STARS OF TOMORROW ONE TO ONE Simon Curtis & Jamie Stone
My Week With Marilyn director Simon Curtis talks to Student Academy Award-nominated film-maker Jamie Stone about the transition from stage to screen and keeping open as many doors as possible
Q Jamie Stone I come from an art and animation background and
I’m trying to make the transition from shorts to longer narratives. How did you find the transition from theatre to TV and then on to feature films? Simon Curtis Being a director is such a hard thing to define, isn’t it? Hav- ing done my first film recently, I was struck by the many different skillsets needed at different stages in the proc- ess — to develop the script, raise the finance, the skills you need to cast it, choose the crew, the skills you need to shoot it, edit it, navigate the studio system and then the skills you need to promote it. They’re all different jobs. In some ways I was very glad to have the experience I’ve had, particularly in the theatre and TV industries. The thread that runs through my
career is working with actors; theatre is a brilliant training ground for learning how to work with actors — you get used to lengthy relationships with them on a particular piece of work. The thing that’s most striking about a film set is that you’re making hundreds of final deci- sions every day — this is the only time you’ll be doing that scene — but in the theatre you have the luxury of a proper rehearsal over three, four, five weeks. But the big lesson having made My
Week With Marilyn is the exposure of a film is so huge it’s got to be something, whether you’re right or wrong, that you believe in passionately. In theatre and television there’s more of a chance of doing two or three theatre shows a year or one or two TV shows a year; you can take a gamble, make it quickly, edit quickly, it goes on quickly and it either sinks or swims and you move on. Whereas film you’re sort of stuck with it for a very long period, so it’s got to be something you are passionate about.
JS Is there a part of you that would have liked to have gone to film school? SC Sometimes I wish I was more techni-
n 40 Screen International June-July 2012
‘You can become a brilliant director without knowing a single thing about a camera, without having ever met an
actor’ Simon Curtis, director
cally expert in terms of talking with the crew. But the weird thing about directing is that you can become a brilliant direc- tor without knowing a single thing about a camera, without having ever met an actor. There are no rules. The alchemy of one piece of work, that’s directing. When I was in the theatre and wanted to work in film, a very eminent film director let me come on his set and I swear I don’t think I heard him say a single thing the whole day! It was very confusing. It can turn out that the gaffer is the loudest per- son there. So it can be confusing going to someone else’s set, you don’t quite know what’s going on. I was lucky because I’ve watched lots of other directors’ sets and been on lots of sets. I was an assistant director to Danny Boyle and Roger
Michell, then when I was at the BBC, I worked alongside people like David Yates, Joe Wright, Tom Hooper, and as a producer I worked with Stephen Daldry and Sam Mendes. So I have a lot of expe- rience of watching other directors at work and seeing how other people define what directing is. And that has been invaluable experience.
JS My Week With Marilyn brilliantly captured the battlefield psychology a film set can have. Do you have any tips for keeping a set together? SC I like a lot of running jokes, actually. In a sense, I cast a crew as well as cast- ing the actors. For Marilyn I brought a lot of crew from the BBC, people I trusted as well as people I liked. And
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Yves Salmon. Photographed at High Road House, Chiswick, London
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