This is Friday’s post a few days early. I’ll explain why in a moment. First:
Don’t forget to sign up for my plotting webinar on 24th April at 6pm UK Time!
Okay. Back to this Friday’s post. Which is today. Why?
Because Andy Riley’s movie, Seize Them!, is out in cinemas on Friday 5th April.
When I heard about Andy’s new movie, I just had to go and talk to him about it.
We can’t keep making superhero movies that are too big to fail. We need more low budget British comedies. Apart from anything else, they’re the movies I actually want to watch. And I can think of anyone who’s better placed to write a movie like this than Andy Riley. He is a very funny man with a wide range of skills, not least as a cartoonist and children’s author as well as co-writing Black Books, Hyperdrive and The Year of the Rabbit. He is also as thoroughly decent human being.
So I went to his office in North London and talked to him about the movie. I filmed our conversation on an elderly iPad and an iPhone SE, a Zoom H6 sound recorder and some very cheap XLR microphones. The result is below.
Packed into 25 minutes, you’ll find some really good advice about writing movies, living in the woods and going a bit nuts, how to write lines for unnamed Town Criers and what to do when wild horses threaten to ruin your drone shot - since you’ve specifically told the audience there are no horses in this movie: