Director's Notes

MAKE IT HAPPEN

TRAILER

Do you know the thing I find frustrating more than any other part of the business of making films? Waiting. Waiting for other people to get round to reading your script, approving your script, passing your script to someone important who might like it, then waiting for them to read your script.

And once you’ve made the film it’s the same (just replace the word script with screener). If you’re lucky, you get a rejection email. If you’re not, you just don’t hear from them ever again. So then you look for more people to send your stuff to and the whole process starts over.

Years of your life can wander aimlessly past while you sit in the industry’s waiting room, and the only thing to read is a well-thumbed copy of a magazine advertising all the films they’re getting on with making. That’s enough to drive anyone to wish he were in an alternative universe.

Then I found one and it went by the name of ‘twitter’. David Ollerton of The London Film Review had persuaded me to run a kickstarter.com campaign to get some attention for the film. As we prepared the campaign, the need for a social media presence was essential.

I was using twitter but, like many people, didn’t really ‘get’ it. I would tweet something once in a while and had about 600 followers, who pretty much ignored anything I tweeted. But now we were crowdfunding and I needed more followers.

I wanted to see what could be done and test the reaction to the film. So, one time, I sat for a whole day following a targeted bunch of people – I followed tweeps who also followed Sight & Sound Magazine, for example. I thought I would more likely find fans of indie/arty film there.

At the end of the day, I had an extra 100 or so followers. But more importantly, I had chatted to some very cool people. Some of them had taken a look at the trailer and come back saying “How can I see this film? It looks amazing!”

After the frustration of industry types relentlessly rejecting the film, after such a long journey to get the film made, to get this kind of reaction was a big big thrill. I was so used to the reaction of cold, cynical negativity, I had started to believe that’s all there was in the world. To find people actually very excited to see our film was quite intoxicating and inspiring.

I was also very liberating. Just like when we set out to make a film with what we had to hand, I set out to tell people about the film with what I had to hand – twitter, facebook, google+, kickstarter. In a rather exhilarating contrast to what I was used to, things almost instantly started to happen.

There’s a Kafkaesque absurdity to the entertainment industry. The day after our ‘global premiere’ of Third Contact out-sold all the shows on the day combined, I got a message from someone – they had shown the trailer to a distributor who had passed on it, saying it was ‘commercially problematic’. Oh really? We just out-sold Elysium. Twice over. A film made for $113 million dollars.

This is nothing new. When I was in a band in the 90s, I used to go into our record company’s office in Greek Street and the guy would be sitting behind his desk, looking sad and defeated, and repeat in solemn tones “I’m sorry, but it’s so hard, no one will play your song”.

This was after we’d just gone to Radio 1 ourselves and got three different DJs to play it. We went to music journalists ourselves and Melody Maker gave us ‘single of the week’, which at the time was worth several thousand record sales. But the record wasn’t in the shops, because the label didn’t see the point.

Failure became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The depressed label owner behind the desk (who later went on to run a pub) feared failure, so decided not take the risk and (in his mind) proved to himself he had made the right decision.

After the premiere, people started to ask me “How can I bring Third Contact to my town?” I invited them to do the same thing we had just done – we’ll create our own ‘cinema on demand’ using a crowdfunding platform. Essentially, this is what we had done with the kickstarter campaign, to great success, so why not repeat it?

So now we have screenings being set up in Antwerp, in Zurich, a couple in London. Shannon has found a cinema in Ottawa, Debbie is hunting one down in Brisbane, Cindy is finding a venue in Cincinnati.

At the IMAX Q&A someone asked me how we got good sound quality for the film without a professional sound recordist. My answer was, ‘I don’t know. But maybe it’s as simple as pointing a mic at someone’. I’m not saying that a professional sound recordist wouldn’t have done a better job – I’m sure they would. But sometimes we overcomplicate things in our minds and it becomes an obstacle to moving forward.

Talking to distributors and film industry types about getting Third Contact into cinemas seems like a strange, mystifying, absurdly long-winded process which includes getting access to some kind of upper echelon of a secret sect who speak their own language and have their own pass codes – if you think my film is mind-boggling, try getting an indie film distributed.

But maybe it’s as simple as making a film and showing it to people. To me, that sounds pretty straight forward. The industry would have you believe it’s not. There’s a thousand hoops you have to jump through first. There’s 25 hardened cynics you have to persuade to back you. Ever wondered why they might want you to believe that?

Whatever happens, this will be challenging and rewarding. We’re going to meet new people and expand our own horizons, without anyone telling us we can’t. This is the opportunity we have in front of us, and we will grasp it with both hands and see what we can achieve .

@sihorrock

thirdcontactmovie@thirdcontactmovie.com

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Third Contact the Movie

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