I wanted to share some recent film work. Commissioned by Run The Alps and ON, with additional support from OMM, Red Needle is a short documentary following ultra-marathon runner Sarah Gerrish. Sarah lost an ovary to cancer at 15 and the second to a malign cyst at 36, putting her directly into surgical menopause and a world of fatigue, brain fog and exhaustion. The film was led by Sarah from the first meeting to the final cut, and I honestly couldn’t feel more humbled to have worked with her on the script and the edit.
There’s still a sense that menopause is taboo – and no one really talks about early menopause or surgical menopause at all. Making this film has been a space for Dom and I to listen and to learn, and I only hope we’ve done some justice to Sarah’s experience.
The film premiered at Kendal Mountain Festival 2023 and was subsequently nominated for TGO magazine Film Of The Year – all the more special for being a readers’ award. At the time of writing there are still 4-5 days left to vote, so if you enjoy the film, please sling a little love our way.
A year at least, I think, since I posted anything; it’s been a time of change. In Easter 2023 I made the monumental decision to leave Kendal College, where I taught the Film Production course for 12 years. While I always loved teaching the students, the job itself changed radically in that decade, and honestly I was becoming unwell. Leaving was an exceptionally difficult decision… but also the right one. I’m a different person for stepping away. I didn’t realise at the time how heavy a thing it was to carry.
So what next? I’ve left to pursue freelance editing and to carve out time to write. I haven’t exactly stopped writing, but I’ve written far more screenplays than prose, and when I sit down with my novel it’s increasingly hard to pull the right words together. That’s a part of myself I want back, and I understand it needs work. My novel has been stalled at 30,000 words for over a year while other projects called me away; last week I sat down and wrote 500 words on it. That felt good. I want more of that feeling. Writing is a muscle: use it or lose it.
What else? I’ve finally released The Potter’s Field. There’s a lot I’d do differently if I was starting again, and overall the process confirmed I’m more of a writer and editor than a director – but I’m also exceptionally proud of what we pulled together on a shoestring. Particular shouts for Jenny Ann McKay and Marie Rabe, my sensational lead actors. They had incredible chemistry from the very first rehearsal, and it was all I could do to get out of their way. I’m proud to share The Potter’s Field:
I’m also thrilled to announce the release of Maggie, a short horror I wrote for the talented James Kennedy. James has done a phenomenal job with my script, and the performances by Shaun Scott (he of Moon Knight, The Bill) and Lukwesa Mwamba (she of Carnival Row, Doctors) are so good. The film won awards all over the world and has now been picked up by horror channel Alter, where it was seen by 50,000 people in the first two weeks – very humbling. I’m now working on a feature film based around the same characters. I’m not naturally drawn to horror, and I don’t mind admitting that plunging back into this world has given me a few sleepless nights…
I also wrote, co-produced and edited this promotional piece for Impact International. It was a challenging brief and I’m really pleased with how it turned out:
My other work of note was cutting 1h30m of drama scenes for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I put myself through a mangle to get the first cut delivered inside a week; a few months later, as I was teaching myself some new software, I went back to recut my favourite scene, Hand To God. Brilliant acting – mind the language though…
There have been some other commercial edits, and a little copyediting work – but the big news is that I’ve done some editing for the iconic BBC property show Homes Under The Hammer. It’s been an absolute blast cutting Homes – I’ve loved every moment. Back for another shift just before Christmas.
To tie all this together, I set up a website as a portfolio for my editing – if you’re interested in my other work, mosey over to SimonSylvesterEditor.com for loads more films.
Now what? I’ve just finished a short doc called Red Needle that I can’t share till the new year; that’s some of the best work I’ve done, I think. I’m redrafting my feature script for Maggie – after a couple of months away and some good feedback, I can see that I need to cut some characters and some locations, to condense and combine and simplify. The core of the story is good, but I’ve added too much around it. I sometimes think that screenwriting is as much about the things you don’t write as the things you do.
There’s more to say – I’ve rediscovered a childhood hobby, I’ve been to France, I’ve started swimming in the Lakes – but I’ll keep the powder dry on that lot. I’d like to get back to blogging more often – use it or lose it, right? …and so I’ll leave myself some things to talk about.
On a train, shuttling back into the black. It’s late August and I’m drunk. A handful of beers with friend Dave and now heading home. The clouds still hang a rime of blue but the summer’s over. Autumn is here. Autumn is the spider time.
Talking with Dave has been transformative. We spent our cups in novels and film theory and learning needs and what it is to swim. The pub is beside a river. Fish jumping from below the surface, bats skimming above, and all the gnats in a Venn diagram of doom.
I’ve been reading again. The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ — The Penolopiad — All The Pretty Horses — The Man Of The Forest. All of it filling the well. I’m writing; the new novel is beginning to feel out the shape of itself. The Potter’s Field is about to step into the world. I hope it will find a path.
The sky has drained to dark while I’ve been writing this. Write drunk, edit sober, right?
According to the good people at WordPress dot com, this is my 300th post, which I see simultaneously as an amazing thing and also an awful lot of words that no one’s ever going to read. As ever, though, I write this mostly for myself; it helps me to clarify my thoughts.
I’ve written before about my experiences with The Pitch. As one of the runner-ups, I was awarded a small production fund to do something with. After spending much of the last year not really knowing what to do with the budget, I’ve moved increasingly to the thought of making a short film myself; in and around Kendal, working with the talented people who live here, keeping the whole thing as local as could be. Without having a clear idea of what to work on, I started mulling on single images and scraps of ideas:
A hanging tree high above a valley.
A stack of flat stones on a riverbank.
A kite, bobbing, soaring, sliding on the wind.
A man with an axe, walking towards a small house.
This was an experiment in free-writing as much as anything else, letting ideas move through association. And there was no story and there was no story and then suddenly there was a story: The Potter’s Field.
Potter’s Field in Hart Island, New York, c.1890
In the Bible, after Judas betrayed Jesus, he tried to return the 30 pieces of silver, but the Priests wouldn’t take back the blood money. Instead they used it to buy a potter’s field for the poor of Jerusalem. A potter’s field is an area of land where all the seams of workable clay have been extracted, leaving a chaos of rocky trenches and holes. These fields are no good for farming, but all over the world they’ve been turned into pauper’s graveyards; burial grounds for strangers and destitutes. After hanging himself, Judas was buried in the same field his blood money paid for.
I found this utterly extraordinary. There’s a circularity to it, a Zenlike completeness, a sweeping up, a recycling of something wasted. It shapes a terrible betrayal into a coherent future: not righting a wrong, but filling a void: what’s broken can always be fixed, and what’s fixed will always be broken. I couldn’t find a moral in it, and that ambiguity sung to me. The ideas began to tumble, spilling like dominoes: a woman betrayed. A guilty man. A child. Two children. A river, a farm. Chickens and eggs. And a kite… the joy of flying a kite.
After months of chewing through images like puzzle pieces, suddenly and sharply the whole picture hung together. I wrote my first draft of the screenplay in about an hour, and was on my tenth draft in a week. It’s probably the most personal story I’ve written, and though I’m not in it, I’m also in every single line. Ultimately, the story is really simple: it’s about someone trying to say sorry, and someone else who isn’t quite ready to forgive.
Now I need to make it. I want to make it. That means producing and directing: the organising, galvanising, driving and delivery of a project from first idea to final edit. Finding a crew, casting actors, sourcing locations and kit, props and music. Insurance. Catering. Scheduling. There’s so much to do, it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin, and so I’ve built myself an armour of spreadsheets and lists. Spreadsheets for each of the schedule, shot list, budget, props list, costumes, research sources. There’s safety in those numbers. Making sense of the mountain; single steps on a journey.
I’ve surprised myself with how much satisfaction I’ve discovered in the budgeting, in the planning. At the moment I’m working out menus for a three-day shoot. How can I feed fifteen people with healthy food and snacks and teas and coffees and keep it on budget? These challenges are testing different parts of my brain, and I’m really enjoying the new processes. It’s good for me to learn. And I love cooking. Just like this guy:
Delicatessen
Along with the pragmatic work, I’m constantly divining a creative language for the story, thinking and feeling my way through how I want it to look. I’m lucky to have the gifted Dom Bush as my Director of Photography, and I’m already so excited at what we’re going to cook up. Dom has such an eye for a face, for a moment. The story is very intimate and I’m looking for emotional spontaneity in the scenes; I’ve been studying Normal People and Sound Of Metal and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, trying to better understand how those moments have been captured so wonderfully.
I’m still a writer, or trying to be. I’ve never wanted to be a director, but I want to direct this. There’s magic in film. It does things no other medium can do. This story is personal, and there are truths in it I want to tease out. In so much of my work, all of that happens in my head, my notebook. It’s a new experience for me to open it up, to share the process with others. I’m learning a lot. It’s good.
I’ve called this pt.1 because I’ll wrote more about this along the way. Same Bat time, folks, same Bat channel.
I haven’t blogged for a long time, and this post is mostly to acknowledge as much. I am actually writing quite a lot at the moment — busy with redrafts of two short films shooting in the Spring, and almost halfway through my third pass at 100 Days Of Writing. I’m working with friends Ali and Andy to maintain some momentum, and that’s completely rejuvenated my daily practice. I’ve done 100 Days twice before, though not for years — this is now day 48, writing longhand in my notebook, whether it’s a single line or ten pages. Writing by hand has been an immensely positive and creative process, and deserves a post of its own. It’s keeping me focused at a time when it would be easy to drift. Quite honestly, between college, children, my freelance work and these general global pandemic blues, I’m struggling for the time to do anything much.
It’s been six years since The Visitors was published. That feels like a lifetime ago. I don’t think of the book at all anymore, and I haven’t wanted to write another since my last draft of The Hollows. I thought I’d left prose behind. And now, after an entire year of only screenwriting, I’m starting to feel the pull of a novel again. It’s so strange. A stirring of embers in the soul. I can be quite blinkered sometimes, or set myself in particular directions, unwilling to change course — I’ve been thinking of myself as exclusively a screenwriter over these months, and it’s very odd to feel this twitch towards prose after so long away. I’m trying to see myself as a storyteller using different formats for different stories, rather than a writer in one particular discipline. That doesn’t sit especially well with me, but that’s the way it is.
I don’t know why I feel the need to define myself within one format. Existence is manifestly absurd and having reached half of my allotted time on Earth, I’m painfully drawn to the thought of walking a clear road in the second half. But in truth, of course, there are no clear roads, and there never have been. Understanding that is as clear as things get. The function of story is to organise the chaos of this life and turn it into something that makes sense, even if only for a little while. In doing so, stories fool us into believing that there is a purpose to any of this nonsense. Stories are a net that hold us high above the void; a comfort that keeps us from screaming. That’s true for writing them as well as reading them, which is probably why it hurts so much when they go wrong.
I just used a semi-colon and didn’t even notice until reading it back. I thought I was finished with those as well. Times they are a-changin.
I’m exceptionally proud to share ‘Only Weather’ — the trailer for Kendal Mountain Festival 2020. I wrote and edited the piece, which was produced by Land & Sky and spoken by Keme Nzerem.
It’s been a challenging brief, aiming to strike several balances — reflective but not sanctimonious — sincere but not depressing — hopeful while acknowledging the damage done by coronavirus. I hope we succeeded.
Quick update to share one of my other recent jobs — when not writing / teaching / parenting, I’m also a video editor — here’s my latest cut for director Daniel Brereton and Dom at Land & Sky. Lovely to work with some high-res 8mm scans.
I’ve recently taken up chess again, years after learning the rules as a kid, and wanted to take a moment to share a quick observation:
Chess speaks the language of story.
This was an idle thought at first, but the more I unpacked it, the more connections I discovered. Like screenwriting, chess is a constant balance of multiple conflicts. Like all good antagonists, the opponent can’t be passive. They force the story, constantly shift the sway of the game, forcing plans to adapt or collapse under pressure. Chess is a game of change, of assimilated knowledge, of action and reaction. Like screenwriting, it demands sacrifices to reach the ending — the bigger the sacrifice, the greater the risk and the reward. Chess fosters courage. Like a good screenplay, chess strips away and resolves minor skirmishes as the bigger heft of story emerges. Like a good screenplay, all the pieces are on the board at the beginning. Like a good screenplay, every piece is important — a minor piece played early holds a crucial role at the end. Like a good screenplay, the final outcome comes down to one or two pieces, finely balanced at the end of the attrition. A seesaw of movements, each outdoing the last, building momentum or shoring up defence. Planning. Problem-solving. Acceptance. Final stands. Last gasp attacks. Forced to find and take the least-worst option. Simple mistakes — or opportunities seized and squandered. A lot of thinking and plenty of gut instinct. The ambiguous ending of a stalemate, or the binary of triumph and despair.
Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of an extended metaphor, but come on: there’s a lot there, right? The engines of chess are the engines of drama. There are questions over whether chess can actually change the cognitive function of the brain, but at the very least it’s teaching me conscious patterns of behaviour I find useful in my writing.
Writing with an update on my shortlisting for the IMDB/FilmBath Script To Screen award — thrilled to say that although I didn’t win, I was awarded an Honourable Mention for my work, and the judges identified my storytelling as a strength. I’ll dine out on that for a while. I’m equally pleased to say that the best script won — I was blown away by Katie McNeice’s short ‘Lambing’, about an intersex baby born to a farming family in rural Ireland. It was sparse, powerful, elegant and disarming, and I’m glad it won the award. I’m genuinely honoured to come second to such a brilliant story, and can’t wait to see the finished film.
I was looking forward to seeing the actors read my work, and here they are, with thanks — six students from the Bath Spa University acting degree with a live performance of A Bed For The Boy:
Equally and wonderfully nerve-wracking, the judges then gave live feedback on the stories — here’s the excellent Andrea Gibb talking about my work.
Thanks to Andrea, Amma, Col and Holly — it’s been so brilliant to be involved with FilmBath and the award, and I couldn’t ask for more.
Buzzing to share the news that my script A Bed For The Boy has been shortlisted for the FilmBath / IMDB Script To Screen Award. This is great for several reasons:
Firstly, A Bed For The Boydid okay at the Grim North Screenplay Festival, and it’s nice to know it wasn’t a fluke — imposter syndrome is always drinking alone somewhere at the back of my brain, giving me evil grins whenever I look over.
Secondly, there are only five of us on the shortlist, and I’m thrilled to have made such a small cut from such strong competition. That’s really grounding.
Third, in the incredibly unlikely event that I win, there’s a £5,000 production fund for the prize. The story is about a man trying to move a sofa across an estate by himself, and that would be enough to do it justice.
Fourth, the judges are absolute badasses, including Col Needham, the founder and CEO of yer actual IMDb.com.
Fifth — perhaps finest of all — the shortlisted entries will be performed live by actors. Normally this would take place onstage at the awards ceremony, but with the Covid-19 lockdown, the event has moved online this year, and the readings will be streamed live instead. This is a really big deal for me — it’s the first time I’ll see one of my stories performed by actors. Regardless of the rest of it, that’s an incredible thing, and I’m humbled.
I’m also really looking forward to seeing the other final pieces, all written by some staggeringly accomplished filmmakers — there’s Lambing by Katie McNeice, How to Hire an Escort by Werner Vivier, The Influencer by Rachel S. Thomas-Medwid and Out of Sight by Jesse D. Lawrence. I count myself incredibly lucky to be sharing a shortlist with writers of their experience and quality. Best luck to them all!
Finally, a big big thanks to Paul Holbrook of Shunk Films for giving me a heads-up about the competition. Thanks comrade!
Simon Sylvester 