Colin and I. How we met. Yeah, that’s crazy. Those guys, he’s like, you know, a god in the industry for me, and he’s a bit of an entrepreneur himself, so he started using, uh, Vimeo, uh, online distribution mechanism and he’s, you know, he’s got enough of a following. I think that works for him.

47:55 Perhaps I don’t. I think I think social media is one area that I’m not up to scratch on as much as I should be, so I tend to go, I guess, a more traditional route. But certainly that’s the way it’s going, and there’s people with massive followings, obviously, on YouTube and Vimeo, and they’re the ones who are going to be able to exploit that and monetize it. Yeah, that’s the whole key, I think. It’s just having that audience to pay a pound or five pounds or whatever it is, because again there’s so much noise online, there’s so much content, that if you don’t have that audience to blast it out to, then it’s tough.

48:26 It’s tough. You guys are going to do with the Indie Ride? Yes. We’ll sell it to a broadcaster, and then we give it to a distributor, but our audience isn’t big enough to make any money really on digital downloads, so we’ll have it as an option. Yeah, down the road, but our audience isn’t big enough to make any money on that at the beginning.

48:45 Right. Yeah, it’s amazing how many people just won’t pay the five bucks or the five pounds, even at a reduced rate. Yeah, for, yeah, cuz there’s just so much, you know… we come on that with London Real all the time. It’s 90 minutes long, and a lot of people have so many other options.

48:57 And like you said, a lot of it is, you know, put a blonde on your trip, and then it’s a different story, or, you know, there’s certain things that sell in the media. We know from BBC and Sky, which is why I don’t watch TV anymore. It’s just this story, you know, and everything has to be kind of kitschy and so formulaic. You know, okay, you’ve got good examples. There are people who are fans of some of the, um, you know, talent shows, where you get people who’ve got incredible voices, and it becomes a… for them to demonstrate their skills.

49:24 You know, The X Factor season started again. None of us will be able to avoid it, um, but then, well, I’ll do my best, but then there’s about it, there’s the show, like, uh, you know, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, and the new, um, Channel 5 version of Big Brother, and for me it just seems to be that it’s an opportunity to, like, humiliate people for our viewing pleasure, and there’s something a little bit sinister about that. Let’s take this girl, who, you know, okay, she’s a bit of a celebrity but not enough that she’s able to make a living on another TV show.

49:54 She’s having to go and eat insects and have a bucket of slugs thrown over her, like that. There’s something I find that a little disturbing about that. Um, unfortunately, that’s the way TV, all, all the shows too now are like eight people. Right? Like, I talked to a broadcaster in the US, and they were like, that’s what we’re really going for, like eight personalities, so that they can just cut, cut, cut, and there’s never a down, always some kind of weird and there, such engendered conflict.

50:20 Well, what happens if we take an Islamist and a white neo-Nazi and put them in the Big Brother house together? Well, I wonder what’s going to happen when Big Brother, that, those two row the ocean, that’d be a talk. Well, you know, when Big Brother came out, though, it was it was, um, it was a novel and unique idea. It was more organic, you know, if they did it, if they… it was if it was a Postcode Lottery, and they just picked out a National Insurance number and put eight people in a house.

50:44 Great, I’d be all for it, but they don’t, right? All right, I’m taking you off the boat for a second. You, I saw that your first movie was called The Virgin Trade, and, uh, it sounds like he spent a year in Thailand, you know, in the brothel, and I just want to hear a little bit about it, and I was wondering if that was a really hard thing to be a part of, day in and day out, and if that got you down, or did it make you feel hopeful for some reason? Uh, both.

51:05 I was there with my then girlfriend, uh, who still has a shareholding in my business, which, uh, she’s since moved on, and had gone on to work on all the Harry Potter films. She’s driving David Yates, the director, around in a golf buggy for a few years, and now she works on The Muppets Movie, and all these big 35mm films. Um, but you know, we have a great social relationship now. But you know, as a couple living in Thailand making a film about the sex trade and the exploitation of, um, some of the women there, that you placed great, uh, pressure on us as a couple, and what we were filming really was the migration of young girls from rural Southeast Asia to Bangkok, where they’re coerced into the sex trade, and Bangkok was often acting as a sort of central hub.

51:50 So girls are, and if you’ll excuse the crude terminology, they’re imported from poor areas and then they’re exported to wealthy places like Japan or Europe. Um, but what we didn’t expect to find was that there was also quite a lot of men who would be very embarrassed by the prospect of being seen walking hand in hand with a prostitute in London, but they’re more than happy to be seen walking down the road holding hands with a girl who works in a bar somewhere in Bangkok, and often they fall in love, and often they marry and have children and live happily ever after. So it was much more of a grey area than we’d anticipated.

52:26 We were going in as 21-year-olds who wanted to demonstrate, yeah, demonstrate the plight of all of these young girls. Right? I met some women who worked in a bank, but they didn’t want to work in a bank anymore, because they could earn more money working in a bar. The idea of prostitution is very black and white in Europe, that prostitution is a transaction. Anytime money is involved, um, it is prostitution.

52:47 In Thailand and in Southeast Asia more generally, it’s much more about agency and control. So, to a Thai woman, a prostitute is someone who is literally tied to a bed. And you know, this happens a lot less now. In Thailand the government has really come down hard on prostitution, but there were brothels, you know, where women were literally, you know, handcuffed to beds in abandoned hotels. Um, and so, if a woman chooses who she goes with, and frequently the girls will say, I’m not interested in that guy, in the bars, then they don’t view that as prostitution.

53:17 They’re making a willful choice, and so often also the age gap that you tend to see with older men with younger women is often viewed in Southeast Asia as more acceptable, because there’s a complementary idea there, where a young woman can physically provide for an older man, and he can financially provide for a younger woman. So the Thais are interesting, because they don’t have this overarching morality that’s kind of shoved down your throat in the West, where it’s like, this is wrong and this is right. And in Thailand, you know, they’ve acknowledged the third sex, the ladyboy, as something for thousands of years.

53:48 They just, like, it’s just something that happens, and then they don’t seem to make moral judgments on the things that we do. A lot of times, exactly, the ladyboys are, are they sort of third sex? And boundaries are more fluid, I suppose. That’s what I actually, you know, I really loved about the place. It was very, very, um, you know, made some incredibly open people, and the Thais were very, very welcoming.

54:10 It was, it was up in the hill tribes and in the north where we experienced the things that were most traumatic and hard to deal with, and that’s where there was great charities like DEPDC working there to try and prevent young girls getting into prostitution, and often what you were finding was that, um, it was predominantly Japanese clientele who were coming over looking for virgins, and they would go up into the hill tribes, and, you know, there was these charities there that were providing contraception for girls, because the HIV rates were still, you know, quite high in hill tribes, and they were also teaching the girls Japanese. But you tended to find that a lot of the sponsors for those charities were US-based religious organizations, and they would remove the funding from charities, because they were just looking for people to outlaw the sex trade.

54:59 You know, they stop the sex trade, and you can’t stop the sex trade. It’s always been there. So what these charities were trying to do was provide the best conditions and working environments for the women involved, and I thought that was a fairly reasonable approach to take. Is there a market for virgins? I mean, is there some premium, weird market out there?

55:17 Ab, absolutely. Yeah, and, and as I say, it was predominantly, we found, with Japanese clientele, but they, you know, they have the money. Or maybe it’s a cult, they’ll pay a hell of a lot of money for some 14-year-old, you know, virgin of the hill tribes, and her value goes down after that, wow, to the point, you know, where she’s worth virtually nothing at all. And that’s what’s traumatic. The HIV rates have come down.

55:38 Thailand still to this date, as far as I know, is the only country that has a condom that is tailored to the Thai penis. You know, you had a situation where the UK and the US were channeling massive amounts of free contraception and condoms to Thailand, but nobody was wearing them. And there was a half-Scottish, half-Thai gentleman who wanted to put some research into this and find out what on earth was going on. So he paid lots of Thai prostitutes and bar girls to measure Thai penises, because everybody knows that if you submit data and you get people to fill in a questionnaire, they’ll lie.

56:16 They’ll add an inch in girth and length, and so he paid these girls to get real, real statistics and real data, and found out that the reason they weren’t wearing these condoms is because they were slipping off. So we said, okay, well, what’s a Thai penis look like? And he found out the exact data for it, and they shaped the Thai condom to fit, and you know, three years later the HIV rates had dropped by like 70%. That’s innovation. Wow, I’m glad someone figured that out.

56:44 They have, they run a restaurant chain there called Cabbages and Condoms, and the idea was that still, culturally, in the hill tribes people were embarrassed to talk about sex, so they had to make condoms as readily available as the cabbages in the market, which were the biggest vegetable that everybody ate. So you get a condom instead of an after-dinner mint. And you know, it’s a very clever idea. That’s smart. Wow.

57:04 Now, did you take this film and kind of you know, base your career on it? Did you get some exposure and meet the right people? Or, I did. Yes. Um, at the time I’d been offered a place at grad school back in the US, and at the same time I’d sent letters to probably a thousand companies whose share price had grown in the UK, saying, come on, I’m a young filmmaker.

57:22 Invest in me. And, um, I’d had like three replies, and one guy gave me like 10 grand, and it was a bit of a punt for him, and, uh, you know, I used that to buy equipment and made this film, and we you know, we went to the UN film festival, and we did quite well in sales actually. I made more from that film than the two films that followed, because I think at that stage trafficking had become a kind of sexy issue. Okay. It’s just, really, trafficking is just movement plus exploitation, but you know, we were at the right time at the right place, I think, with that, and so that was a stepping stone, but I still had to make my next two films you know, without a commissioning agent.

58:01 It wasn’t until after that the commissioning agent started to fund me to go and make films. Okay, do you miss, um, the West Coast? Do you miss LA? Do you miss the film industry there? I, I do.

58:11 I love LA. You know, I went, took that film back there to find a distributor. I was living in Echo Park, this kind of little sleepy area, and I bought a car like something out of CAD Shack for like $800, and um, what were you doing in LA exactly? Uh, well, the first time I was there, I went there to work for 20th Century Fox. I was interning for Weekend Films, who were a subsidiary on the Fox lot, and then I was script reading at Paramount Classics, which is like the art house department of, um, Paramount, and that was an eye-opening experience, because you were seeing scripts like Monster’s Ball, you know, wins best, you know, win Oscar, not sure best Oscar, but won Oscars and best actors and stuff.

58:46 You read the coverage on that movie, and it got slated, and I think, God, it’s such a subjective industry, and it’s so easy for the guys who are working in somewhere like Paramount to say, are the scripts naff to pass on? It’s a big leap of faith for them to say, yeah, this one’s one we want to invest in. And it’s just a few guys making the decisions there. Is that true? Yeah, it’s really, you know, you were just a filter, essentially, saying, I was a filter.

59:12 Yeah, but I was saying, this is good, and then someone else would read the final, and that, yeah, and that was a wonderful experience for me, because I was reading a script today for like three months, you know, and I, I felt I had the freedom, because, you know, it wasn’t my job, didn’t depend on it, and when you’re 21 you don’t think about that anyway. To say, I think this is a great script, and, you know, then I pass the script on, and the script reader comes back, he’d be like, what a joke, that’s crazy, you know, that script’s terrible, it’s a piece of s***, and then you hear that it’s won at Sundance, you know. And I thought, well, hang on, here, if I want to start making movies, and ultimately I want to make 35mm feature films, which is why I’m so excited about these technological advances that we’re seeing now, I might have to do this solo, and I think independent film is is, um, you know, is the way I’m going to go.

59:59 You know, Matt Damon was. Interview with him recently, and he said he was driving with his dad up New York City for like 20 or 30 blocks, looking at all the movie posters, and his dad turned to him and said, this is not one of those movies I want to see, and Matt said, that’s cuz they’re not for you. You know, all these movies are targeting this really young audience, you know, 15 to 25. That’s where the money is, the blockbuster, the summer stuff. I mean, as an independent filmmaker, how does that make you feel, you know, knowing that the film you want to make doesn’t necessarily have that market?

1:00:26 Well, I go to the Cannes film festival most years, uh, initially as a sort of networking event, more now as a kind of chance to blow out with friends from the industry, but there’s always that demoralizing moment the day after. You know, you’re walking out of a party and the sun’s rising, and you can see the street sweepers along the side of the road, and there’s just scripts just everywhere. You know, where some, it’s such a great visual imagery. There’s all these guys who were just like, you know, passing their scripts to producers, and producers like, yeah, read it, and onto the side of the road, and I thought, yeah, I want to, I’m not going to swear.

1:01:00 I don’t know whether this is PG radio, but I, I was like, God damn it, I do not want to be one of those guys desperately chasing other people to make my movie. I want to make my movie myself. And you know, what, initially I didn’t have the money in the budget, uh, now I’ve, I’ve got a little bit more money to play with. I certainly didn’t have the technical expertise either, but now I’m, you know, I’m a competent DP. I do a lot of music videos and commercials as well, and I can call in a lot of favors from friends, and the one thing that’s holding me back now, the only thing, is that, you know, it’s a big investment in time, it’s still a big investment in money, and you probably only get one shot, so you have to make it count.

1:01:37 So, you know, although I could go out and probably make a film tomorrow and take six months off if I needed to. Um, do I have the script yet that I want to do that with? No, I don’t. You have one shot, cuz of your reputation, because you can call in those, only rep your reputation. You can only call those favors in once.

1:01:52 Some guys, you know, I have producers and contacts still remaining out, you know, exec producers in LA and here in the UK that I could call to read a script, but they’re only going to do that favor for me one time. Yeah, so I have to think very carefully about it. So you’re constantly in the back of your mind looking for that one script that maybe you want to direct one day, or DP on, or produce. Yeah, and in the meantime I’m happy shooting other people’s films for them, and, you know, trying to stop their dreams being crushed.

1:02:17 So often I, you know, I come in and I fix scripts, and I’ll, I’ll, you know, shoot low-budget features too, because as you know, people are shooting them on all sorts of cameras and formats now. Yeah. How do you feel about that? I mean, anyone can get their hands on a Canon 5D, so anyone can make a feature film. Is there too much out there?

1:02:36 Well, you know, Vimeo and YouTube are absolutely packed with films that are shot on a 50mm prime at 1.4. You know, everyone’s become obsessed with the depth of field. Look, you know, it’s going away now, right? Yeah, thank God. You know, it’s become a cliché, and you know, what’s the result of that democratization?

1:02:53 Yeah, there’s an awful lot more crap on the internet, but would I change that? Not for the world, because it used to be an exclusive club, and now it’s not. So, if your idea is good, what is going to be the thing that separates you? It’s either going to be, like, um, Colin suggested the fact that you’ve got a lot of followers, and it’s going to be the fact that you can get it out to a lot of people. Or it’s going to be you’ve got a great idea and a great story that’s well realized, and if you’ve got that, I still think, you know, you’ve got something to play with, even without a marketing budget.

1:03:24 I mean, we see films, as these days, that are got 60 million for the film and 60 million for marketing. I mean, is that a standard Hollywood thing? Is 100% of the budget… you know, there are people who will say, I’m sure there are great films made every year that no one sees, and that’s the case, but if you’ve got it, you know, enough people and enough passion, um, I, you know, I still think your chances are pretty good. But then that’s coming from somebody who’s only ever done it from the sidelines, on other people’s films, not with my, you know, with taken.

1:03:47 I’ve never taken a project and self-distributed it before. Right? Uh, I’m relying on the fact that I do have some contacts to, uh, help accomplish that with. But you know, is marketing, you know, probably going to be the biggest part of the budget for my film? Yes, you know, that that will realistically be the case.

1:04:02 Now, yeah, it’s so important to get that. I mean, you know, if the tree falls in the woods and no one hears it. Yeah, the film you want to make, though, is that so? You said you’re looking for a script. Are you looking, or are you actually want a pen one?

1:04:13 Well, uh, I have a script. I have, I have two scripts, but one of them, I’ve come to the realization, it can’t be a first film, because it’s shot in the South Pacific, based on my experiences there with, you know, another expedition, and just logistically it’s, uh, kind of a more difficult, uh, thing to realize. I want, you know, a film that’s shot on location in the UK, uh, you know, probably in a limited amount of locations, and that’s, um, that makes things more difficult, but it also forces you to be more creative.

1:04:43 You know, you get films like that, the one recently where the entire movie was shot in a, in a, in a CO box. You know, phone booth. That’s the, the old classic, you know, all one shot. Recently, all in a coffin. So, see that seen that one.

1:04:58 Who’s in there? Only one guy, I guess. No, I don’t even know. And just, just one thing I remember once being a part of a radio calling for the guys who did the marketing for, um, what’s the movie called where they all go out into the forest, The Blair Witch Project, which was shot on a nothing budget, right? And somebody said, you know, that’s one of those massive successes, right?

1:05:19 Yeah. How did you guys get the marketing? How did the marketing work for that? And the guy said, the stars will never be aligned the same way again. There was just so much luck involved.

1:05:29 There was no kind of… it was a curious alchemy. There was no magic formula. Yeah, there was that movie as well, like Paranormal Activity, you know, that was another one that was just aligned. And then what is it, Spielberg, Spielberg. He watched it, and then apparently he got locked in his bathroom the next day and couldn’t open the door, and he was like, okay, something’s weird, weird going on.

1:05:48 And then, you know, they were going to remake it, but you know, they didn’t. So I think you’re right, as far as, like, making your first film has to be big, big, you have to put your passion into it. It has to be realistic, and you have to shoot what you know, you know. So, but, but what that’s where I feel like I have quite a unique advantage point, because I’ve seen a lot of really crazy things that a lot of people get excited about, but not a lot of people have ever experienced, so that’s something, you know, I, I use to my advantage.

1:06:14 Going back to, like, someone who meets you, you know, in the pub. I mean, like you said earlier, you’re not an adrenaline junkie. You’re not the guy from, um, Point Break, you know, that’s constantly looking for the next buzz, like Robin Banks and stuff. But, uh, I mean, is that not you? Do you not like extreme activity?

1:06:30 Is it really, if, if it’s off camera, are you not doing it? Well, like, you know, I, I want to come back alive, and maybe, maybe the biggest of adrenaline junkies are willing, uh, are willing to die for that buzz, and I’m really not, you know. And I think every time I go away and do something like this, I remember thinking to myself, I’m not one to die for this. I’m not willing to take any chances that I don’t think are controlled, and, and all the expeditions I’ve been a part of, there’s a pretty big list of contingencies that you have, um, at your disposal.

1:07:06 You know, there’s always, there’s always, it feels like there’s always some route out. And all right, I know that, you know, that there are risky endeavors, um, but I, I think of adrenaline junkies like being those crazy guys who jump off cliffs in the bat outfits, you know, and guys have died. Yeah, they make a, they make a a moment’s, millisecond mistake, and they clip anything at that speed, and they are dead. You know, I make mistakes, you know, but if I make it, if I take a wrong foot on a, you know, on a boat, I might start to fall overboard, but as long as I remember to clip in, or, you know, as long as I can swim back to the boat, I’ve got, I’ve got a fighting chance.

1:07:41 And you could say, you know, I could fall down a crevasse in Antarctica, but as long as I’m chained up to the rest of my crew, you know, I’ll do everything I can to stay safe. And it’s not the adrenaline bit that, that, that gets me. It’s, um, it’s not a moment’s buzz. It’s, it’s about the, the overarching feeling that I get, um, at the end of the whole experience, and a lot of people say it is, like, like the buzz you get from doing drugs, right? And I, you know, I’ve never taken drugs, so, I, recreationally, I don’t have, don’t have that comparison to make, but I can’t explain to you that the utter euphoria and the sense of sort of emotional, uh, release that you get at the end of something like that, and it, it doesn’t pass by a second.

1:08:26 You know, it stays with you for quite some time, because you look in the mirror, and you realize that you’ve changed, and you’re a different person because of that experience. Now, if you don’t do one of these in two years, will you start getting anxiety? It seems like maybe that’s where you’re right, and I, I, I’m not self-aware enough to know that perhaps I am an adrenaline junkie, because there tends to be a little gap, and I go back home and I return to my normal life, and I say I’ll never do that again, and I’ve said I’ll never row another ocean, right?

1:08:53 I’ve rowed two oceans, and I’ve sailed the Pacific as part of the round-the-world yacht race, and I was like, I am done. And the day I got back, I received an email from this young guy who’s just, he’s exactly that type. I’m thinking, a row in the Pacific, it’s going to take a year, it’s going to be amazing, and I’m like, you can fly me out to Hawaii, I’ll come and meet you in Australia. I am not rowing that ocean. And Lar was like, you’ll row that ocean.

1:09:15 You know, he just phoned me up, and he’s like, you’re going to row the, row the Pacific with me. And I thought, man, am I really going to do that? Surely a year is just too long. Do you, you only, after a great trip, you often, like, six months later, you only remember the good, the good part. Exactly.

1:09:34 And the bad parts. Yeah, and the bad parts just kind of flutter away, and then all of a sudden you’re back at it again, and you’re like, oh, this fu… it’s, it’s exactly what we’re saying about how the mind only categorizes the good stuff, and then, because how do you define that experience when you get home? You talk about all the good things, and you talk about all the bad things, and you get the same amazed response from either of those, uh, you know, initial conversations.

1:09:58 So even the bad things, like the s*** in a bucket, or, you know, almost falling overboard, get wide-eyed amazement from people, and I suppose incrementally over a month, that, you know, gives you some inflated sense of ego, or something. I don’t know what it must do to us. But then you start to think, yeah, that was a great experience. I got to do that again. Yeah, like they say, tragedy plus time equals comedy.

1:10:20 Just that’s true, and then like our brains, not only do we remember those highlights, but we actually rewrite our own history of what happened, and so you recall maybe a couple peak events, and you’ll even weave it together in a different way, 5 years, 10 years from now. That’s what’s so wonderful about the editorial part, because you get to live the experience again, um, but more objectively, to an extent, and you get to see what happened through an editor’s eyes, with other people around you, and you think, ah, actually, God, I was, you know, well out of line with that line of argument I took, given the situation, or, you know, I should have really put my foot down about that. And, um, you know, that’s, uh, you know, life aboard a boat or in any expedition.

1:11:03 You’re not always thinking clearly, and, uh, you know, I remember one of the mantras I had was, look, if I’m going to lose my temper about anything, I’m not going to do it in the moment. I’m going to wait and think about it, and then I’m going to come out and say, listen, this is why I’m angry with you for X, Y, or Z. And that served me really, really well, because there was times I wanted to let rip, you know, Skipper about certain things, and instead I went away, and I might not have slept well, and I might have been exhausted on my next shift, but I was able to, uh, more appropriately articulate my point.

1:11:33 And often I knew what his answer was going to be, and I was, I was able to sort of, like, already have an answer in response to that, so that I kept, you know, winning these debates about things, and, you know, getting my way by, by taking that, that approach. Has anyone said that you shouldn’t edit this, or have you ever thought to yourself, I should really, how many, how many hours of footage? If you didn’t edit it, I think we’ve got about 40 on this one, something like that.

1:11:58 Have you ever thought about giving it to someone else? And having thought, and I will have other editors. They’ll just be guys who work for me, so, um, you know, work with me. I should say they’re all freelance. You know, some great editors, and I will bring them in to, uh, to work on this, so that I get a fresh set of eyes, and I’ll, I’ll more kind of oversee it.

1:12:18 It’s tricky, cuz it’s so tricky, cuz you’re, you’re an integral part of the adventure, too close to it, but then you need someone close to it sometimes to feel the passion of it. Yeah, there’s a moment, you know, there’s moments where the drama centers around something I’ve said or done, and I certainly shouldn’t be responsible for editing that. You know, we had this whole big conundrum that we knew we needed some external shots of the boat, um, but we were moving along at a rapid pace, and obviously there are shark fins cutting through the water all the time, because, you know, human waste is a blood derivative, and we’re, you know, there’s food in the form of feces going overboard, and it’s hugely attractive to sharks.

1:12:53 Right? And there’s little feeding on the barnacles, being fed on by Spanish mackerel and dorado, being fed on by sharks. So those fins are there most of the time, and then when they’re like, right, we need some external shots of the boat, so you need to paddle away with three miles of water beneath you, knowing full well that oceanic whitetips don’t come at you from the side. They come vertically up and swallow you almost to the chest, you know. Who’s going to do that?

1:13:16 And they’re like, you know, the skipper had agreed that he was going to do it, and then he changed his mind, and because he was upset with me, because I said that I was going to format… I was going to back up all the footage before we went, and he was like, you don’t trust me, and I’m like, you know, it wouldn’t matter if you were a diver, I’d back up this footage, because I don’t want to lose anything. He refused to go, so I was like, right, right, that’s it, then I’m going, and, you know, the other guys there filming us both going at it, uh, and I think more than anything, you know, I was probably out of line there as well, and I, I was just angry, because I didn’t want to get in that water and swim out with those sharks.

1:13:49 But you did. But I had to. Yeah, of course I had to, to get the shot. Yeah, I’ve had, I’ve, I’ve had two experiences with sharks on prior shoots, one of which I would say was a near miss. So, um, although, you know, I think they’re incredible creatures, it’s their domain.

1:14:05 There’s a lot of guys I know who have had, you know, experiences as divers, or whatever, or even been lifetime mariners, that don’t like sharks, and, um, you know, I, I think I fall into that category. You know, you got a close call. Yeah, in the South Pacific once, I was filming a boat cut, cut over reef, and I did about three or four passes, and I was scuba diving, and there was no fish anywhere, and I’d been washed against the reef, and I’d cut my leg, you know, quite, quite badly on this reef.

1:14:32 Hadn’t really even noticed it. It cut right through my wetsuit, and then when I got to the surface, my dive partner was just like, Stuart, I need you to bring your ankles to your chest. I bring, you bring your legs to your chest, and I turned around and went, oh s*** off, you know. I, I thought he was kidding, or I wanted to think he was kidding, and he was like, Stuart, do it now, I’m not joking with you. And I was just like, where is it?

1:14:54 Tell me where it is. You don’t know, you don’t need to know where it is. You just need, where is it? Right beneath you. And even though there’s no fish, there was this huge big, you know, white tip shark there that was, uh, you know, sort of swimming around me whilst I’m bleeding out.

1:15:10 And, uh, and I looked away to where we’d… the little life, the little, um, speedboat. We had a little rib with us, and we’d been swept so far with the current, it was like 400 meters away or something, and I just had to kind of backflip all the way to this, to this little rib, to try and clamber back in, and it was one of the longest, you know, three minutes of my life while it just, you know, came after me. And when we got to that boat, I tried to clamber in, almost brought the boat over on top of myself, and this Tongan guy who was in it jumped into the water and just started slapping the surface and shouting, and the shark just kind of swam off, and he was like, a, just treat him like a bad dog, just a bad dog.

1:15:52 And I was just like, you’re my hero. Made yourself into a ball, because they’re less likely to bite if your legs are dangling. You know, that’s, uh, you know, you’re less easy to bite if you’re a tiny little ball. So, um, I, I went to Cape Town, and I got in the cage with some sharks down there, and yeah, the great whites down there, they come from the bottom, and they, they breach, and, like, and then Cape Town is where I had my other close experience. We were, uh, following a Chinese vessel that was illegally longlining, and it had been illegally longlining along the Mozambique coast, but we’d not been able to prove it, because in the day it would slip out of the exclusive economic zone that it wasn’t allowed to fish in, and it would fish in international waters again, and we were like, got to catch these longlines, like, commercial fishing, commercial fishing.

1:16:35 But they lay out these long, these lines that are miles long. It totally destroys the habitat and the reef, and then they get these sharks, and they just cut the fin off and throw the, the fish back out, and the sharks die this horrible death. And I was with a guy who was on Whale Wars, called Pete Bethune. He’s a guy from the Whale Wars series, a crazy guy who, you know, got, he jet-skied, you know, onto a, onto a Japanese whaling vessel, and ended up doing like six months in a Japanese prison as a result.

1:17:00 But, uh, he was like, look, the only way we’re going to get this is if we swim across, uh, this bay and fuse a transponder onto the side of the boat to track the vessel, so we can prove it’s going in. The only problem is that it’s in this harbor, where there’s like Secret Service type stuff. Yeah, I think that was the idea. This, in the middle of a shoot, or this is here, in the middle of a shoot, and he’s like, the only way we’re going to be able to do this is to swim across this bay, which has got, like, a greater concentration of great white sharks than anywhere in the world.

1:17:26 And, uh, the week before, a kid had been taken, and it’s in the middle of, like, a seal colony, and of course they feed on seals at night, and so we’re dressed all in black so we can’t be seen, kind of looking like a seal, swimming for like an hour. And I, I, I’m like, I don’t want to do this, and Pete’s like, come on, it’s going to be great. And the sound recordist is like, look, you know, he’s got to do it, and the South African fixer is like, I cannot stay with you while you do this, because I just, I honestly think, like, I’ve seen people be taken in these waters.

1:17:52 I, I do not want to watch this. Eh. So I’m like, brilliant. So then we, we paddle across, and he fuses the transponder on, and I feel this thing bump me in the leg, and, uh, and it’s just a seal, but I, I squeal like a girl on camera again while Pete’s doing his hero thing. And, you know, we got, we were fine.

1:18:12 Uh, but yeah, I just, I hate sharks, and at night in the water too, the ocean at night is so scary, cuz you can’t see anything. I feel like any of these stories will make, like, a great London Real episode. All I’m going to hit you with is our standard London Real advice question, so here you go. If you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old Stuart Kershaw, and, uh, give him a little bit of advice, uh, and it can’t just be go make films, it has to be, like, some proper advice to the 20-year-old.

1:18:40 What would you tell him? Yeah, yeah, not take the money. Wow. I guess I would say, have faith, stick to your guns. It will happen, those six words, I guess, because, um, when I graduated with my department of all wannabe, enthusiastic, bridling with enthusiasm filmmakers, uh, one by one I ticked them off a list as they went and took normal jobs.

1:19:08 Yeah, uh, until there was only two of us left. The other guy’s now a working actor, and I’m a filmmaker, and there was times in my kind of mid-20s when I felt really down, that I should at this stage in my life be far further ahead than I was, but I’ve been unwilling to go and make cups of tea and work my way up a production company where I would have been grossly exploited for a couple hundred quid a week. And I just thought, I don’t know how much longer I can do this.

1:19:33 So I would say that to myself, or to any other young filmmaker. You know, those that make it, they’re the ones who stick it out, because eventually, you know, what you get better at what you do, and everybody else quits, so you, you end up inheriting the mantle. Wow, that is true. I guess everyone just kind of falls out. It’s like the 14-man row, everyone else just quit.

1:19:53 Yeah, yeah, well, and you know, there are guys out there now who are working filmmakers who aren’t the best. Maybe they’ve just got the right attitude. They might not creatively be the best, but they’ve survived. What, um, what’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? Um, that’s a really difficult one.

1:20:10 Uh, actually, apply to do, go and do, um, some study in the US, from a boy from a small town, from, or from Liverpool, and in a small university, University of Wales, suddenly going to America and having the opportunity to study there in this huge university that had its own film studio gave me the opportunity to go to Los Angeles, and, uh, you know, that was a, a phenomenal opportunity. And I think there’s something about, you know, uh, the British in America, you know, they, they they quite like us out there. They, they want you to succeed.

1:20:47 And I think I’d had a, had a gap year, which a lot of us students don’t take, and I was a little bit more mature, and I took, I seized every opportunity that came my way, and it changed my life. We’ve heard that before, actually, on Silicon Real. The Nigerian guy, Tommy Davies, said go study in the States. You know, I guess it just gives you a new perspective, and Penn State’s a huge school. It was a massive school, massive school, and, um, you know, I was the, there was only one place at my university.

1:21:12 For Penn State, they had a link with, like, Kansas or somewhere. You know, you got sent into the back of beyond, and, uh, you know, there was all these law students and everything else, and they were like, why should we give it to the film boy? You know, and I had to, and it was for that reason, you know, the opportunities that were available, the facilities that are available. Um, so your school in Wales sent you. Yeah, that’s right, for one year.

1:21:34 Yeah, for one year, and then I took another six months to go and, you know, do internships in LA, and then I went, and then after that I went back to LA just to live for a while and distribute The Virgin Trade. Right, so broaden your horizons. What, but if you look at Hollywood, there’s an extremely large percentage of working British actors. Right? We might be the stereotypical bad, evil guy, or, you know, the classic Tom Hardy character now, but there’s a lot of British talent, and I think, you know, people are willing to, uh, you know, I think we’re seeing, traditionally, as being a crazy hub.

1:22:04 There’s an old saying that the British film industry is always dying, never quite dead. You know, every so often a film comes along that reignites it again, or a great director, um, but you know, we are known as being a hub of creative talent, and, um, you know, there’s a lot of opportunities that come your way if you go out there. I, I would love to go back. Yeah, the Americans are always, in a weird way, fascinated with what’s going on in Britain. I think they always will be.

1:22:27 You know, they always want to know what the hell they’re doing over there, and there’s always this kind of an unspoken fascination. Yeah, you know, we’re like, somebody once said to me, you know, why we, why we like you and your accents over in England? And I was like, oh no, why? This was at Penn State. This woman said, because you’re like exotic without being, you know, black Jesus, right?

1:22:54 Okay. Uh, but you know, the, the, the interest that Americans have in Europe works the other way as well. There’s something Philip Roth once described as the American berserk, and it’s that creative and destructive force about America. You know, they can’t, these backward people who have the death penalty and some questionable foreign policy under the Bush administration, but equally this massive creative force as well. So you know, there’s just something about that that I think anyone who’s a creative in Europe is attracted to.

1:23:21 Yeah, I can definitely see that, and vice versa. Bit, I mean, I think as much as the Americans [expletive] about the French, they do look to them for a lot of things, including cinema. You know, they look to them from the past and even the present of doing something just slightly different. You know, just to finish out the advice question to the, to the, you know, to the young 20-year-old listening to this now, who, you know, wants to be like Stuart one day, or wants to make films.

1:23:43 You know, what do you tell them? Get out there and practice, practice, practice. I went to university. I don’t regret that experience. It cost me a lot less than it would cost somebody now.

1:23:55 Uh, it taught me an awful lot, but mainly about girls and football and how to drink. It didn’t really teach me an awful lot about the filmmaking process. So whether you still want to go or not, get yourself a Canon 7D for Christmas or a 60D for a few hundred pound, get out there and start making projects, because the more you make them, the better you’ll get at it, and you know that’s going to be your stepping stone. I think there’s probably an awful lot more to be gained from, you know, going, working part-time or interning at a production company, uh, for a low pay, than there is going to university.

1:24:30 That’s just because it’s vocational, and unfortunately that’s just the simple facts of the matter, that a lot of universities, uh, just aren’t able to offer you real experience in what it’s going to be like to try and make it in the industry. And, you know, why? Because a lot of those departments are led by people who’ve never even worked in the industry. Yeah. Those who can’t do, teach, sometimes.

1:24:49 Yeah, that is why are they there? Because they’re not in the biz. And what do you say to all the people who want people in film to work for free? You know, they want photographers and filmmakers to work for free, or, you know, you’re going to be on this project for free, and then some people, a lot lately, photographers, put their foot down and say, I’m not going to be one of those guys. What’s your stance on that?

1:25:07 It’s always like, how long is a piece of string? When do you get to the point where you stop working for free? I would say to young guys who are enthusiastic, definitely work for free. I’d say do it on a case-by-case basis. Don’t just go and offer to work for free for anyone.

1:25:20 Check out somebody’s work, and if you really like it and you want to work with that person, then offer your services for free, because you know, what if you’re not going to, lots of other people are. But I’m fair with the guys I work with. Like, I work with young guys. I’m, you know, a certain age now. I don’t always want to be carrying 100 kilos of camera kit around London.

1:25:37 I’ll pay them. You know, I’m happy to pay them. I’ll pay them when I’ve got a job coming, and if my client’s paying me, me, I’ll have a bit of budget set aside for me to get some assistance. Um, so when you get to the point where you, you know, you place a value on what you’re worth, you know, everybody needs to have that stage where you feel comfortable enough. Right now I don’t offer my services as a professional DSLR photographer.

1:25:58 I can get images that are just as good as a professional DSLR photographer, it just takes me a little bit longer, you know, because, you know, I’m used to shooting for film. The setup slightly separate. There’ll come a point where, okay, I’m not going to do that anymore, and I’m going to add that to my roster of skills under my production company. So I think it’s inevitable, and, you know, you need to do it. There will be a stage where you’re expected to go out and work for free for a little bit, but I’m talking young guys who are either pre-university.

1:26:27 I work with kids who are from the Prince’s Trust as well, and, you know, they’re offering to work for free on building sites. I’m like, come and learn about cameras. You know, come work with me on that. It’s going to be, you know, you’re going to have more fun, and they love the experience, because every job’s different, and often it’s really cool projects for young guys to be working on. So, um, they’re happy to do it, but, you know, I’m not going to make somebody come and carry my kit for me more than two or three times where I’m going to say, all right, I’ll give you 100 quid a day, you know, or, you know, you’re operating a second camera, right?

1:26:57 I’ll give you 150 quid a day, 200 quid a day. Um, and anybody who’s fair, I think, would probably adopt that approach. The government’s obviously got this implemented, the system now, that we can take on unpaid work, and I think sometimes, inevitably, it is, um, exploited, but it’s, it’s also there for a reason. It’s actually there for companies like mine, small-time companies who are looking to grow and get bigger and need some help, but need flexibility in the workforce.

1:27:23 Fair enough. Colin, you know this guy better than I do. Is what did I miss? Yeah, maybe a question, um, that I don’t even know if I know the answer to, but, uh, like, were, as a kid growing up, were you always like, I want, I’m creative, I like sort of filming stuff, or I like taking pictures, or I like, you know, writing stories, or were you that growing up? And you always knew this is what you wanted?

1:27:47 Always writing. I’ve always written since I was very, very young, and actually originally I trained as an actor, and that’s what I wanted to be, and I studied acting at university, but almost immediately then I got that opportunity to go to acting school in the States and do a three-year MFA and become an actor, or take this small amount of money, this 10 grand that some guy offered to give me, and go make a documentary. And I always wonder what would have happened if I’d gone down that other route in life, because that’s the one thing I missed doing passionately, but I wasn’t willing to just do what an awful lot of my friends had to go through to become actors, and, you know, just working on terrible script after script after script.

1:28:24 And I think to some extent they were more easily able to do it, because they were like, well, it’s work, and for me, I’ve always written, so when I read something and it’s terrible, I can’t get excited about it. So I got into the mindframe that I was going to go and make my own films, and I was just going to take, you know, I was going to do a Tarantino and put myself in them. And I, I still want to do that. You know, are you going to be in your first film?

1:28:45 For sure I am. But I’m not going to… I’m not going to try and do a Clint Eastwood here and take a lead role. I’ll give myself a cameo, do a Hitchcock where you just walk by on the street for sure. Um, but you know, that’s the one thing I miss, but that’s what’s great about the world we live in now that you… it is possible, particularly in the creative industries, to have more than one career and to make that sustainable You can, you know, throw your hat into the ring.

1:29:07 After, in speaking, you can be a full-time filmmaker. Sure, you can do a bit of acting. Why the hell not? There’s just nothing to stop us. Do you think you could act and direct and produce a film and DP it, which, probably, I’m sure you’d want.

1:29:18 Uh, I, I would not. I would do all those. I would act in it, I would direct it, uh, um, and I would write it, but I wouldn’t DP it. For sure, I’d bring in another DP, but I wouldn’t do that now. That would come down the line, right?

1:29:31 Now I’m going to concentrate just on writing, writing, directing. You know, I won’t take a role as much as I would love to. I know I would be biting off way more than it was possible to chew. Um, that’s a Ben Affleck the one you’re talking about, direct? Yeah, where he, act, directs.

1:29:46 I don’t know if he wrote that or not. Ben but yeah, he’s done a few where he’s the lead in. Yeah, he did that in Argo. I thought Clint would’ve done it in, um, the one where he’s Unforgiven, no, the one where he’s, is really like one of his later ones, the old man one, where he’s… yeah, yeah, yeah, the Gran Torino. Yeah, that’s it.

1:30:02 It’s a great film. Yeah. But, um, what is it? Steven Soderbergh, um, DPs his own films under a fake name. Only he does that.

1:30:10 Yeah, and, uh, it’s amazing just to, when I watch his films, I’m like, Jesus Christ, he’s behind the camera on every shot, and he has a very, very signature style that you see, like his Liberace movie. And you know, but it’s just hard for me to get my head around sometimes that he’s… I worked on a music video once with a female DP from the States, great DP, American Girl, and, um, you know, there was this shot that needed to be underwater, and it was quite a heavy unit.

1:30:33 We were shooting on an ARRI Alexa, and then we needed to walk down this kind of, um, rocky outcrop, and then go into the water, and I, I was camera operating for her, and I remember this sound guy turning to me he’s like, this is how filmmaking should be. He was like, we’ve got a director here who’s camera operating for his DP, and I was like, that’s the kind of filmmaker I want to be. I don’t, I’m not going to sit there on a chair and be a snob about it.

1:30:57 I’m going to be hands-on, of course, and do everything to make it a successful shoot, and that means being inclusive and getting your hands dirty. Apparently Danny Boyle’s like that. Apparently he’s the first on the set, the last to leave, and happy to get his hands dirty, and the whole crew just loves that. You know. Yeah, I think you’ve got to be.

1:31:12 Yeah, last question. What are you going to be doing in 10 years? You know, what will you… where will you be? I will be the bottom of an ocean. No, I didn’t mean that.

1:31:20 Well hopefully, let’s hopefully not. In a shark’s belly. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll, I’ll have, um, you know, I’ll have proy by then I’ll be making low-budget feature films. I have no interest in making 150 million, no CGI, film. I’m just not interested in that.

1:31:35 I’m really not. I want to make… that’s what Noan said back in the day. And look, really? Is that what he said? No, I’m, I’m just joking.

1:31:41 I’m just saying maybe they are. But all right, you don’t want to do that yeah. I’m talking sub-one-million-pound budget, you know, so that you’ve got enough money that you can make the film, and do it, you know, do it without having to, you know, feed everybody McDonald’s, each day. But I, uh, I have no interest in rowing any more oceans. Fair enough.

1:31:59 No, Robert, I’m, was just thinking of filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez, who, uh, you know, started off kind of, you know, with Tarantino on the, you know, Toronto Film Festival circuit and made some great films he was just like, Hollywood’s solution to the problem is to throw money at problems on the set. It just happens. Throw money, throw money, throw money. And he was always like, no, there’s another way around this, and so he makes his films under budget.

1:32:21 He’s like, he’s known for, like, setting up, like, 40 shots in one day, and he’s just, he has a real quick pace that he works on, and that’s like, if you can, um, you know, if you are, if you have got budgeted restraints, you know, that does also force you to be more creative, and I think that’s the one benefit of indie filmmaking, is perhaps, you know, you don’t have all the studio resources at your disposal. Cool, how can we do this differently? And if you hold on to that mindset, then you know you can create brilliant films as Rodriguez does, and you can come up with maybe a better shot, cuz you didn’t have the cash, right?

1:32:52 Get super creative um. Stuart, thanks for coming. This is, uh, awesome. There’s so many things we could keep talking about. You might have to come back to talk about the seven marathons, about the Jesus.

1:33:02 It’s like too much. Like, don’t send me that whole, like you know, background next time, there’s, like, too much to talk about. If people want to get in touch with you uh, how do they find you? You know, website? I don’t know if you tweet, or what? inthedarkproductions.co.uk is my website, and ITD Productions is my Twitter feed.

1:33:18 I am trying to tweet at least once a day good man. But yeah, you can find me online. Okay, sure. In the Dark Productions, that’s who we are. Okay, good stuff and if people watch this and want to, like, do some work for you, should they, should they give you a ring?

1:33:31 Drop me a line. As long as it doesn’t involve rowing the Pacific for at least two years. Drop, definitely drop me a line. Drop your a line. Okay, awesome.

1:33:36 Um, Colin, what’s going on with you these days? Yeah, working hard. Silicon Real. Uh, you know, we’re, that’s going great. We got, uh, 11th episode this week.

1:33:45 Um, otherwise, yeah, just started up a website, language learning website, lingo.com, so check it out. Give us some feedback. And yeah, working hard, trying to make something go. Good man. All right.

1:33:57 You’re at Colin Pyle on Twitter, please follow him. He’s, low… I’m sorry that they just have to check it, that’s all. I don’t know, anyways. Um, I don’t want pity followers.

1:34:09 I want pity followers you say that. I want people, like, you know, I’m not already friends with on Facebook. Um, I just want to thank the guys of Bulletproof. Um, I think we have a new fan in Stuart, you know, which is… this is a guy that rowed across the goddamn Indian Ocean. He’s drinking Bulletproof.

1:34:23 I’m going to… yeah, I’m going to take some of this stuff with me when I row the Pacific in two years. There we go. Be careful what you say, man. Dave Asprey might call you next. Um, yeah, so thanks to those guys for sponsoring the show.

1:34:33 Uh, you know, if you want to find us, we’re on Twitter at @londonrealtv. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can come see our faces. We got a whole new, uh, whole new video production here. We’re filming on, like, seven cameras today. It’s crazy.

1:34:43 On YouTube channel London Real TV. And, uh, if you want to come help us, in turn we found this great girl named Christy who probably is going to be editing this episode, on Twitter, and she’s just helping out and loves being part of the show so if you guys want to intern and do anything for us, send me a message at [email protected], and that’s it um. Until then guys, it’s about the journey, which he knows all about. And, uh, thanks for coming on. Brian, you rock look at that, my first handshake.

1:35:15 All right guys, take care. Thank you. All right.