ONE TO ONE STARS OF TOMORROW Pete Travis & William McGregor
The director of Vantage Point and the upcoming Dredd talks to young director William McGregor about social work, agents as bouncers and the importance of the right script
Q William McGregor I’m always interested in what gave
film-makers that initial spark, what motivated them to make films. What got you going? Pete Travis I used to be a social worker. I did community work in King’s Cross, London, when it was a pretty rundown part of the world. It was great but it was seri- ously hard work. And I just want- ed a year out. So I picked what I thought would be a piss-easy course, which was communica- tions at Goldsmiths. I assumed it meant you watched films all day; when I got there, I was shocked to find out you had to make some- thing. I was into a lot of left-wing movies, Fassbinder, and I liked the idea of cinema as a political tool. So I did a drama-documentary about the only three things I really knew about: football, the miners’ strike that I’d stood on a few demos for, and the Spanish Civil War, which I kind of fantasised about when I was younger. So I wrote this ridic- ulous story about a football hooli- gan who meets an old woman who used to be involved in the Spanish Civil War. My tutor loved it and I sent it to the NFTS. But they said I wasn’t quite good enough…
WM I got rejected from there as well a few years ago. PT I got down to the last 20, I think. They said I needed more experience working with actors, which was actually really good advice for me. So I spent the next five years blow- ing all my money on fringe theatre. I put on a bunch of plays. It’s great fun but it’s like pouring money down the toilet. After doing that I got a job as a researcher for a local TV show because I knew I didn’t want to go back to being a social worker. But I wasn’t getting any closer to making a film. I had saved a bit of money
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and I met someone who agreed to help me with the rest. And I found a Nick Hornby story that I loved, called Faith. I wrote a begging letter to Nick Hornby and he let me have it for a couple of hundred quid. So I adapted his short story and shot a short and that was the first thing I’d done that was, I suppose, proper.
WM Did that help to get you noticed? PT I got an agent from it. Film-mak- ing is like this really exclusive night- club and there are great big bouncers on the door who are agents. And if you don’t get one, you don’t get in. I had sent it [the short film] to a bunch of agents and I got this phone call one morning. This guy said to me, ‘I watched your film at 5 o’clock this morning and loved it.’ I thought, ‘Oh God, he’s a weirdo.’ He told me his young son had been up all night teething and he’d finally given up on sleep and watched my short. And that was Alan Radcliffe. His son was Daniel Radcliffe. And he was a very big agent at William Morris in Lon- don. And I signed with him. But then it took me ages to get another job.
WM When did you get your break? PT I couldn’t really get a job, and I got so broke I did the first job that came along that paid the rent, a kids’ show that was seen by Christine Langan. She was looking for a director for an episode of the second series of Cold Feet. And what’s really interesting, the other directors of that series were Tom Hooper and Tom Vaughan. And Christine Langan is now the head of BBC Films. So that was the big break for me. After that I made two TV films with Peter Morgan. Paul Greengrass saw one and offered me Omagh, which was the first [feature] film I did. From when I made the short until then it was five years, so it was pretty fast.
WM How much did you learn in that time? PT You learn all the time. You learn on everything you do. I learnt that you don’t get anything unless you work hard for it, to be honest. If I had a quid for everybody that came up to me and said, ‘I’ve got this great script, I want to go to Cannes and sell it. What do you think I should do?’… I think, ‘Why don’t you just make something?’ If you really feel like you’re born to do this, it’s something you cannot not do. You don’t take a script to Cannes and hope somebody will buy it. You fucking make a short film for no money and use your mates and your money and sell your car and your cat and your house.
WM You said earlier that politics got you into film-making. Was that what drew you to Dredd? PT It’s always for me the script; it always starts with that. And I loved Alex Garland’s script, it’s just extraor- dinary — really visceral and real and tough. That’s why I did it. Somebody much more famous than me once said there are only two decisions you make as a director that are worth anything. The script and who’s in it. Whatever you do with the cam-
era, if you’ve picked the wrong script or actors it makes no difference. Those two things are most impor- tant. I spent a long time actually waiting for Omagh. I suppose if there’s any advice to give someone when they are starting out it’s don’t do something if you don’t feel you’d give your life for it. Because if you get that one shot and it’s something you don’t care about that much, then you won’t do it very well. You see the choice that a lot of peo-
ple make after making really interest- ing short films, and you think, ‘Why did you do that?!’ Sometimes it just looked like someone paid them a lot of money. Which is fair enough but I
‘You have to go out there knowing that you would rather die than not do this. If you don’t feel like that, then you
shouldn’t do it’ Pete Travis, director
think you have to be quite ruthless with yourself because this world is so competitive. Honestly I think that was one of the reasons I was picked to do Vantage Point, because I was younger and cheaper than Paul Greengrass. He’d just done Bourne. They wanted something handheld and realistic and they’d just seen Omagh. So I do think you have to hold out for the one thing you want to do more than anything in the whole world. And I knew when I got Omagh, that would be the one for me. That would be the first film I would make properly. And I think it shows.
WM Hopefully, later in the year, I’ll be shooting my first feature, The Rising. Do you have any specific advice? PT It’s not original, I can’t remember who said it first but my advice is: ‘everything cuts together’ and ‘get more sleep than the actors’. A lot of people fret about what will and what won’t cut together and everything does actually cut in my experience. Maybe not well, but it does. I also think you have to be very passionate about what you want to do. You have to go out there knowing that you would rather die than not do this. If you don’t feel like that, then you shouldn’t do it. Most people in your life come second if you’re a director and you’re serious about your work. I’ve just got very understanding peo- ple in my family. n
s June-July 2012 Screen International 39 n
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