How did you get into film?
I went to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama to do concert production management. On one of my last projects, they decided to film three shorts. We were training to be stage managers and it was then that someone said, "why don’t you become a location manager?". I ended up living in London for 10 years, working my way up from location assistant to location manager and through to production manager.
Then, after setting up a company supplying Wi-Fi, radios and mobile phones for film and television, I decided to become a producer. I set up Causeway in 2009 and our main aim is to develop and bring through our own content.
What’s it like being a producer in the current climate?
It's sort of like society. You've got the ultra-rich companies and the ultra-poor and the tween. And then there is the convergence of film and high-end TV. You've got those big companies that are into film and television who have already converged at that level, where film stars like Nicole Kidman are doing TV series after TV series. I think the industry itself is actually starting to constrict, to retract. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for people coming in as crew as I think there will be just as much production. But, from a producer point of view, it’s going to get a lot harder to be an indigenous producer.
I think we’re coming towards a more fractured industry in terms of people having to get three months' work, two months' work. The boom after COVID has created more of that, particularly for the younger entrants. There will be people who get the whole year, but they are probably the same people that get the whole year all the time.
Why did you want to work with ScreenSkills on the Film Skills Council?
In the past year, the Film Skills Council has really diversified, not only with people from low socio-economic backgrounds, but with all different types of people being represented.
A lot of the Fund’s work has been around new entrants and bringing people into the industry which is really important. We get a number of students in from various universities in Northern Ireland that come and work with Causeway, and when they leave university, they always leave with a pretty empty CV. And I say, ‘you need to be going onto ScreenSkills and doing the online courses, get the certificates so that people can see you’ve done something’.
But we also need to look at reskilling people in the industry, particularly with new technologies like AI and virtual production. We want to be as far ahead in technology as any other country. We don't want to have to start shipping people in because we have a technology drain.
I think that over the next five years ScreenSkills, working alongside other skills
providers, can try to bridge the gaps. That's one of the things that we do at the Council: to look at where those gaps are and help to fill them. Our crews need to be moving with the technology and I think ScreenSkills will be at the forefront of helping people retrain or learn new skills.
As a Council, we can come together to discuss the landscape and I hope that we can guide the industry and support it becoming more open and supportive of indigenous production.
What is your advice to others?
I worked my way up from a working-class background, as did a number of the people on the Council. We’ve needed to have resilience. And so I think the advice is that it's a marathon, not a sprint and you need resilience. It’s a tough industry to break into, but also to stay in. You have to keep going.
I think the one thing that hits people hardest is pride. You shouldn't see it as a bad thing to be working outside the industry, even sporadically, until you get to a position where you can support yourself full-time. Employers shouldn’t see it as a bad thing either. If you need to leave your job to go into a nine-month film, do it. But if you haven't got a nine-month film, how are you going to pay your bills for nine months?
You need to diversify as a person. Look at different departments and different paths to get to where you want to be. There’s no linear path when you’re working your way up from the bottom.