Pitch and Foot

Went to Phil Parker's short film class in M/cr last week. Oh hang on, it was the week before - time flies when you're a lazy sod. Details in a follow-up post - if I get round to it.

In between, the film scheme I'm on just got interesting. I was chosen to be one of the five directors, and then the ten writers had to pitch to us directors to select five scripts we wanted to make.

So - I was really looking forward to the boot being on the other foot and listening to writers pitch to ME! And I think I learnt more from being pitched to than anything else I've heard or read. I've been on this film scheme for seven weeks now with a great bunch of Lancashire folk and we've all got to know each other and get on really well together, so although it was a serious pitch, I was surprised how nervous some people were. As the person being pitched to I found it strange - they were here to talk about their script, they were amongst friends - what was there to be nervous about? And thinking about my own pitching - I have been nervous every time - why?

Also, despite my feelings of goodwill, I got bored really quickly. I know it's stating the obvious, but the shortest pitches were the best. One stood out - a short punchy rhetorical question, with a couple of sentences about the film - then she asked if there were any questions - and that was it. Of course I had loads of questions.
Another good one was by a thickly accented Spanish guy - it was so short and quick I didn't grasp a word of what he said, but again I had a load of questions.
Most of the others though, either read a written pitch (No no no) or gave a nice short pitch then rambled on and on trying to second guess any questions I might have so that by the time they'd finished I'd forgotten their pitch, had nothing to ask them and their time was up (everyone had ten mins).

I have done pitches before as a writer - with wildy varying results as I still haven't learnt to love it - which is the key I reckon. Who doesn't love talking about their favourite movie? I think the trick is to transfer that passion to your movie. I'm actually looking forward to my next pitch.

Anyway, we had to make a shortlist of five scripts in order of preference, with the guarantee that we would get to make one of our top three - and of course as directors we all chose the same five scripts - so I got my third choice.

I'm quite happy really - the script at the moment is a bit of a mess, but there are good ideas in it - it's non-linear which gives me something to get my directing teeth into. I'm just about resisting the temptation to completely re-write it myself - as a writer I would hate it if a director tried to do that to me and we have a script editor to work with, but I can't help these new feelings of total control freakery.