Best Girl Grip

My guest this week is Carmen Thompson a film programmer, curator and creative producer based in Scotland, who predominantly works with Black film and cinema from the African continent and the diaspora, especially at their intersections with non-fiction storytelling. 

She currently works as cultural curator and programmer for award-winning exhibitors We Are Parable and as producer for international sales & distribution company Aya Films, where in recent years she has worked on the UK releases of acclaimed Kenyan film Rafiki (Wanuri Kahiu, 2018), Jamaican drama Sprinter (Storm Saulter, 2018) and Sundance award-winning This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, 2019). Aya Films also work across media education and in 2021 developed the app ‘Curate-It’: an interactive course designed to help democratise film programming and increase access to curatorial learning, supported by Screen Scotland.

Carmen has over 8 years’ experience in film exhibition and distribution and has worked for a range of organisations including Sheffield Doc/Fest, Africa in Motion (AiM) Film Festival, Everyman Cinemas, New Black Film Collective and Film Hub Scotland. She also serves on the board of Document Human Rights Film Festival, Glasgow Film and the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA).

We talk about her fairly circuitous route to programming and the responsibilities or considerations that come with that role, how she approaches contextualising or reframing African cinema, finding audiences who have been historically underserved when it comes to programming, leaving behind a PhD, wading into the world of freelance work and the interrogation at the heart of her programming. 

As always these interviews are recorded over Zoom so quality can vary. But I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

 

SHOW NOTES

• Testimonies, We Are Parable
• The Ripple Effect Fund, Doc Society
• Watch 'The Black Cop' by Cherish Oteka
• Screen Scotland
• Watch 'We' by Alice Diop, currently showing on MUBI
• ICO’s Guide to Programming

I spoke to Adelaide Waldrop a certified Intimacy Director with Intimacy for Stage and Screen (ISS), where she trained with Lizzy Talbot and Yarit Dor (she began training in this work in 2017 with various practitioners in the UK and US). She also serves as the Secretary of the Intimacy Coordinators’s Branch of BECTU and teaches Intimacy for Performance at LAMDA.

Speaking of which, Adelaide graduated from LAMDA’s MA in Directing programme in 2017. She has directed productions in the UK and America and is the co-founder and co-Artistic Director of devised theatre company Maude.

Her credits as an intimacy co-ordinator include the upcoming Netflix erotic thriller DAMAGE and upcoming ITV queer period drama THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON. Past credits include Jack Rooke’s TV series BIG BOYS, Charlotte Wells’ directorial debut AFTERSUN, BBC drama THEN BARBARA MET ALAN written by Jack Thorne and Genevieve Barr. She is currently working on the HBO/Channel 4 series GET MILLIE BLACK by Marlon James.

We talk about drama school, how directing a production of Spring Awakening at 19 provided a first taste of co-ordinating intimacy, how establishing the necessity of having an intimacy co-ordinator on certain sets was at times difficult, choreographing non-sexual intimacy such as the father-daughter relationship between Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio in upcoming MUBI release and Cannes darling AFTERSUN, the kind of persona Adelaide embodies in order to do her job well, how she holds space for actors to admit discomfort and pushing the industry forward to be more representative and inclusive in its depictions of sex.

The fact that there are still actors who denounce the need for safe-guarding and choreography when it comes to sex scenes or any scene of an intimate nature, I think underscores the need for these kinds of conversations and I am beyond thankful to Adelaide for having this one with me.

My guest this week is Reetu Kabra, a London-based publicist with over 15 years’ experience working in house for renowned media and entertainment companies including the BBC and BBC Studios, UKTV, Discovery Networks and Penguin Random House. 

During her time at BBC Worldwide she handled global publicity for the internationally acclaimed Doctor Who and Sherlock as well as other major BBC dramas including War & Peace, Luther and Wolf Hall.  In 2017, she managed the Cannes Film Festival publicity campaign for Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake: China Girl.  

Shortly thereafter Reetu founded her own company: RKPR, where she manages personal publicity for a number of actors and writers, as well as consulting for clients including Amazon Prime, Netflix and Apple TV+ among others. She recently worked as a unit publicist for The Essex Serpent starring Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston (AppleTV+/See-Saw Films) and the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (Netflix). 

We discuss many things, including how Reetu wound up working in the entertainment industry, where you begin with creating a publicity campaign and defining your audience, what exactly unit publicity is, what goes into creating behind-the-scenes featurettes such as this one for The Essex Serpent and what sets RKPR apart.

Reetu was an incredibly intelligent and incisive guest and for me, this conversation served as a reminder that there really is a strategy behind publicity and how shows or even people get promoted, it’s not just about putting a trailer up on YouTube and hoping for the best. There is real creativity and specificity and ambition when it comes to finding an audience for a film or TV series. 

My guest this week is Aoife McArdle, a filmmaker from Northern Ireland who you may know from her recent stint as a co-director and producer on Apple TV's Emmy-nominated series Severance. 

Severance depicts a world in which people can choose to surgically divide their work and personal lives, so neither selves have any idea who they are outside of those realms. It stars Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro and Christopher Walken and it recently secured 14 Emmy Award nominations, including the first Outstanding Drama Series for Apple TV. It’s truly an exceptional show, so inventive and cohesive and the storytelling is just chef’s kiss. The final episode, which I won’t spoil, is on another level.

And so I was thrilled to speak to Aoife on the basis of that alone, but then I discovered her extensive background in directing music videos for artists like Bloc Party, Jon Hopkins, James Vincent McMorrow, Anna Calvi and U2. Her direction is consistently gorgeous and her eye for visuals outstanding.

In 2017 Aoife directed her first feature Kissing Candice, about a 17-year-old girl who desperately wants to escape her small seaside town and finds solace in her imagination. More recently she directed a short film starring Cillian Murphy called All This Unreal Time, an immersive sort-of performance piece written by Max Porter - a preternaturally gifted writer - that explores themes of repentance, masculinity and environmentalism. Description of any sort won’t do it justice, so I urge you to click the link in the show notes and give it a watch.

We talk about how Aoife discovered filmmaking was a career and how she began to pave her way into it, her creative process when directing music videos, the learning curve that was her directorial debut, adapting to the environments you’re shooting in and working with what’s available, and of course, her experience on Severance, working with a very talented ensemble cast and in tandem with Ben Stiller and what she’s working on now…

I’ve got a Friday treat for you in the form of this bonus minisode with documentary filmmaker and producer Sara Dosa, whose latest project FIRE OF LOVE is in UK cinemas today.

Find showtimes near you!

This explosive and intimate and eccentric documentary tells the story of Katia and Maurice Krafft, French volcanologists who were also a married couple. For two decades they roamed the planet, chasing eruptions and documenting their discoveries and in doing so, left behind a legacy that enhanced our knowledge of the natural world. Sara and the filmmaking team have crafted a lyrical and curious celebration of the intrepid scientists’ spirit of adventure, drawing from the Kraffts’ spectacular archive and imbuing their story with a freshness and ferocity that sizzles on the screen. 

Sara has also directed an Emmy-nominated episode of the Netflix music docuseries REMASTERED about Johnny Cash's 1970 concert for Richard Nixon; and premiered her third feature as a director THE SEER & THE UNSEEN at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival.

As a documentary producer, she recently produced the Peabody and Emmy nominated SURVIVORS about Ebola in Sierra Leone (2018 IDFA / POV); co-produced AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER (2017 Sundance / Paramount) and THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY (2019 Sundance / Netflix); and, produced Peabody award-winning AUDRIE & DAISY (2016 Sundance / Netflix Originals). 

We talk about how she got her start in filmmaking, alongside studying anthropology and how her interest in human behaviour continues to inform her practice, as well as what led to her to directing FIRE OF LOVE, how she came to involve Miranda July and why Agnes Varda was a key inspiration. 

My guest this week is Make-up and Hair Designer Claire Anne Williams.

Claire left a career as a legal secretary to train at the Delamar Academy before being accepted onto a ScreenSkills traineeship where she worked on big-budget productions such as Solo: A Star Wars Story and Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil.

After working on shorts, commercials and music promos, Claire received her first head of department credit working on Neil Maskell’s Klokkenluider and recently worked as Make-Up and Hair Crowd Supervisor on The Kitchen, co-written and produced by Daniel Kaluuya.

In 2021 Claire was recognised as a ScreenDaily Star of Tomorrow and she is represented by Lucy Price at Loop Talent. 

We talk about quitting a satisfying career to pursue her dreams, the hardships of being a trainee later in life, the benefits of having an agent, how she creates a sanctuary for actors, as well as going into the craft of creating things like sweat and wounds and keeping spray tan consistent across weeks of shooting. 

Claire was a really fun interviewee and it was great to expand my own understanding of how myriad make-up designing can be. It’s not just about eyeliner and lipstick. 

This episode 114 of Best Girl Grip.

I am thrilled to say that my guest this week is Jessica Kiang. 

Jessica is an International Critic for Variety, covering all the major European and Asian festivals. She also writes for Sight & Sound, BBC Culture, The New York Times and The Playlist, where she also spent five years as Features Editor. She also regularly features on the Film Comment podcast, which if you like film and discussion and why would you be here otherwise, I highly recommend.

Jessica mentions some of the pieces of writing of which she is proudest in the interview, including her New York Times review of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and her essay for the Criterion release of David Cronenberg’s Crash, which I urge to you to check out but there are very few and perhaps none of her reviews where I haven’t marvelled at her perceptiveness and agility. There is a line towards the end of her Sight & Sound review of The Worst Person in the World where I actually stopped and clapped when I read it.

Which is all to say this was rather a joyous occasion, to be able to sit down with Jessica and probe her writing process and how she configures her reviews and what she keeps in mind she writing them. 

We talk about how she transitioned from a career in advertising to writing about film full-time, her tips for aspiring film critics, managing relationships with editors and other writers the she looks to for inspiration.

I was really honoured to have Jessica as a guest and I don’t think our conversation disappoints.

This episode 113 of Best Girl Grip.

This week my guest is Sheena Patel, an assistant director for Film and TV. Her credits as a 1st AD include Casualty and Dominic Savage’s upcoming series I Am Ruth. She has also 3rd Assistant Directed on feature films such as Boxing Day and Pirates, as well as series like I Hate Suzie and Apple Tree House, and she is represented by Sara Putt Associates.

Sheena is also an author and a co-founding member of the poetry collective 4 Brown Girls Who Write and part of the reason I invited her on for this season is that she has just published her debut novel, I’m A Fan, of which many people are. It’s getting rave reviews and Sheena was listed in The Observer’s 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2022. I’m A Fan is published by Rough Trade Books and uses the voice of a single speaker to explore an unfaithful relationship and the power struggle within that, as well as how this connects with the wider world and our cultural obsession with status. Desiree Akhavan has called it hilarious, heartbreaking and sickening and you can get a copy via the Rough Trade website. 

When I was preparing to talk to Sheena I figured that the conversation would be divided into two parts, but of course when someone’s passions co-exist in the way they do with Sheena, some overlap is to be expected and we sort of oscillate between the two and find some surprising comparisons between being an assistant director and being a writer or performer. 

We talk about perseverance and how Sheena came to the television industry relatively late, how she establishes a sense of authority, collaboration and harmony on the floor and bluffing your way through imposter syndrome, as well as how and when she wrote her novel, what the process of finishing it and releasing it has been like and why she just wrote wherever her brain went.

It was a really fun and also chill chat. I think Sheena really embodies that sense of harmony and calm that maybe she presents when she’s AD’ing and yeah I came away from it thinking what a lovely way to have spent an hour of my Saturday morning. I think we’re lucky to have someone like Sheena in our film and TV industry and likewise, lucky to have her as a powerful and critical voice in and of our culture, so I feel very privileged to have had her on the podcast.

This is episode 112 of Best Girl Grip. 

 

To kick off season six, I’m sharing a live edition that I recorded recently at Sundance London - an offshoot of the Sundance Film Festival that takes place every January in Utah - with the legend that is Tabitha Jackson, the outgoing Director of the Sundance Film Festival.

Tabitha was announced as the new Festival Director in January 2020,  meaning that her first two festivals had to deal with the ramifications of Covid-19, as well as a reckoning around racial justice. 

Her appointment came off the back of seven years as the Director of the Institute’s Documentary Film Program. Tabitha has over 20 years experience in the documentary and non-fiction field, having served as Commissioning Editor of Arts at Channel 4, as well as the Editor of More4 where she ran the day-to-day operations for the UK’s sixth largest digital channel including running the two key areas of original programming True Stories and More 4 Arts. 

Of her commitment to the continuation of Sundance’s values, Tabitha has said “By fiercely holding space for independent perspectives and media created outside the mainstream market, we as a community can spark new narratives, protect bold critiques of power, and deepen our understanding of what is possible. It has never been more essential.” 

Our conversation kicked off the 4-day industry programme and it was a really special moment, not just to share a stage with someone who I have greatly admired for a while now and who brings such grace and courage and clarity to her work, but to do something like this in association with Sundance London. Sundance is a festival I have LOVED for well over a decade. I have long combed their programme and made lists of all things I want to watch when they get a UK release and so it was a real privilege to get an insight into the ambitions and considerations behind that festival and that organisation via Tabitha. As ever, I hope you get something from this chat. 

This is episode 111 of Best Girl Grip.

I lied and said that last week was the last episode for a while and then I got a very exciting email about interviewing this week’s guest and here we are.

That is guest is New York based cinematographer Ashley Connor, someone whose work I have been a big fan of for quite some time. She has lensed some of my favourite independent films, including Tramps, First Match and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and is a regular collaborator with Josephine Decker, having shot Butter on the Latch, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and Madeline’s Madeline. 

Ashley has also shot music videos for Angel Olsen, Beach House and MGMT, plus worked on TV shows like Broad City, Ramy and High Maintenance, so I think it’s safe to say that Ashley is probably the coolest DP working today, and certainly someone whose work I am just always in awe of.

She came on the podcast to talk about her career thus far, but also shooting a new movie called True Things, directed by Harry Wootliff, who was on the podcast many, many episodes ago talking about her directorial debut Only You. True Things is her second feature and stars Ruth Wilson as a dissatisfied woman who gets into a passionate and slightly toxic relationship with Tom Burke and must sort of find her way back to herself. I think it’s a fearless and visceral and feverish piece of cinema about female sexuality and desire, and I think Harry is fast becoming one of our most exciting filmmakers in the UK and I think Ashley’s cinematography - which has always been very muscular and balletic and dynamic - is a perfect match for depicting this tempestuous relationship.

We also talk about how Ashley got her start in indie films, as well as the work she did to support herself, how she has developed this movement and emotion-based cinematography practice, shooting sex scenes and finding a new language for the depiction of women’s pleasure, working with and responding to actors, and why cinematography is often like being another actor in the room, working with Lena Dunham on her latest film, Sharp Stick, as well as power structures on film sets and how Ashley prioritises radical vulnerability to change that dynamic.

It was a really special conversation. I think Ashley is a very talented artist and filmmaker and proved also to be a very genuine and compassionate person and just someone I think we’re very lucky to have making movies and putting women’s feelings and desires at the forefront of cinema. 

True Things is out in UK cinemas now. If you go to www.truethings.film you can find showings near you and I highly recommend that you do.

This is episode 110 of Best Girl Grip. 

I am very excited to introduce this week’s guest, as she is both a friend of the podcast and a someone I consider to be a friend full stop. 

And that person is Katie Sinclair. 

Katie is an independent producer and development executive, currently working at Blueprint Pictures, whose credits include Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, In Bruges, The Last Letter From Your Lover, The Riot Club and Emma, where she sources and develops projects for the production company’s slate. She has worked in production and development for BBC Film, BBC Studios, Disney and Lionsgate.

As producer, Katie recently completed The Last Days (wri/dir. Dipo Baruwa-Etti) which was filmed during the pandemic and was funded by BFI NETWORK and BBC Drama commissioning, while her previous short film Signs (wri/dir Yero Timi-Biu) won the Youth Jury Prize at the Academy Award-qualifying Encounters Film Festival. She produces under the banner Tannahill Productions and is committed to developing and championing new talent. 

We talk about how she pursued a career in development, what she learnt from working at BBC Film, our shared love of the Anna Paquin film Fly Away Home, why relationships are the key to pretty much everything, how she has built her confidence in her taste and opinion, the difference between working in development for a production company as opposed to a public funder, the art of giving feedback and why the key is asking questions rather than supplying solutions and her producing ethic and storytelling sensibilities and why it comes down to empathy and care. 

Enjoy!

My guest this week is Renee Zhan, a Chinese-American director and animator from Houston, Texas now based in London. She graduated from Harvard University in 2016 with a BA in visual and environmental studies and the National Film and Television School in 2020 with a degree in Directing Animation.

Her short films, which include 2016’s Hold Me (Ca Caw Ca Caw), 2018’s Reneepotosis, 2020’s O Black Hole and 2021’s Soft Animals have screened and won awards internationally including Locarno TIFF, and the Jury Prize for Best Animated Short at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. 

We talk about her path into the world of animation, how she started making films and why she gravitated towards the more tactile techniques displayed in her work. We also discuss why animation can sometimes be lonely and how she has evolved her process along the way. 

It was a treat to chat to Renee, I think her filmmaking style is really special and beguiling and so I urge to seek out her short films if you haven’t already seen them. I’ve popped some links to that which is available online in the show notes. 

This is episode 108 of Best Girl Grip.

 

Show Notes

• Make sure to check out Renee's commercial work with Blinkink.
• Watch Reneepoptosis here. 

This week my guest is Chi Thai, an independent filmmaker & producer who works across features, documentary, animation & immersive. She has produced over 13 short films, been a Cannes Lion finalist three times, had her work screened at BAFTA & Academy accredited festivals, and exec produced the documentary short Little Miss Sumo, written & directed by Matt Kay, which you can currently watch on Netflix. Chi is also an alumnus of the Guiding Lights scheme and NETWORK@LFF and a ScreenDaily Star of Tomorrow. Her production company Last Conker is also a recipient of the BFI Vision Award and she is currently producing BIFA nominated writer-director Paris Zarcilla’s debut feature Raging Grace. 

We talk about how Chi ‘blagged’ her way into film school (her words not mine), how she has gained confidence as a producer, the ethos and mission behind her production company Last Conker and how the climate crisis and her ambition to work with storytellers from the East & South East Asian diaspora, spearheads her producing and advocacy work.  

We also discuss not getting the BFI Vision Award the first time she applied, what the money has allowed her to do when she was awarded it and why she chose to invest the money in a variety of initiatives and how she’s working towards dismantling the structures that marginalise underrepresented groups in the film industry. 

I hope you enjoy our chat. Chi is someone who has a lot of experience and very clear sense I think of what needs to change in the film industry and how she can help effect that, so it was definitely a galvanising conversation and I was really delighted to be able to speak with her. 

This week’s interview is with Lizzie Gillet, the Director of the Feature Documentary Department at Passion Pictures, whose credits include the Oscar-winning SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN, Bart Layton’s THE IMPOSTER, James Marsh’ PROJECT NIM and more recently THE RESCUE. 

Lizzie recently produced THE TERRITORY, a feature documentary co-produced with an Indigenous community in Brazil about their fight to protect their ancestral land in the Amazon rainforest, which the World Cinema Documentary Award at this year’s Sundance. Lizzie also produced LADY BOSS, a feature documentary directed by Laura Fairrie about trailblazing life of novelist Jackie Collins. 

We talk about her first foray into producing feature docs by making the climate change documentary THE AGE OF STUPID and how that led to the 10:10 global campaign to cut carbon emissions, how crowdfunding played a big part in financing that film before crowdfunding was a thing and whether she felt any pressure to replicate the success of that. We also discuss how she arrived at Passion Pictures, what she’s responsible for and what it means to direct a department, supporting the filmmakers she works with and what she’s learnt along the way. 

Lizzie was brilliant interviewee and someone I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with, so I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation. 

My guest is Aisha Bywaters, a BIFA-nominated casting director whose credits include independent films such as Body of Water, County Lines, The Last Tree, Dirty God and Mari, as well as the TV series Enterprice and We Are Lady Parts. Most recently, Aisha cast the upcoming TV series adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s memoir Everything I Know About Love, the process for which we talked about a little bit. 

We also discussed Aisha background in theatre, learning the film industry ropes at Shaheen Baig casting, branching out on her own and learning how to put herself out there and also what is she’s looking for in audition and trusting her gut instinct when it comes to casting decisions. 

I always enjoy chatting about casting because it’s such an integral yet still strangely invisible part of making a film and although there has been much more recognition for the work that casting directors do over the past couple of years, I still think there are so many nuances and elements of the role that we (myself included) don’t necessarily grasp. So it was a real privilege to spend some time with Aisha and hear about her perspective on what she does and how she does it.

My guest this week is Ruth Greenberg, an award-winning screenwriter and director whose directorial debut RUN, a short film starring Niamh Algar from CENSOR, is currently showing on Short of the Week. The film was backed by Film4 and BFI NETWORK and was long listed for a BIFA in 2021. 

As a screenwriter, Ruth’s prehistoric horror, THE ORIGIN, is in post-production with Escape Plan Productions - the company who made SAINT MAUD and she’s also working on a medieval horror with director Nora Fingscheidt (SYSTEM CRASHER, THE UNFORGIVABLE) and producer Philippa Tsang at DCM.

Ruth and I had a great chat about completing a PhD in screenwriting, getting an agent and what that relationship is like, how she prepared to direct RUN and collaborated with director of photography and former podcast guest Molly Manning Walker to achieve the subjectivity and kineticism required of the story, what a writing day might look like for her, how she likes to situates herself in the setting or place of a story and how she deals with rejection. 

I think there are some really vital thoughts that Ruth expresses on writing genre and writing in general, and not being hemmed in by how you ought to write. 

**TW: discussions of assault**

There are few housekeeping notes before we get to the interview. The first of those is that there is mild discussion of violence against women in the context of Ruth’s short film Run and we mention the death of Sarah Everard, so if for whatever reason you don’t feel comfortable listening to that, feel free to skip the episode or rejoin us around the 20-min mark.

The other thing to say in relation to that film is that it’s on Short of the Week and to coincide with that launch, Ruth its raising money via JustGiving for Woman’s Trust who provide mental health and support services to women affected by domestic abuse. I’ve linked to that page in the show notes, so if you’d like to donate, you can do so there. And I would obviously also recommend watching Ruth’s very powerful short film.

This was recorded via zoom and there are occasional background noises, but otherwise I hope you enjoy this conversation.

This episode 104 of Best Girl Grip.

My guest this week is Elhum Shakerifar, a BAFTA nominated producer and winner of the 2017 Women in Film & TV's BBC Factual Award and one of Screen International’s 2018 #Brit50 Producers on the Rise.

Elhum’s multi-award-winning credits include The Reluctant Revolutionary (Sean McAllister, 2012), The Runner (Saeed Farouky, 2013), multi-award-winning A Syrian Love Story (Sean McAllister, 2015), Even When I Fall (Sky Neal and Kate McLarnon, 2017), BIFA winner for Best Documentary, Almost Heaven (Carol Salter, 2017), ISLAND (Steven Eastwood, 2017), Of Love & Law (Hikaru Toda, 2017) and Ayouni (Yasmin Fedda 2020). Her work has been broadcast internationally and screened at festivals including Berlinale, IDFA, Rotterdam and CPH:DOX. Elhum was also a recipient of the 2016 BFI Vision Award.

I was both excited and nervous to speak to Elhum because she has produced a body of work that is interrogative and curious and empathic and I wanted to come to the conversation with that same energy, knowing that we would likely cover some complex topics.

And we did, we spoke about the vulnerabilities and ethical considerations inherent to making documentary, how she prioritises relationships and intentionality as opposed to access, what a greater level of respect for documentary filmmaking would look like, why and how she distributes her own films through her company Hakawati and also how she persists, to keep telling stories that are meaningful and difficult and heartfelt. 

It was a really gratifying conversation and one that I’m really glad to have had, so I hope you enjoy it just as much. 

This week's guests are Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth! 

Hen and Jess are screenwriters, directors and twin sisters. Having penned their first script at 15, they went onto write OLIVIA AND JIM which came third on the Brit List in 2011. In 2012, at the age of 24 they were featured on ScreenDaily’s prestigious Stars of Tomorrow list and began writing on TV shows such as FRESH MEAT, DIXI and KILLING EVE..

In 2018 their BFI-backed debut feature as screenwriters - TELL IT TO THE BEES, starring Holliday Grainger and Anna Paquin - premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and they currently have two other adaptations in the works, alongside a TV series for Amazon.

Meanwhile Hen and Jess have branched out into directing and their short film NIGHT BUS, a supernatural horror starring Susan Wokoma is now available to watch on Short of the Week. They are also working with Helen Gladders (who produced NIGHT BUS) on developing their directorial debut.

I had a blast chatting with Hen and Jess who are both very smart and funny and have lots of wise things to share about their experiences as screenwriters since arriving in the industry almost a decade ago. I think the thing that struck me most about our conversation was not only how willing they were to talk about some of the difficulties or disappointments inherent to being a writer, but also how they could frame that in a way that is helpful to other aspiring writers and filmmakers and so I think this conversation is fully of really good nuggets about breaking stories and figuring out characters and moving between or on from projects, as well as what it’s like to write in service of another person’s vision as opposed to being in service of your own imagination.  

I highly recommend that you check out NIGHT BUS and also watch this space for many more exciting projects penned and or helmed by Hen and Jess.

My guest this week is Sandra Hebron, the Head of Screen Arts at the National Film and Television School where she leads the course for the MA in Film Studies, Programming and Curation. Previously Sandra was Head of Festivals and the Artistic Director of the BFI London Film Festival and Director of Cinemas at Manchester’s Cornerhouse. She is also a qualified Psychotherapist with a counselling business. 

We spoke about how she got her start in film exhibition, her time as artistic director of the LFF and what direction she hoped to push it in. In doing so, we touch on ideas of cultural renewal and not staying in positions of power for too long. We talk about curatorial ethics, mentorship and also how her psychotherapy training plays into how she works in the world of film.

I got a lot out of speaking with Sandra. I cut it out of the final edit, but there was a moment where I had to check it was ok to run over our allotted time and confessed to having a really good time and I think that was a combination of Sandra’s honesty, the perspective and consideration she gave to the questions and the interrogation too and it was just a very invigorating interview, so I hope you have as good a time with it as I did.

This is episode 101 of Best Girl Grip. 

My guest this week is Rose Garnett, the Director of BBC Film. Since joining the BBC in 2017, Rose has commissioned and Executive Produced a wide range of titles including…

• Joanna Hogg’s THE SOUVENIR and THE SOUVENIR: PART II
• Eliza Hittman’s NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS
• Sean Durkin’s THE NEST
• Steve McQueen’s SMALL AXE
• Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG
• Debbie Tucker Green’s EAR FOR EYE

...among many others and is passionate about backing new and emerging filmmakers. Rose was also an EP on BBC Three’s smash hit adaptation of Sally Rooney’s NORMAL PEOPLE, produced by Element Pictures.

After graduating from Cambridge University, Rose worked in theatre before freelancing as a script editor and producer. Then she joined Film4 where she would become Head of Creative. Whilst there, Rose developed and executive produced an array of recent successful UK films, including Yorgos Lanthimos’s THE FAVOURITE, Martin McDonagh’s THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING MISSOURI, Steve McQueen’s WIDOWS, Lenny Abrahamson’s ROOM, Lynne Ramsay’s YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE and Andrea Arnold’s AMERICAN HONEY.

It was an immense pleasure to talk to Rose about a surfeit of topics, from how theatre prepared her for a career in film, what she learned working at Film4, what it means to be a director of a public funder and the considerations that come into play in making that organisation accountable, accessible, inclusive and supportive to what success look like and how she and the BBC Film team back filmmakers. Unsurprisingly, Rose had a lot of wisdom that she was generous enough to share and I know that this is an interview I will be returning to time and time again. 

Please note that this was recorded remotely over Zoom and there are some occasional audio glitches. 

This is episode 100 of Best Girl Grip. 

It’s been a weird week, with Omicron taking hold and trying to feel festive but also feeling quite apprehensive. So I hope you’re surviving, which has definitely been the overarching theme for 2021. And as always I hope this podcast brings a little bit of light into your week.

It’s an appropriate segue to introduce my guest - filmmaker Sophie Littman - whose short film Sudden Light was selected for competition at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival 2020 and was nominated for a BIFA that same year. Her latest short film Know the Grass screened at the BFI London Film Festival in October and was long listed for Best British Short at this year’s BIFAs. It’s also playing in competition at the upcoming London Short Film Festival and you can buy tickets for that right now at shortfilms.org.uk. 

Sophie has a background in Fine Art and graduated from the UCL Slade School of Fine Art, which is where she got her start making experimental video work. 

We chat about what that label ‘experimental’ means to her, how she honed her voice as a filmmaker and we go deep on creative process, as Sophie enlightens me on this idea of horizontal versus vertical work which I thought was brilliant. We also talk about getting an agent and being named a ScreenDaily Star of Tomorrow earlier this year. 

A quick housekeeping note - this was recorded over Zoom and occasionally it sounds like it - but I hope you enjoy our conversation regardless.

This is episode 99 of Best Girl Grip. 

My guest this week is Akua Gyamfi who has over 20 years of experience in the entertainment industry, with a career spanning fashion, film, television, theatre, print and online media.

Starting out behind the scenes, Akua carved out a reputable career as a hair stylist on London’s Portobello Road. Her hairdressing reputation lead to her first foray into the entertainment world with a hair CV which includes work for magazines Vogue, Disorder, BOLZ, and i-D. Since 2010 she has been a part of the Paul Hanlon hair team during both London and Paris fashion weeks for Matthew Williamson, Topshop Unique, Jonathan Saunders, Giles and more. She also worked on set for various music videos and British gangster film Rollin’ With the Nines.

After leaving a full-time career in hairstyling, Akua studied journalism at London College of Communications (formerly London College of Printing) and her career as a freelance journalist took off. Akua worked at renowned underground music digital TV station Channel AKA (formerly known as Channel U). Then moved to the BBC where she worked at their Performing Arts Fund, BBC Writersroom and then BBC R&D.

In 2010 Akua worked with director Mark 1 to co-write, and produce anti-knife and gun crime short film, After Effects. During this time, Gyamfi gained valuable insight into the machinations of script writing and turned those skills into becoming a script consultant for new screenwriters & playwrights.

In 2012, Akua launched multi-award winning platform The British Blacklist, a media outlet for BAME entertainment professionals.  The British Blacklist is a media brand respected throughout the industry for its dedication to news of British black professionals in screen, stage, sound, and literature and its database documenting and championing their achievements in a way that hasn’t been done before.

Akua is also a sought-after commentator regularly speaking on news outlets. She is on the board of The New Black Film Collective and is a regular collaborator with We Are Parable. Akua is also a regular chair for screenings and panel discussions hosted by BAFTA and the BFI.

So there was a lot to talk about! We also cover what success means to Akua, if there’s anything she would do differently, what it actually means to be a founder and what keeps her creatively energised. I really appreciated Akua’s transparency and straight-forwardness, and I think there are definitely some wisdoms to be gleaned. So here is that interview…

My guest this week is a wonderful woman and friend: Nia Childs. 

Nia is a freelance creative producer and curator working in both the fiction and documentary space. She’s produced, curated and programmed projects for Doc Society, BAFTA, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the London Short Film Festival and The Roundhouse. More recently, she has begun to write and direct her own films, with her debut short The Other End premiering at the BFI London Film Festival earlier this year.

We spoke about a myriad of things, including managing your finances as a freelancer, making a short film in lockdown, crowdfunding and finding a producer. We also touch on storytelling about crime, climate and class and why people should watch more short films. As well how Nia overcame anxiety around bad on-set experiences to create a fun and safe atmosphere on her own set.

I want to thank Nia for her candour about her finances and some of her fears about her transition to filmmaking. I genuinely think it’s going to be a crucial listen for any fellow freelance creatives.

Siobhán Harper-Ryan is a Hair & Make-Up Designer who started out as an apprentice in fashion design & millinery in London’s Camden Lock, before exploring the world of theatre in the 90s where she found a place within London’s Off West-End and the Fringe. In 1999 Siobhán changed course and trained in make-up artistry and has since enjoyed a varied & colourful career, working on a range of TV and film projects. Recently she worked on Sky Atlantic’s series I Hate Suzie, as well as Joanna Hogg’s films The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II. The latter for which she just earned a BIFA nomination. She also worked on Joanna’s next film The Eternal Daughter, and Peter Strickland’s upcoming film Flux Gourmet. 

This is my first time chatting to a make-up designer on Best Girl Grip, so as well as chatting about Siobhán’s route into make-up artistry, we also go back to basics, discussing how she decides what make-up to use, what goes into creating onscreen looks, particularly for subtle period dramas like The Souvenir and how she establishes a rapport with the actors. We also talk about neurodivergence in the film industry, building confidence and taking time for yourself on the hubbub of a film set. 

I hope you enjoy listening to our chat. Make sure to catch The Souvenir Part II when it’s released in cinemas on 21st January next year.

This is episode 96 of Best Girl Grip.

This week’s interview was a real treat to record. Sam Joly, my guest, radiates joy and positivity, but what I got from this chat is the sense that that’s a choice and one that sometimes takes work and so I hope you come away from it with a smile, but also a sense of how you can celebrate your personal achievements and maybe make that choice too.

Sam is Head of Marketing and Publicity at the film and television production house See-Saw Films. These are the folks that made The King’s Speech, Lion, Widows, Macbeth, Ammonite, Slow West, Top of the Lake, State of the Union and more recently Jane Campion’s ferocious gothic Western The Power of the Dog and Andrew Haigh’s riveting TV series The North Water. 

Sam started her career in documentary television before joining See-Saw in 2011 where she worked her way up from assistant. 

We spoke about many things to do with marketing such as poster design, creating trailers, what good publicity actually looks like and how involved directors are, as well as several more broad topics such as mental health on film sets, how you can better value and advocate for yourself, and that time Sam produced a Steve McQueen-directed music video for Kanye West…

This is episode 95 of Best Girl Grip.

 

Show notes

• Watch Sam's film recommendation Little Woods or Crossing The Line by Nia DaCosta on Amazon Prime.

I’m here today with a bonus minisode with two-time Academy-Award nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus to celebrate the release of her latest documentary Becoming Cousteau.

If you listened to last Tuesday’s interview with Anna Godas, CEO of Dogwoof, you’ll have heard me mention the film. Well it’s out in UK cinemas today and all puns intended, I think you’ll have a whale of a time. 

For over four decades, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his explorations under the ocean became synonymous with a love of science and the natural world. As he learned to protect the environment, he brought the whole world with him, sounding alarms more than 50 years ago about the warming seas and our planet’s vulnerability. In Becoming Cousteau, from National Geographic Documentary Films, Liz takes an inside look at Cousteau and his life, his iconic films and inventions, and the experiences that made him the 20th century’s most unique and renowned environmental voice. 

It’s a documentary that reinstates or reframes Cousteau as a revolutionary, as well as a father and filmmaker, and I’m quoting the New York Times here “succeeds in restoring some of Cousteau’s luster, and also his relevance. It’s a swift-moving, detailed biography, recounting a life that was long, eventful and stippled with tragedy and regret.” 

It’s awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, energetic and emotional filmmaking, and at 93 minutes long, should definitely be high up on your watchlist this weekend. 

Liz Garbus is one of America's most celebrated documentary filmmakers. She has received three Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, two Academy Award nominations, and a Grammy Award nomination for her body of work, which includes The Farm: Angola, USA; What Happened, Miss Simone?; Bobby Fischer Against the World; Nothing Left Unsaid; There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane; The Fourth Estate; among others. In 2020 she turned her hand to narrative filmmaking and directed Lost Girls which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is currently available to watch on Netflix. 

We talk about why she was compelled to make this film about Cousteau, how she imbued the documentary with his own adventurous spirit, how she crafted his story through over 550 hours of archive material and the different muscles you have to flex working on fiction as opposed to non-fiction. It’s a brief but buoyant conversation, and I was thrilled to have the chance to speak with Liz about her wonderful film.

 

Discover which venues near you are showing the film. 

My guest this week is Anna Godas, the CEO of documentary distribution company Dogwoof, who have released films such as The Alpinist, The Act of Killing, Blackfish, Cameraperson, Citizenfour, Free Solo, Honeyland, Minding the Gap, OJ:Made in America, RBG and many many more. Quite simply, if Dogwoof are putting a doc into cinemas, you’re probably in for a treat.

Their latest film is Becoming Cousteau, directed by Liz Garbus which is released this Friday and provides an inside look at the life of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and the experiences that made him the man who inspired generations to protect the Earth.

Anna has steered the company from a small UK indie film distributor to a leading global brand in the field of documentary and was directly responsible for the creation of Dogwoof's international sales arm, as well as the creation of Dogwoof's fund T-Dog Productions. Anna is now focusing on growing Dogwoof's production and development side, focusing on feature docs, doc series, remake rights, podcast and shorter content. Her mission is to create a fully integrated true stories mini-studio. 

We talk about the origin story of Dogwoof, as well as how her role as evolved over the years and since becoming a mother. We discuss how she strives to create an open, transparent and healthy working culture, how the documentary landscape is changing and why, and why you can’t really plan for the future. 

It was a joy to speak to Anna and hope you enjoy this insight into one of the most prolific distributors out there. 

This is episode 94 of Best Girl Grip.

Hello! Welcome to Season Five of Best Girl Grip. 

 

This week my guest is Jemma Desai. I first encountered Jemma at an event hosted by The Quarter Club, which was co-founded by former podcast guest Jo Duncombe, where Jemma was reading a letter she had written to her daughter Leena which evolved into a TinyLetter for a while. And then I kept encountering Jemma’s name and work in various iterations and I was always struck by how thoughtful and rigorous and I guess, unconventional it was. And then in 2020 I read Jemma’s research paper 'This Work Isn’t For Us', which considers how arts institutions and cultural policy - particularly initiatives towards inclusion - have treated, or mistreated the Black and Brown people they seek to include. And I’ve never read anything like it. It's a significant piece of work in so many ways and I knew then that I wanted to speak to Jemma about it, and so I’m really glad that she agreed to come on the podcast and talk about all manner of things, including that. 

 

In terms of a professional work biography, Jemma is is a writer, researcher and curator based in London, currently completing a PhD on practices of freedom in the arts. Most recently she was Head of Programming at the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and she has also held positions at the BFI London Film Festival, British Council and Independent Cinema Office. She is also the founder of a curatorial initiative called I Am Dora and is a fellow of the Clore Leadership programme. 

 

We talk about a myriad of things including her role as programmer and her ambivalence around that label, community, colonialism, the need to redefine or abolish the idea of linear progression, what leadership means to her, and why she hopes it will be dismantled, the issues at the heart of campaigns like #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite, how to structurally enable care, out of office emails, embracing possibility and joy and much much more. 

 

I see this podcast episode as being, hopefully, a bit of an antidote to feeling like you don’t belong in the film industry, or feeling like your career doesn’t make sense or isn’t one thing. I think it’s a really expansive and generous conversation and as you’ll hear in the intro it was actually our second recording, so I’m really grateful to Jemma for sitting down me with me on two occasions and having what I see as being a bit of an eye-opening or mind-expanding discussion.

 

SHOW NOTES

Jemma's Work

• Follow Jemma on Twitter
• Jemma's linktree 
• Notes on Programming Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival 2021
• An interview with Matt Turner for Sentient Art Film which goes into more depth on Jemma's programming collective 'I Am Dora' and also tells a slightly more expanded 'career story'. 
• 'This Work Isn't For Us'
• The video piece Jemma created as a reflection on making and disseminating 'This Work Isn't For Us'. 
• A Letter to Leena about care

Things Jemma talks about in the podcast

• Activist collective Resist + Renew
• Jordan Lorde's 'Shared Resources'

• Ryan Coogler on rejecting his invasion to join the Academy 

• The White Pube

• Healing Justice London
• The bare minimum collective's manifesto

Jemma's book & film recommendations

• 'Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power' - Lola Olufemi
• Picture books written by Toni Morrison and her son Slade that Jemma is reading with her own daughter
• 'Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism' - Alison Phipps
• Merata: How Mum Decolonised The Screen, a documentary about trailblazing Maori filmmaker Merata Miti currently on Netflix 

 

This week I am back with the third instalment of my bonus trilogy and my guest is the incredibly talented, incredibly charming Cathy Brady!

Cathy is a two-time IFTA-winning director, having won Best Short in 2011 for her first film Small Change and again in 2013 for Morning. In 2011, Cathy directed the BIFA nominated short Rough Skin, starring Vicky McClure, and in 2013, Cathy was named one of Screen Daily’s ‘Stars of Tomorrow’.

In 2014, Cathy directed on the BAFTA-nominated drama-thriller series Glue. More recently, Cathy directed Stefanie Preissner's TV comedy series Can’t Cope/Won’t Cope. 

Wildfire, her debut feature film which we’re here to talk about, alongside how her career led to this moment, is released in UK cinemas tomorrow (on Friday 3 September). 

Cathy’s film tells the story of inseparable sisters - Lauren and Kelly - raised in a small town on the Irish border, but whose lives are shattered by the mysterious death of their mother. Lauren is left to pick up the pieces after Kelly abruptly disappears, but when she returns home after being reported missing for a whole year, their intense sisterhood is reunited. 

I saw the film at LFF last year and it was haunting and poignant and spectral and definitely had this spiky, fiery quality to it. It’s also lensed by Crystel Fournier who has worked on lots of Celine Sciamma’s movies, including Girlhood and Tomboy. 

Anyway, this chat was lovely and I could spend many hours talking to Cathy. We cover her time at the NFTS, how she hustled to get directing work upon graduation, the experience of making Wildfire and then the difficulty of releasing it during a pandemic and whilst grieving the death of one it’s lead actresses Nika McGuigan. 

I definitely urge you to support this film in cinemas, but in the meantime, enjoy our conversation.

This is episode 92 of Best Girl Grip.

Today I’m sharing another in-between season bonus episode that I recorded live as part of the BFI’s Woman With a Movie Camera Summit in July. My guest was Molly Manning Walker, a cinematographer, writer and director. 

Molly trained as a cinematographer and graduated from NFTS in 2019, after which her graduation film November 1st was long-listed for a BAFTA. As a DP, she works across a variety of formats including documentary, fiction and advertising, and she has just finished shooting her first TV series, Superhoe, written by Nicole Lecky and directed by Dawn Shadforth and she is in prep for Scrapper directed by Charlotte Regan. 

Molly’s debut writing and directing project was the short film Good Thanks, You? which premiered at the Semaine De La Critique program at the Cannes Film Festival. Her follow up short film, conceived and created during the pandemic, The Forgotten C, was BIFA Nominated. Meanwhile, her debut feature film How To Have Sex is currently in development with Film4 and Molly was recently awarded the Next Step Prize at Cannes. 

I thought it was a quite a no-bullshit conversation - Molly is quite young, and to mind, very successful and on a very exciting trajectory, but she made it very clear that has only been achieved through a very strong work ethic. Listening back to it for the edit I think it’s full of quite practical advice and we talk about how limitations can be creatively useful, what support looks like on-set and how counselling and intimacy co-ordination were crucial to the making of Molly’s short film Good Thanks, You? As well as discussing Molly’s transition from shooting to directing, why she makes a habit of only using one light and what she considers to be the biggest learning curve of her career so far. 

I hope you enjoy listening to it!

 

I’m back! Not with a brand new season - just yet - but with a triple-bill of bonus episodes that I recorded a couple of months ago either for live events or to tie-in with a film release.

The first in this series is with the immensely talented, and very down-to-earth writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond.

Prano grew up in Wales on a diet of Twin Peaks before becoming an editor and then award-winning music video director. Her narrative short films have screened at festivals worldwide and earned her critical acclaim, including being named a Screen International ‘Star of Tomorrow’ in 2018. 

Her debut feature film, Censor, had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival opening the festival's Midnight section and will be released in UK cinemas this Friday. 

Censor is set in Britain in 1985 and follows a film censor called Enid, played by BAFTA-nominated actress Niamh Algar, as she discovers an eerie horror that speaks directly to her sister’s mysterious disappearance. She then resolves to unravel the puzzle behind the film and its enigmatic director – a quest that will blur the lines between fiction and reality in terrifying ways. Which sounds suitably nerve-shredding…

I actually saw the film last week and its disturbing and hallucinogenic and suitably nasty, and that’s all I’m going to say because it’s probably best you go in with minimal info. 

Prano and I discuss many things: how she discovered directing was her calling, the conditions she prefers in order to write, how she prepares for a shoot, how she communicates with and directs actors, how she established a common visual language with DP Annika Summerson and what it’s been like releasing a horror film amidst a ‘women-directing-genre-films’ boom. 

It was a really lovely conversation, I’m a big fan of Prano’s and the film’s so I highly recommend you book a ticket immediately after listening to the podcast.

So this is the final episode of Season Four - which I started back in March and honestly I have no idea where that time has gone. There will be a couple of bonus episodes coming out to coincide with some film releases, but apart from that I’ll be on hiatus for a couple of months figuring out and planning for Season Five.

But I feel like I’m going out with a bang!! This season has been a real treat - I’ve spoken to some amazing women and had some really fun but also important conversations and that trend is definitely continuing with this episode in which I spoke to Mandy Chang, who is currently the Commissioning Editor at the BBC’s feature documentary strand Storyville. 

Mandy has been on my radar for several years, I’ve seen her speak at Sheffield Doc/Fest and have watched many of the films she’s commissioned and executive produced and I was incredibly excited when she said yes to being interviewed. I knew it would be one of those interviews where an hour / hour and a half is simply not enough time to ask all the right questions and I’m sure there are plenty of other paths that we could’ve gone down but what you’re about to hear is the conversation that we did have and I found it to be as thoughtful and illuminating as I had hoped.

Mandy started out as a freelance filmmaker, producing and directing docs for TV. Her credits include The Mona Lisa Curse, an Emmy and Grierson award-winning polemic that traces the pernicious rise of the art market and The Camera That Changed The World, a portrait of the first portable cameras and the impact they had on filmmaking and filmmakers. 

Mandy was later Head of Arts at ABC TV, a broadcaster in Australia before joining Storyville in 2017. During her time there she has shepherded many incredible documentaries to our screen, among them are: UNDER THE WIRE, ONE CHILD NATION, COLD CASE HAMMARSKJÖLD, INTO THE STORM, I AM GRETA and the upcoming MISHA AND THE WOLVES. 

And she has just been announced as the new Global Head of Documentaries at Fremantle where she will spearhead the producer-distributor’s growth in high-end factual production. 

We talked about her filmmaking career and how she sustained that for two decades, as well as how those experiences have informed her approach to commissioning. We discuss how she built on Storyville’s legacy whilst also pushing it in new and bold directions, why caretaking is a central part of her commissioning philosophy and what that means and what excites her about the future of documentary.

I think Mandy was really generous with her answers and I certainly got a lot from hearing about her career journey, so I hope you do as well.

This week I’ve got a very exciting line-up of guests. Yes you heard that plural correctly, I spoke to not one, not two, but three brilliant women working in the film industry and the reason for that is they formed the T A P E collective together.

My guests are Angie Moneke, Isra Al Kassi and Nellie Alston, who founded T A P E in 2015 as a response to the lack of representation both on screen. 

Their mission is to bring exciting screenings to new audiences, championing the forgotten could-be cult films of the festival circuit and programmes of women of colour both behind and in front of the camera. Over the years T A P E have curated a number of well-rounded screenings bringing together film, art, music, talks and more into one space and events with a focus on representation, identity and heritage. T A P E has also produced two zine issues: the first one called They Thought We Were Token, and the second issue, Moon Sisters, released six months later. Since launching in a community café nearly five years ago, T A P E has expanded to include content writing, talks, consultation, curation, cross-arts events and an online streaming platform called Good Wickedry. 

We spoke about how they became interested in programming as individuals and where the idea for the collective came from and how they’ve retained the identity of the collective, as well as the passion for doing it, as it’s expanded.  

We also spend some time talking about their month-long season coming up at the BFI Southbank in July called But Where Are You Really From, which explores the nuances of being mixed heritage and will centre around three themes: mother tongue, the significance of names, and the ‘good immigrant’ trope.

Special guests confirmed to take part in the season and the week-long online takeover include director Ngozi Onwurah, whose film WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME (1995) was the first feature directed by a Black British woman to receive a UK theatrical release and Nikesh Shukla, who co-wrote the short film TWO DOSAS (Sarmad Masud, 2014) and edited the essay anthology The Good Immigrant. The season will culminate on 30 July with the short film programme CULTURE SHOCK, which were selected from submissions responding to the theme of ‘But Where Are You Really From?’ presented by T A P E and UNDR LNDN.

This week I am delighted to welcome set decorator Lisa Scoppa to the podcast. I came across her name and work after watching Barry Jenkins’ THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, and a) just wanting to know who worked on that series because it is phenomenal and b) I thought the production design and the sets were just incredibly evocative - at times harrowing, at times transcendent and that is how I found Lisa’s name. And then I was overjoyed to discover she’s also worked on shows like THE DEUCE and ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, as well assisting on films like THE IRISHMAN and THE GREATEST SHOWMAN.

She’s also worked on two of my favourite American indie films which are SHERRYBABY starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and DOWN TO THE BONE starring Vera Farmiga.

We talk about her path into set decoration, why she actually doesn’t love being on set, how she goes about sourcing ‘the stuff’ and what her experiences were like on some of the aforementioned shows.

If you’ve always been keen to know why a particular chair has been selected, or what happens to all of the furniture afterwards, or how they created 1970s Times Square in The Deuce, this conversation is for you.

There are some occasional background noises such as a dog barking and as ever these are recorded on zoom. 

This is episode 87 of Best Girl Grip. 

This week my guest is Rachael Tate, a BAFTA award-winning Dialogue & ADR supervisor slash editor whose credits include 1917 (for which she won the BAFTA), upcoming Bond film No Time to Die, The Rhythm Section, All the Money in the World and The Martian. 

We talk about how Rachael got into this line of work, what exactly ADR is and how she works with actors to try and recreate their performance in the studio, why she perceives her job to be more of a craft than a technical role and how she achieves authenticity so that every word or breath you hear in a film, feels like it belongs.

 

This week my guest is Kat Buckle, an agent at Curtis Brown in their Film & TV department where she represents a range of talent such as director Stella Corradi, writer and actor Emma Sidi, presenter, podcast & writer Tolani Shoneye, comedian & writer Jack Rooke and many, many more.

We talk about her route into the world of talent agenting, how she built her own roster and what she looks for in potential clients, how she manages client expectations and sets boundaries, how she deals with both the competitive nature of the business as well as when clients might want to move on and her proudest moments as an agent. 

It was a real treat to chat with Kat, she was really open and generous and I think gave lots of valuable insights into what it means to be an agent, as well as perhaps what to expect if and when you are looking for representation, so I’m very grateful for her time. 

So cinemas are open which is hugely exciting! What are people going to see? And where? Lots of things that have had releases are back on big screens like Nomadland and Sound of Metal and Ammonite, which is cool because I think they’re all films that will benefit from that sense of surroundedness that you can only get from the cinema. 

And so it feels fitting that my guest this week has worked in cinemas and is an advocate for the kind of tangible film-going experience and that person is Tara Judah.

Tara is a cultural critic, film programmer and curator and occasional video essayist. She was Watershed's Cinema Producer for two years, having freelanced in programming and editorial for the Watershed's archive, classic and repertory film festival, Cinema Rediscovered, which launched in 2016.

Tara was also Co-Director at 20th Century Flicks video shop and programmed films for Australia's iconic single screen repertory theatre, The Astor, and for Melbourne's annual feminist film event, Girls on Film Festival. 

And she is currently Editor of Critics Reviews at MUBI and writes a bi-weekly column for an online journal called Ubiquarian that focuses on experimental cinema alongside documentaries and shorts and champions the forms or mediums that surprise us.

We talk about being a mature student, redefining experimental cinema, criticism and film-festival going in the time of a pandemic, increasing transparency around freelance rates and fees and producing work that is unique to you.

I’m not going to lie, I had high expectations for this chat, because Tara is such a thoughtful and critical thinker and writer, and it did not disappoint, Tara contends with lots of thorny and important issues in the industry and raises lots of salient points, so I do hope you enjoy listening.

 

Show notes:

• Cinema Rediscovered
• Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way
• Tara's column 'Reflections' for Ubiquarian
• Europa Cinemas report on innovation & audience-building
• So Mayer
• Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.

 

 

 

This week my guest is Mariayah Kaderbhai who is Head of Programmes at BAFTA, where she represents them as the lead film industry voice and moderates most of their panels and Q&As. She’s interviewed filmmaking talent such as Spike Lee, Jacques Audiard and Stephen Frears, as well as this year’s Best Director winner Chloé Zhao. 

We talk about how Mariayah took a roundabout way to studying cinema at university before getting an internship at the BFI, working at Al Jazeera as a journalist and then developing the membership and events programme at BAFTA. As well as how she prepares for Q&As and how she has adapted to interviewing talent through the medium of Zoom.

Speaking of which, all these podcast interviews are recorded on Zoom meaning the audio quality can vary and this is one of the times where I hope you’ll bear with…

This week my guest is Mika Watkins, a screenwriter for television and film, whose career is already on a really exciting trajectory.

She’s been part of the writers rooms for Black Mirror and the Amazon series Hanna and has written episodes for Sky’s Lucky Man and BBC1 period drama Troy: Fall of a City. She also created, showran and executive produced the 10-part sci-fi Origin for Leftbank and YouTube Premium.  

Mika is currently writing a range of her own projects including Love Story, a Tokyo-set rom-com for Eleven Films, Joketsu, a series about a 16th century female samurai for Sister Pictures and Amazon and Yakuza for FX, which is being produced by Fargo & Legion’s Noah Hawley. 

Mika is also currently writing on Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix horror anthology series, 10 After Midnight, and has just wrapped directing a short film that she also wrote for Film4.

So there’s plenty to talk about! We go deep into Mika’s writing practice, how she generates ideas and at what stage she actually starts writing. We talk about her experience in writers rooms, as well as what it was like show-running Origin and why she recently turned her hand to directing, but why her heart we always be with writing.

Mika’s incredibly intelligent and eloquent and that definitely came across in our chat, it was a real treat to have her on the podcast and to be able to interrogate how and why she writes. 

My guest this week is Melanie Hoyes who is an Industry Inclusion Executive at the BFI, where she deputises for the Head of Inclusion to advocate for equity and access in the film industry. She joined the BFI in 2016 as a researcher, working on a project to acquire diversity data about gender and ethnicity for the BFI Filmography, telling stories about UK film history using data from the archive. Melanie continues to use data and research in order to monitor and inform improved policy and practice at the BFI and the UK film industry in general. 

We talk about a myriad of topics: her start in academia, her decision not to finish a PhD, her path to the BFI and the work that she’s doing to advocate for and instil inclusion, the value of emotional intelligence at work, why the concept of a career ladder is dangerous, how data can galvanise informed, targeted change and how she stays motivated to keeping working towards that change, 

I really enjoyed this conversation and found it very validating actually, so wherever you are and whatever time of day you are listening to it, I hope it gives you a little boost.

This week I spoke to film publicist Kaila Hier.

Kaila is a Montreal-born, formerly Berlin-based publicist and the founder of Exile PR. She has been working with film festivals for over a decade including Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival, FrightFest London, Fantastic Fest in Austin, and The Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, among others. Films that she’s represented such as CAM, SEA FEAVER, RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE and THE BEACH HOUSE have screened at festivals around the globe. 

We talk about how she got into publicity, the experience of striking out on her own, what’s it’s like to work for herself and how she goes about creating that all important buzz.

This was a really fun chat and Kaila was incredibly transparent about her career this far, so I hope you enjoy listening.

 

PS. The Q&A that Kaila mentions at the end for Sabrina Mertens' film TIME OF MOULTING can be watched here.

My guest this week is Parisa Taghizadeh - who goes by the name Tag - and she is a stills photographer for film and television. 

This is a job that I was so curious to find out more about - because stills are often the very first glimpse we get of a film. We might hear whose been cast or that production is underway, but when that photograph is released it’s our first visual of what that film might look and be like and so it’s a really important role. 

Tag has an extensive and varied career working with directors such as Jane Campion, Sally Potter, Michael Winterbottom, Edgar Wright and Steve McQueen on both studio and independent productions such as Top of the Lake, Killing Eve, Slow West, the Small Axe anthology and upcoming films Last Night in Soho and Last Letter from Your Lover. 

We talk about Tag’s career from art school to getting her “big break” in inverted commas, as well as the mechanics of the role and how she’s able to get those shots and why being both discreet and pushy are key traits on set.

This week my guest is Lauren McCallum, who has worked in the VFX industry for over 15 years. And you might be thinking niche or not applicable to me, but I really urge to listen to this because Lauren’s advice and perspective on a whole array of topics is just phenomenal, frankly.

Lauren is currently Head of European Production at Scanline VFX, who have worked on films like Black Widow, Joker, Stranger Things 3, Captain Marvel and Black Panther.

She also worked at MPC as Head of Production on films like The Jungle Book, Spectre, The Martian and Blade Runner 2049 and as Managing Director at Mill Film where she launched studios in Montreal and Adelaide. And before that she was a visual effects co-ordinator at Framestore, where she worked with closely with Alfonso Cuaron on Gravity.

This is an episode for anyone struggling to maintain work life balance. Lauren and I talk about burnout, setting boundaries, redefining success and overcoming imposter syndrome. 

Lauren is also a champion for diversity and inclusion within the industry and in 2019 was named on the UK’s OUTstanding LGBTQ+ Role Models List. We talk about the value of bringing your whole self to work, and how creative industries in particular can facilitate the kind of inclusion and acceptance that enables that. We talk about a transgender toolkit that Lauren worked on and disseminated whilst at Mill Film. 

We  also talk about what it takes to make original and extraordinary visual effects and the lasting influence of Jurassic Park. 

So it’s a wide-ranging, but hopefully inspiring chat. I know I got a lot from it.

I spoke to Grace Bridger and Runyararo Mapfumo who are a producer / director duo that work together under the banner DessyMak films and have made a number of short films through that company. They have their own careers separately and we talk about both of them, but that producer-director relationship is such a unique thing and so I was keen to ask them about how they formed that bond and what their journey together has been like!

Their short film MASTERPIECE premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2017 and was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick. Grace then went on to develop and produce DAWN IN THE DARK, written and directed by Runyararo, which was supported by BBC Films and BFI NETWORK and which premiered at BFI London Film Festival 2019 and has also been selected for festivals such as Encounters Film Festival, Underwire Festival and the Norwich Film Festival. Grace then produced Runyararo's BBC and Google Arts commissioned short SENSATIONAL SIMMY which was released and broadcast on BBC and BBC iPlayer and then Grace developed and secured funding from Uncertain Kingdom for Runyararo's documentary WHAT'S IN A NAME? which was released as part of an anthology of films aiming to provide a portrait of contemporary UK.

Grace is originally from Perth in Australia, and has most recently worked on a number of films with producer Tracy O’Riordan at Moonspun Films; as a Production Secretary on Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava, and then as a Producer’s Assistant and Assistant Producer, working in post-production on Hong Khaou’s Monsoon.

As well as continuing to work with Runyararo, Grace is also currently working with Producer Fiona Lamptey as Post Production Supervisor on four Sci-Fi short films supported by Film4.

Meanwhile Runyararo is currently developing her debut feature film and has recently finished directing block 2 of Netflix’s Sex Education, Season 3.

We talk about their respective career paths, setting up their own production company, the learning curves along the way and how they’ve supported each other, we also chat about making shorts, transitioning to bigger projects, making career pivots and asking stupid questions.

This is episode 77 of Best Girl Grip.

 

Welcome to Series 4 of Best Girl Grip!

My first guest of the series is the wonderful Eva Riley.

Eva is a Scottish director and screenwriter based in Brighton. She graduated from the National Film and Television School in 2015, whereupon her final year film Patriot premiered in competition at Cannes. In 2016, she was commissioned to write and direct Diagnosis by BBC Films and she was subsequently named a Screen International ‘Star of Tomorrow’.

Eva's first feature Perfect 10 was developed and produced through Creative England’s iFeatures programme and later premiered at LFF. It tells the story of a young gymnast, played by Frankie Box, whose already difficult life is disrupted by the appearance of a half-brother, played by Alfie Deegan, whose existence she was unaware of. It’s a dazzling debut, just really assured and sensitive filmmaking and performances and it’s rebellious, summery vibe is perfect for these cold winter months and you can currently watch it on BBC iPlayer.

I think Eva is a brilliant filmmaker, and she made for a wonderful interviewee. She didn’t sugarcoat any of her successes and I think she makes visible the hard work and effort it’s taken to arrive at this very well deserved moment. 

We talk about working with young actors, what her filmmaking instincts are, giving less fucks about asking for what she wants, the physical demands of directing, the realities of pre-production and what she learnt from making her first feature.

My guest this week is none other than Emily Morgan, a BAFTA-winning film producer whom I admire greatly. 

Emily started out in distribution and as a production freelancer for various companies before setting up her own production outfit Quiddity Films which is supported by a BFI Vision Award. In 2018, she won the aforementioned BAFTA for Outstanding Debut Producer for Rungano Nyoni's I Am Not A Witch, which premiered at Cannes, screened at the Toronto Film Festival and Sundance, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and won three BIFAs. 

Emily has since produced Claire Oakley's feature debut Make Up which is currently available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

She also produced Harry Macqueen’s second feature Supernova, which premiered at LFF in October and is due for release on the 5 March next year, as it currently stands. The film stars Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth as long-term partners grappling with a diagnosis of early on-set dementia. 

Emily is a graduate of the NFTS, a member of ACE Producers. She was featured as a Screen Star of Tomorrow in 2015 and most recently, Quiddity Films was selected as one of the UK’s top emerging production companies in Screen Daily’s Brit 50 list.

So I hope that provides some context as to why I was so thrilled to speak with Emily. We spoke about her experiences at NFTS, how she worked her way towards producing features, how the BFI Vision award impacted her company and its future, what she looks for in collaborators and material and what’s she learnt about producing in her prestigious career thus far.

As always I hope you find it useful and insightful. 

My guest this week is Louisa Maycock - the creator, owner and mastermind of the hugely brilliant brand Girls on Tops.

If you don’t know them, I’m sure you’ll have seen one of their t-shirts out and about, particularly if you used to frequent film festivals. Louisa prints and sells white t-shirts that feature the names of celebrated and trailblazing women in the film industry including Tilda Swinton, Claire Denis, Lulu Wang, Greta Gerwig and Ava DuVernay. This year they released editions with Miranda July and Sofia Coppola and I myself own t-shirts emblazoned with Agnes Varda and Celine Sciamma. And I feel très chic when I wear them.

And not content to make us all just look very cool, Louisa has also set up an editorial platform called READ ME, which commissions female-led writing and along with Ella Kemp she edits and features really thoughtful and interrogative pieces on both contemporary and historical cinematic culture through an intersectionally feminist lens, and I think it’s very much unlike the kinds of the things you’ll read elsewhere. And I consider myself very lucky to have been published by them a few times. 

Louisa and I talk about the origin story for Girls on Tops, how the brand has grown over the past couple of years and how Louisa stays on top of it all - as a one-woman CEO and t-shirt folding machine. I’m so thrilled that we got this time to chat and I really was coming at it from the perspective of a fan, because I think it’s just immensely impressive that in the space of a few years Louisa has created something that - certainly in film-going circles - feels incredibly pervasive. I can’t imagine a time when they didn’t exist.

My guest this week is Anna Bogutskaya. Anna used to work at the BFI around the same time I was there and I believe I’m right in thinking she was the youngest programmer at the BFI Southbank - at the time, not of all time - although that might also be true. Anyway all this to say I always admired Anna from afar, she seemed incredibly ambitious and accomplished and I thought what she was doing both within the BFI - and outside of it - was refreshing and almost revolutionary in that she was often putting woman-directed cinema and indie filmmaking front and centre. 

Anna is currently a freelance film programmer, broadcaster, writer and creative producer. She is also the co-founder of the horror film collective The Final Girls and Festival Director of Underwire Festival where Best Girl Grip had it’s first live outing.

As mentioned she was previously the Film and Events Programmer at the British Film Institute, where she curated many seasons and also created the Woman With A Movie Camera Summit which we talk about in-depth.

We also go deep into the principles and considerations that uphold Anna’s programming ethos and all the aspects that go into designing a film season. We talk about her decision to go freelance, the other avenues its allowed her to pursue and how she manages her schedule. And fittingly we also wax lyrical about podcasts.

I’m hugely grateful to Anna for coming on the podcast and sharing her wisdom - of which there is a lot - so do tuck in.

This week I spoke to the lovely Gemma Cole, an agency director who comes from a background in film marketing. She’s worked for Ritzy Picturehouse, Picturehouse Entertainment and until quite recently elevenfiftyfive, a company whose mission is to support the film community by connecting brands with films through consultancy, partnerships and experience-building.

Gemma has recently ventured out to co-create her own agency called Dive, we talk about that process and the motivation behind it. We also chat about a whole host of other things, I think I mention at one point it felt a bit like creative therapy because we talked about valuing yourself and your work, learning curves, perfectionism and monetising creativity. 

I had a really great time speaking to Gemma. She’s based out in Margate which I am quite jealous of, I’m definitely lusting after some fresh sea air as I am sat in my bedroom recording this intro. But for now hopeful this conversation is all the invigoration you need.

My guest this week is Georgina Higgins, a Script Supervisor, whose recent credits include the Film4 and BFI-backed production Limbo from director Ben Sharrock, which was selected for Cannes this year and very well reviewed at the London Film Festival; a moving drama called Monsoon starring Henry Golding which is on BBC Two tomorrow night and will then be on BBC iPlayer. She also worked on Michaela Coel’s astonishing TV series I May Destroy You, Sky Atlantic & Showtime’s Patrick Melrose and the BAFTA-nominated film Stan & Ollie.

We unpack what it means to be a script supervisor, what the hardest part of the job is, how Georgina prepares and whether she can bear to watch what she works on considering its a job all about continuity and perfection.

This week my guest is Joanne Michael, the Director of Marketing and Distribution at Cornerstone, an international sales and financing company that launched in 2015. 

Some of their recent titles include Herself directed Phyllida Lloyd and produced by Element Pictures, Josephine Decker’s enthralling psycho-drama Shirley starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg, the screen adaptation of Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals as well as an upcoming project called The Fantastic Flitcrofts starring Mark Rylance and directed by Craig Roberts.

Jo came to Cornerstone having spent five years at HanWay Films where she managed the international launches and releases of award-winning films including Todd Haynes’ Carol and John Crowley’s Brooklyn. 

We talk about the intricacies of marketing for a sales company as opposed to a distributor, the creative point of view it requires, what happens when a film goes to a market and the best piece of advice that Jo has ever received.

As someone who had a brief stint working in sales it was a joy to revisit that element of the film industry and also during a year where things have felt decidedly quieter on the cinematic front, to be reminded of the madness and magic of a market. So I’m very grateful to Jo for joining me.

This week my guest is Jayisha Patel, an award-winning British filmmaker who works at the intersection of cinematic film and VR. 

Her short film, A Paradise, premiered at the Berlinale in 2014 and was nominated for over 37 international awards. 

In 2017 she directed Notes to My Father, an award winning VR experience commissioned by Oculus. The film launched at Oculus House during the Sundance Film Festival, before premiering at SXSW and Locarno. It won the UN Women’s Global Voices award for best 360/VR film and it was shown to policy advisers fighting gender violence at the World Economic Forum’s India Summit.

In May Jayisha finished a three-year spell as an artist in residence at London’s Somerset House, where she started to develop her next VR project After The Fire and in September she was named a ScreenDaily Star of Tomorrow.

I was thrilled to welcome Jayisha to the podcast, not least because VR is completely unchartered territory for Best Girl Grip. We talk about her incredibly fascinating journey into the film industry, how she utilises VR to tell personal, poignant and painful stories, how she stays creatively centred and what her experience has been like operating within both the tech and film industries. 

In other news I feel like we breathed a collective sigh of relief at the weekend with the eventual update that Joe Biden has been elected as the next President of the United States. For some context this interview was recorded just before that on Friday and I felt quite tense and tired and then I had this wonderful experience of talking with Jayisha. And even before the news broke, it made me hopeful and curious and connected. So thank you to Jayisha for her time and wisdom. I hope as ever you get as much from it as I do.

I’m excited for this episode because international sales isn’t a realm of the industry we’ve covered massively on the podcast and to my mind it’s obviously a hugely important chunk of the film’s journey, but one that sort of gets maybe less attention, particularly once a film is out in cinemas, we more often than note associate the film with its distributor or producer but sales agents are the bridge between those two entities and who better to give us insight into that world than Gabrielle Stewart whose is Managing Director at London-based sales agent HanWay films.

HanWay are an incredibly prestigious who have sold some astounding films in the past decade, some of my personal favourites include Brooklyn, Carol, High-Rise, Tale of Tales, 20,000 Days on Earth, The Guest, Tracks, Only Lovers Left Alive and Colette. 

Gabrielle joined HanWay Films in 2016 and their current slate includes Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio, Viggo Mortensen’s debut Falling, Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, and Made in Italy starring Liam Neeson.

Gabrielle came from serving as SVP of International Sales and Distribution in Los Angeles for Bloom Media since its 2013 inception and they sold films such as The Nice Guys and Suburbicon. The company has since been acquired by Endeavor Content. She joined Bloom from Exclusive Media where she worked on films such as Rush and Jane Got a Gun. Prior to Exclusive Media, she spent eight years in London at Focus Features International where she served as Vice President of International Sales, selling films by international directors including Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, the Wachowskis, Fernando Meirelles, Gus Van Sant, Alejandro Iñárritu, the Coen Brothers and Joe Wright.

So suffice to say, Gabrielle has a wealth of experience and insight and I feel very privileged to have gotten to talk to her for the podcast. We cover how the landscape of international sales has changed during Covid, the difference working in LA and working in London, how Gabrielle has learnt to manage a team and what it was like being the first ever woman that served as MD at HanWay. There are lots of good nuggets of advice within, so thank you to Gabrielle for sharing them and I hope you enjoy listening.

This week’s guest is Malinda Kaur, a second assistant director whose recent credits include Clio Barnard’s upcoming film Ali & Ava, HBO & Sky Atlantic’s TV series The Third Day, British independent dramas Rocks and Monsoon and a little show calling Killing Eve. 

Malinda started out as a floor runner working on Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, before becoming a third assistant director. We discuss in-depth that particular hierarchy and how her responsibilities change depending on both the role, and the project. 

Malinda is also a writer-director in her own right, having made two short films, Amishi in 2016, which was shot by Robbie Ryan and Blind in 2019 which was shot by former podcast guest Rachel Clark. Malinda was selected as a mentee on the 2019 Women in Film & TV mentoring programme for writing & directing and she is currently preparing to shoot her third short. 

It was really heartening to hear how Malinda has balanced her creative ambitions with the need to get full-time work, and how the practical elements of her roles on set have gone on to inform her own filmmaking process.

I am very thrilled to be able to introduce Dionne Farrell as this week’s podcast guest. 

Dionne is a Development Executive at BBC Films where she has worked across several of their releases, including Rapman’s Blue Story and Francis Lee’s Ammonite which is closing this year’s London Film Festival. Dionne began her career as an office runner for Raw before moving into script development as the BFI’s Script Editor Trainee. We talk about those experiences, as well as gaining confidence, learning when to speak up but also finding value in silence, slowness and the idea of not feeling guilty when we’re not being maximally productive, how she assesses projects and trusting her gut instinct when it comes to championing them. 

I’m really grateful to Dionne for her openness and I hope as ever you enjoy the insight into this part of the film industry.

This week my guest is Sophie O’Neill, a costume designer whose credits include Clio Barnard’s upcoming film Ali & Ava, costume supervising on British indie films like Jawbone, Iona and The Selfish Giant and costume buying for the likes of Everest and the TV series The Last Panthers. Don’t worry, if you’re wondering what all those different roles mean, we break it down.

We also talk about how she finds inspiration, where she looks for costumes and what happens to them after a production wraps, how getting an agent has changed her career and what her favourite part of the job is. 

This episode was recorded pre-lockown, if you’re wondering why we sound particularly cheery and there’s no mention of the Rona. 

Hello podpals and welcome to Season 3 of Best Girl Grip, I’m very excited to be back with another round of guests who will help guide us through the many different roles in the film industry.

It feels very special to be launching a new series with this week’s guest, because it has been a long-time coming and it was an interview that was delayed due to Covid, and that guest is Anu Henriques.

Anu is a development and production assistant at Fable Pictures, whose films include Stan & Ollie and Wild Rose. Their latest production is Rocks, a vibrant and vital film about a teenage girl living in London who is trying to protect her younger brother from the authorities after her Mum disappears. Anu has a credit as an Associate Director on that film, having worked closely with director Sarah Gavron through development, production and post production. 

Alongside her work at Fable, she is also the founder and co-editor-in-chief of Skin Deep, a creative platform that is redefining culture and amplifying voices of colour through discussions of race, politics and activism through print, film and live events.

Anu and I talk who gets to be storytellers, how she formed Skin Deep to probe that question, the organic and collaborative process out of which Rocks was born and the tools she’ll be taking to all her projects having had that experience.

It was a joyous chat, and having seen Rocks and also having followed the press campaign for it quite closely, everyone involved just radiates such pride and enthusiasm for that film. It’s really infectious and the same can be said of the film itself. I would urge you to get out to a cinema and see it while you can.

In the meantime, here’s episode 64 of Best Girl Grip. 

I’ve interrupted my own break to deliver a bonus episode of sorts. It was recorded last week, and I didn’t want to hold onto it for a new season, it was a really mind-expanding conversation if that’s not too self-important to say and I wanted to share it ASAP. 

It’s with award-winning non-fiction filmmaker and geographer Brett Story whose is based in Toronto. I became aware of work maybe last year when I saw The Hottest August at CPH:DOX, a documentary festival in Copenhagen and I was really wowed by it and then I saw Brett speak at Sheffield Doc/Fest and again found her to be a very interesting and illuminating figure in the non fiction scene. And yeah with zoom and these lockdown podcasts, I figured why not reach out and see if she would talk to me about her career. 

Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapeswas awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Her follow-up film The Hottest August was released in 2019 and has screened world-wide and considered to be one of the best films of the year, according to places like Variety, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Sight & Sound and IndieWire. 

Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Infrastructures of Citizenship. Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.

Her interests across the fields of documentary and critical theory are expansive, and include experimental cinema and essay films, politics and aesthetics, racial capitalism and Marxist political economy, and visual geography. We touch on some if not all of those ideas. 

We talk about how academia facilitated her filmmaking interests, how she formulates ideas and then tethers that to form, what production looks like and how she funds her films. It’s a far-reaching and provoking conversation, which is exactly what Brett’s films feel like to me, so it was a joy to connect the dots in that sense and I hope you get something out of it too!

I’ll be back later in the year with Season 3. For now this is episode 63 of the Best Girl Grip podcast. 

I’m rather excited and a little bit trepidatious to release this episode because it was recorded live at the Watersprite Film Festival in Cambridge back in March and so it feels rather antiquated. There were people there! Georgia and I sat face to face! We mention SXSW being cancelled which Georgia was due to attend with a pilot she directed called Bored. So listening back to this was odd, it felt a bit like a time capsule. But the conversation is still great and Georgia is wonderful, so I am of course very happy to have spoken with her and to do so for Watersprite.

Georgia is a writer and director with a raft of award-winning short films under her belt, including Little Bird which is being adapted into an 8-part drama with Riverstone Pictures. Her first feature 'Blue Jean', was developed through the iFeatures, I think in 2018 and is now backed by BBC Films.

Other upcoming projects include ‘The Isles’, a feature film in development with Creative Scotland and ‘The State of Us’, a six part series in development with Origin Pictures.

I particularly loved this conversation because it feels rare to me that you hear a director speak prior to their first feature being made or released, obviously all the PR is done after the fact, and so it felt special to me to get a bit more of an insight into what that interim bit entails. And truth be told it’s not really an interim, it’s Georgia’s career and one of the things she happens to be working on next is a feature film. And Georgia mentions this later one, about not ever getting complacent or thinking that one film is going to elevate you to permanence in the film industry, it’s all about persistence, so I guess my point is that I liked the idea of divorcing that first feature from the sense of having made it. 

We also chat about staying motivated during development, balancing lots of different ideas, how she stays creatively energised, being mentored by Desiree Akhavan and the invaluable advice she gave and the collective she’s part of called Cinesisters.

My guest this week is Louise Ford, a film editor who has worked on some of the most original and startling and accomplished features of recent times. I don’t think that’s overstating it. They include Robert Eggers’ The Witch and The Lighthouse, Cory Finley’s Thoroughbreds and his recent release starring Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney Bad Education, as well as Paul Dano’s directorial debut Wildlife starring Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. 

We talk about a myriad of topics, from Louise’s pivot from journalism to film editing, how in a roundabout she was inspired by 70s Hollywood editor Dede Allen, her approach to editing and what that process actually looks like. We go deep into The Lighthouse talking about performance, and the layering of sounds to achieve such a deeply unsettling finale. What else? Mentorship, confidence, instinct, films... 

I really adored this conversation. I sort of had some knowledge about what editors are responsible for and capable of, but talking with Louise tipped me off just how important an editor is and I just came away with a much better sense of how they do the brilliant and often magical work that they do.

My guest this week is Grace Snell, a BIFA-nominated costume designer, whose glorious work you'll have no doubt seen in Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir, as well as Billie Piper's directorial debut Rare Beasts, and an upcoming film starring Riz Ahmed called Mogul Mowgli.   We talk about her path into costume design, mentorship, mental health, getting an agent and the story behind that sumptuous gown that Honor Swinton Byrne wears to the opera in The Souvenir. I had a wonderful time talking to Grace, about the specificities and responsibilities of the role and definitely got a new appreciation for not just the costumes that you see on-screen but the role that costumes play in an actor's ability to perform a role and just situating you in the world of the film.

I’ve got what I consider to be a really exciting episode this week and it’s with Mahalia John, who is a central and clapper loader. If you have no idea what that is don’t worry, we get into it. I was somewhat clueless going into this and really appreciate Mahalia’s time in breaking it down for me. 

Straight off the bat I’ll say this is one of my favourite conversations I’ve had for the podcast, it’s very giggly and Mahalia’s just a very open and lovely and funny person to talk to, so in that regard it was very easy. But also besides interrogating how Mahalia worked her way into the camera department and what that experience has been like and what it’s taught her, we also talk about some thorny and topical issues around Black Lives Matter. 

I came across Mahalia on Instagram after she published a post entitled To My White Friends in the UK Film Industry - I have hyperlinked to that post - and I impel you to read it and then take up Mahalia’s advice and do some more reading and learning beyond that. It was apparent that Mahalia’s perspective would be unique and I was hoping that maybe she could expand on some of the points she made in that post, but also just use this platform however small it is, to talk about how she got into the film industry because that is one of the salient statements that she makes. This is a nepotistic industry and people of colour aren’t always taught about the job roles that exist or granted access to them and Mahalia sets a great example I think, in both existing and excelling in the film industry and I am very grateful that she wanted to talk to me about her career thus far. 

 

Show notes:

• Follow Mahalia on Instagram. 
• Find out more about the BFI Film Academy
• Anti-racism resources
• Screenskills Unconscious Bias Training

 

This week's episode is pretty exciting because as you know this podcast is called Best Girl Grip which is play on words for the role on a film set called Best Boy Grip, meant to highlight the historical and in fact present tense lack of women within the film industry. And this week I am actually speaking to a grip, to hear about that role and what it is. So I’m hoping that 58 episodes into the life of this podcast, it will all finally make sense.

The grip in question is the delightful Rebecca Horsburgh, who has worked on lots of brilliant British films including Free Fire, Films Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, Journeyman, Stan & Ollie, Rocks and also has credit on Chloe Zhao’s upcoming Marvel film The Eternals.

We chat about how she learnt about this rather lesser known role in the camera department, what it is she’s responsible for, how she built her confidence in the role and what’s it like being one of very few women in the profession.

I’m so grateful that Rebecca spared the time in lockdown to talk to me, because even though the podcast bears the name grip, it’s something I don’t have a lot of knowledge about, so I was just excited to learn from her and I hope you do as well.

This week I spoke to the casting director Lara Manwaring who has been in the industry for the past decade, predominately working at Des Hamilton casting - they’ve done films like Four Lions, Tyrannosaur, This Is England, Wuthering Heights and Adult Life Skills. Lots of of really incredible British cinema. Lara now has her own company, through which she has cast projects such as Mandy starring Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough, Aneil Karia’s Surge starring Ben Whishaw and a film called Lynn + Lucy, directed by Fyzal Boulifa which is released today! It was called a fiercely impressive feature debut by The Guardian and is now available to watch on digital platforms including BFI Player. 

Lara and I talk about making that leap from working for a company to being her own boss, what she looks for in auditions, why the recognition toward casting directors has come at a glacial pace and the responsibility feels towards ensuring greater representations for people of colour on our screens.

It’s a great chat, I always find casting so fascinating to consider and I hope you get something from it also. This is episode 57 of Best Girl Grip.

This week I spoke to director of photography Rina Yang and she’s someone I’ve wanted on the podcast for a while, but she’s incredibly prolific and hard-working and was always off doing shoots so lockdown was sort of the perfect opportunity to get to speak to her.

Rina is based in London but grew up in Japan, and some of her recent credits include shooting 3 episodes of Top Boy for Netflix, a fantastic feature-length TV drama about the Windrush scandal called Sitting in Limbo for BBC1, as well as working alongside director and cinematographer Nadia Hallgreen for Netflix’s Michelle Obama documentary Becoming. She’s also worked on music videos for Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, FKA Twigs, Vince Staples and Dua Lipa, 

We speak about the difference between a DoP and a cinematographer, the balance between the technical and creative aspects of the role and how she transitioned to working on short films and music videos to filming and lighting Michelle Obama, as well as what it’s like working on a Netflix project.

You can watch Sitting in Limbo on BBC iPlayer and I urge that you do. In the meantime please do enjoy this interview. This is episode 56 of Best Girl Grip

This week I wanted to revisit the interview I had with Corrina Antrobus, originally published in February of this year, in the context of the dialogues happening around Black Lives Matter and because today is the online launch of Hackney's Windrush Generations Festival which Corrina worked on.  

If you can please consider donating to these UK-based anti-racism and racial justice organisations...

• Black Minds Matter
• Black Lives Matter UK
• The Runnymede Trust
• Liberty
• Inquest

Or buy a gal-dem membership! 

Here are some resources that might be useful for your own education on what anti-racism means...

• This Work Isn't For Us - Jemma Desai
• 10 Steps To Non-Optical Allyship - Mireille Cassandra Harper
• WFTV's Anti-Racism Resources

 

This week, I spoke to the brilliant Anna Bertmark. Anna is a sound designer and supervisor who has worked on several acclaimed and award-winning British feature films including God’s Own Country, The Goob, Adult Life Skills, Lilting, You Were Never Really Here and more recently Blue Story, as well as episodes of Normal People as a sound effects editor.

I should also mention that Anna won the Best Sound BIFA in 2017 for her work on Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country and if you haven’t seen that film it’s a true marvel and definitely something worth seeking out. 

Originally from Sweden, Anna has worked in the UK film industry for 15 years and been Vice Chair of The Association of Motion Picture Sound (AMPS). She’s passionate about mentorship and training, so we speak her experiences of that and how she’s providing that currently to up-and-coming sound professionals. 

We also talk about her approach to designing sound, what those initial conversations with a director look like, where she gets inspiration, how software has changed over the years and what motivates her.

Personally I think it’s a great chat and my first with a sound designer so there was lots for me learn. 

If you’re a sound designer or interested in it as a career I’m going to flag a couple of things you might find valuable. One is a documentary called Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound by Midge Costin who herself has extensive experience in the sound department and its a great introduction to both the history of sound, but also how valuable it is as a storytelling apparatus.

Secondly, next week on Friday 26 June, the Sundance Institute and their Collab offshoot are hosting a webinar with Alma Har’el who directed Honey Boy and Benh Zeitlin who directed Beasts of the Southern Wild all about sound design and the role it can play and how to make the most of it even with lower budget features. I’ve been watching quite a few of their talks and they are really really good and this sounds like it’s gonna be pretty fascinating, so yeah one to bookmark. 

And finally, Anna recommended a book she was reading called 'Women in Audio' by Leslie Gaston-Bird and it features almost 100 profiles and stories of women working in various audio fields including sound for film & TV, so give that Google.

Cat Marshall is a producer based in South Yorkshire, and also Production Supervisor for the Sheffield based company Warp Films whose projects include Shane Meadows’ recently BAFTA-nominated series for Channel 4 The Virtues, This Is England ’90 (Channel 4), The Last Panthers (Sky Atlantic), and feature films such Yardie and ’71. 

In her role at Warp, Cat works in production across all the company’s projects from development and prep right through to post and delivery. However, since 2018 Cat has been Associate Producer on Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, the feature film adaption of the hit west end musical about a teenage boy who dreams of becoming a drag queen. The film was shot in Sheffield last summer and fingers crossed will be released internationally this October. 

We talk about her experience on that shoot, as well as what provoked her desire to start producing. Cat is also currently on Women in Film and TV’s mentorship programme, so we dig into the value of that, as well as working in Sheffield, her experience of furlough and how she’s been keeping busy. 

Whether you’re out taking a stroll, soaking in the tub or scrubbing down your bathroom tiles as I did the other day whilst listening to a podcast, I hope as ever you’re using lockdown to be kind, to yourself, to others, and as Cat sagely says later on in the interview, to figure out what’s important to you. 

I had a really wonderful chat with Emma Norton, who is an In-House Producer at Ireland’s Element Pictures, she was formerly Head of Development there and she’s worked on a number of their big titles, including The Favourite, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Room, The Lobster, Frank and The Guard. She has also produced Rosie and A Date for Mad Mary and most recently she exec produced the smash hit TV series that everyone’s been devouring - Normal People.

We talk about getting fired from her first job as an agent’s assistant, freelancing, working for Film4, making the move to Ireland, building relationships with writers and directors and the different between adapting material for TV as opposed to film, as well as how lockdown has been treating her.

Speaking of treats, I think this one, and I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did. There are lots of pearls of wisdom inside.

Meroë Candy is a story research and production consultant for film and television drama. We delve extensively into what that entails and what that research looks like. But essentially Meroë provides assistance to writers and producers in world-building, uncovering true stories, story-lining and connecting and coordinating experts from the scientific, historic and medicinal fields to the film industry.

Prior to this she worked at the Wellcome Trust, the UK's largest private foundation where she built their film and broadcast drama programme and also devised their Screenwriting Fellowship in partnership with Film4 and the BFI. During this time she commissioned and developed over 30 scripts and served as an exec producer on 5 major film productions including Craig Roberts' Eternal Beauty, Clio Barnard's Dark River, Paddy Considine's Journeyman and Rachel Tunnard's Adult Life Skills.

We talk about her transition from Wellcome to freelance work, how and where she does her research, and also what scientists and storytellers can offer each other. 

 

Hello podpals and welcome back to Best Girl Grip; the mini lockdown edition.

It’s been a crazy and stressful and unprecedented time, I feel like all adjectives have been exhausted and at that the same time like the language doesn’t exist to fully articulate what this is and what it feels like. I’m also really aware of pandemic saturation, it definitely feels like we’re past the point of no return when in comes to the overwhelming amount of content that is available for us to consume, with this supposed surplus of time and I’m really conscious of adding even more noise to that.

However, I have decided to put out a mini quarantine edition. Firstly for selfish purposes because the interviews have always been about connecting with women in this industry and just enjoying the simple art of conversation with them, and I’m particularly craving that at the moment. And secondly, my friend was right, this is a great time to talk to women from all over the UK that being London-based, I might not usually have the chance to. And finally, if this edition can offer people in the film industry a sense of affinity or kinship, or just the sense no-one is working to their full capacity, everyone is juggling, maybe struggling or re-evaluating, then to me it’s totally worthwhile adding just a little bit to the noise.

I’m really happy to say I’ve got my first duo on the podcast in the form of Rosie Crerar and Ciara Barry who formed their production company barry crerar in 2016 and are based in Glasgow in Scotland.

They’re a relatively young company but already they have a number of exciting titles on their slate, and rather excitingly they’re releasing a film they co-produced called Run next week, which is directed by Scott Graham, a filmmaker I really adore and who you’ll hear me enthuse about during the interview. His previous two features Shell and Iona, the latter featuring Ruth Negga are really intense and poignant set in remote landscapes, which I highly recommend you check out.

It was wonderful to talk to Rosie and Ciara about their ambitions for the company and their desire to tell contemporary and cutting edge stories that originate from Scotland, but have universal appeal. As well as the advantages of working together, how they came to set up the company and how they balance responsibilities. We do touch up on lockdown and how that’s changed their day-to-day and whether they’ve learnt anything from the experience. Not that that’s a requisite, surviving it is enough.

Run is a gutsy and gripping drama about thwarted dreams, masculinity and small-town living, and it will be available to download from Monday 25th May from all the usual platforms. 

This is episode 51 of Best Girl Grip. 

Lizzie is someone I’ve wanted on the podcast for a while. In fact when I first started this project whilst working at the BFI, I was always sort of biding my time slash working up the courage to ask her.

And then serendipitously I was asked to do a live show at Glasgow, where two films that Lizzie had exec’d were showing and it seemed like exactly the right moment.

She’s sort of the perfect guest for Best Girl Grip - not that perfection exists - but in terms of the expansive career she’s had from journalism to programming to being the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival to production to execing over 50 feature films at the BFI and working with renowned filmmakers such as Joanna Hogg, Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Andrew Haigh, Pawel Pawlikowski and Mike Leigh, I love that her career has taken many different directions and it was such a pleasure to interrogate how she chartered that path. 

Thank you so much for listening to this season, whether you joined me since October when I released the episodes recorded in Toronto, which feels like lifetime and an epoch ago, or if you jumped on the bandwagon more recently, I hope you liked what you’ve heard so far. I’ve been thrilled and awed and galvanised by the people I’ve managed to interview, and it remains my favourite part of doing this podcast. So I’m looking forward to seeing what season three bring in that respect.

This week I interviewed Roxana Adle, a talent agent at Independent Talent. Her clients include some really exciting filmmakers such as Alma Har'el, Eva Husson, Aneil Karia, Remi Weekes, Mahalia Belo and Georgia Parris, among many others. 

It was really exciting to delve into this side of the industry for the first time and ask Roxana about how she spots talent, how she supports her clients and works with them, whether its at all competitive and what her ambitions are as an agent. 

I have to give you a heads up that the sound recording quality on this one isn’t the best, and I deeply apologise for that. It’s still a learning process for me and I hope you don’t find it too painful to listen to. 

This week's episode is tinged with a bit of sadness. I recorded it with Sanne Jehoul, co-director of the Glasgow Short Film Festival, whilst visiting the Glasgow Film Festival 2 weeks ago, ahead of their 2020 edition which was due to kick off tomorrow. Unfortunately Coronavirus has waylaid those plans and the festival has been postponed until later in the year.

It’s a tricky but necessary decision, and my thoughts are with Sanne and the whole festival team, whose hard work will have to wait to be rewarded. I decided to put this episode out anyway, because I think it’s still very timely given that festivals around the world are having to postpone or move online to hear what goes into the organisation and execution. 

Sanne joined the Glasgow Short Film Festival in 2014 and worked her way up to the position of Co-Direction. She is also a programmer and producer of Document Human Rights Film Festival and freelances as a writer, conversation host and curator. She also sits on the advisory board of Femspectives, a feminist film festival in Glasgow.

We talk about the process of selecting films for the festival, how they support filmmakers, what excites her about Scottish talent, the expanding short film landscape and some recent highlights in her career. Its heartbreaking having heard Sanne talk so ardently about her work on the festival to think that it won’t be going ahead right now, but it will be back and with Sanne and her team at the forefront I’ve no doubt it will be with a bang. 

On a similar note, I hope wherever you are self-isolating, you’re doing ok. Now is definitely a really difficult for freelance creatives, filmmakers and crewspeople and the film industry at large, and more than ever we need to be connected, so setup that Whatsapp group, get on the phone, Skype a friend or peer or colleague and stay energised, stay healthy and most of all, watch all those films you’ve been meaning to get around to. 

This week I spoke to Clarisse Loughrey, the chief film critic for The Independent. She also acts as a regular stand-in for Mark Kermode on BBC Radio 5 Live’s ‘Kermode and Mayo’ and runs That Darn Movie Show, a weekly review channel on YouTube.

We cover lots and a lot of it is new ground for the podcast because I’ve never interviewed a film critic before - so we talk about the art of pitching, how Clarisse learnt what a good freelance rate was, how she learnt to trust her opinion and put it on the Internet, what her writing process is, the fear you get when your opinion of a movie differs from your peers and fair bit more, which I think will hopefully be insightful not just for people interesting in a career in film criticism, but also to anyone that reads film reviews - if that’s not too audacious - and what goes into that. So thank you so much to Clarisse for sharing that perspective. 

This is episode 47 of Best Girl Grip!

 

My guest this week is Nia Hughes, an Organising Official for BECTU, the union for creative ambition. They represent over 40,000 staff, contract and freelance workers in the media and entertainment industries and do a lot of important work to support and advise their members on issues such as pay and conditions but also career development, contracts of employment, hours, leave, maternity, pensions and bullying and harassment.

Nia was really integral to the Ritzy Cinema London Living Wage campaign, having started her career working for that very cinema and she is currently focused on supporting freelancers and making sure they know their rights. 

If you are a freelancer in the film industry this episode is for you! Towards the end, Nia talks about several things you can and should be doing to protect yourself and maximise your chances of having a positive professional experience. They are golden nuggets of wisdom and I am so thrilled that Nia came on the podcast to share them. 

This week I’m joined by Corrina Antrobus, who is very much someone I started the podcast with the intent to interview.

As you can tell by the runtime, we covered a lot, which is predominantly due to the fact that Corrina is a very busy woman and has had a really dynamic career, so there were lots of threads to explore. Corrina started out in VOD marketing for Virgin Movies, having worked her way up from receptionist and then moved over to Picturehouse Cinemas & Picturehouse Entertainment to become their Communications Manager, handling press and PR for releases such as God’s Own Country, Animals, The Wife, Out of Blue, Capernaum, The Last Tree and Monos.

She recently left that job to become Arts and Culture Communications Officer for Hackney, so we talk about what prompted that move, how she felt about slightly leaving the world of film and what projects she’s currently working on.

And then on top of that Corrina is the founder of Bechdel Test Fest -  an ongoing screening collective who present films with a positive representation for women in film that she runs alongside Beth Webb, Steph Watts and Caitlin Quinlan who are all incredible women with many a side hustle in their own right.

The first event I ever went to was a 25th anniversary screening of Thelma & Louise, and I’ve since been to several sold-out screenings that they’ve put on, always with a really thoughtfully considered panel that provides fresh context to older films. 

We devote a big chunk of the interview to talking about what prompted Corrina to start the festival, what her programming principles are and how she got the thing up and running. Alongside that we talk about the power of social media, the importance of seeing positive representations of women and people of colour, what Corrina has learnt since setting up the festival and the advice she would pass on to anyone wanted to run their own collective. And in a podcast first, we also discuss redundancy and how Corrina dealt with her experience of that.

It’s a really lovely episode I think - Corrina is incredibly smart and thoughtful and there are lots of other topics I could’ve and would’ve love to pick her brain about, but I think we’ve done a pretty good job of covering her many passions and pursuits and I hope you enjoy hearing about them.

This is episode 45 of Best Girl Grip. 

My guest this week is Gini Godwin, a whirlwind of energy who has worked on a really prolific number of music videos, short films and feature projects including last year’s Blue Story and has a number of exciting collaborations in the pipeline.

As Gini says later on in the interview, production design is about creating the world of the film and therefore incredibly integral to our immersion in the story. We talk about putting out metaphorical fires, the difference between naturalistic and stylised design, whether there’s a place for hand-drawing skills in an age of digital revolution, the brilliance of Nadine Labaki and which era Gini would most like to design for. 

This week’s episode is an exciting one for me because I get to speak to a casting director, which is a role I’ve wanted to explore on the podcast for a while.

Kharmel Cochrane has been a casting director on a swathe of British indie films, including Lilting, The Goob, Bypass, The Levelling, Pin Cushion and a wicked upcoming horror film called Saint Maud. She has also cast all of Robert Eggers films from The Witch to The Lighthouse to his current viking revenge project. The Lighthouse is actually out this Friday and has such a distinctive look that it rewards a visit to the cinema. 

Kharmel was also a casting assistant to Nina Gold, who worked on Game of Thrones, The Iron Lady, Attack the Block and many many many more. So when you hear us talk about a Nina, that is who we mean. 

We talk about the types of films Kharmel likes to cast, why looking in unexpected places for talent is a priority, working with Robert Eggers, the genius casting in Uncut Gems and the physical reaction Kharmel has when she spots potential…

We were in Kharmel’s office in West London for this recording, so there are occasional background office sounds, but otherwise I hope you enjoy our chat.

This is episode 43 of Best Girl Grip. 

I am very delighted to say that this week I am joined by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, an award-winning French composer based in London, whose CV includes commissions for the V&A Museum, an HBO short film as well as  drama and documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and The Guardian. She has also composed the film scores for the romantic drama Only You, which is currently available on Netflix and the upcoming film Rocks, which will be released in UK cinemas on the 10th April.

It was a really eye-opening discussion, in terms of hearing about all the different layers that go into a composition - from conceptual to intellectual to technical, and Emilie makes some really interesting points about why women composers aren’t getting equal opportunities, and also how this might be remedied. We also talk about the experience of hearing her work on the big screen, and the difficulty of finding studio space to record in. 

It’s worth mentioning that we were recording at the BFI Southbank and towards the end you can hear rehearsals for a screening accompanied by a live score, which I thought was actually serendipitous. 

Emilie is also an artist on Spotify, so I implore you to go and listen to her music after you’ve heard our interview. 

This is episode 42 of Best Girl Grip.