Andrew Cumming is a Scottish film and television director from Fife. His National Film and Television School graduation film Radiance, was nominated for best film at the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Awards, while his claustrophobic psychological drama Beneath won Best Student Film at the Courant 3D festival in France.
In 2015 he directed Oakwood, a short drama exclusively for the BBC iPlayer, as well as Kai, funded by i-D and VICE, which has been viewed over one million times on social media. In 2017 Andrew directed the explosive 15th anniversary episodes of BBC Scotland’s River City, and in 2018 directed three episodes of BBC3’s acclaimed thriller Clique (S2) and the last two episodes of Cold Feet series 9 for ITV.
When did you know you wanted to be a director?
There wasn’t any one lightbulb moment because where I come from, the idea of directing for a living was akin to dragon slaying or time travel. Instead, it sort of happened organically over a number of years.
I grew up on the east coast of Fife, Scotland in an area that I now understand has a lot of depravation, but at the time felt fairly idyllic – lots of time outdoors acting out adventure games, or indoors writing short stories, watching films or drawing. So I was already practicing telling stories visually and the curse of being able to draw eventually led to art college in Dundee and a degree in animation, which felt like the perfect meld of drawing and writing.
While in Dundee, I had my eyes opened to a lot of world cinema via the Contemporary Arts Centre that had recently opened there, and film by film, Empire article by Empire article, I was slowly falling in love with the idea of filmmaking. It seemed much more sociable than animation and the idea of drawing 24 frames for every second of footage for the rest of my life made me depressed. In my last year of art college, a few of my peers had been making zombie spoofs on really cheap miniDV camcorders, and after working on a couple of those and editing them on iMovie I realised that the technology was at my fingertips.
So at 21, and with no links to the film or television industry, I turned my back on a first class animation degree and decided I was going to be a director. Reading that sentence back affirms two things: all directors need a healthy dose of naivety and supreme confidence (bordering on arrogance) to survive. It’s essential to hold onto these attributes.
Once you knew you wanted to pursue a career as a director, what were your first steps in achieving this goal?
This section is pretty long but it has to be so you can understand the insane amount of steps (over several years) that went into this. Bear with me.
While at art college, one forward thinking tutor had the bright idea to showcase our graduation films in London for the animation industry. Afterwards, I was approached by someone from the National Film and Television School (NFTS) to apply for their animation course. My first reaction was, ‘We have a film school in this country?!’ because I assumed the only film schools were in the US.
I Googled the film school, saw that they had a Directing Fiction MA and that was it – I was fixated on going to the NFTS from that moment on because it felt like the only way in. So in spite of my parents’ concerns and protests, in spite of the fact I’d never made a short film and in spite of the fact I’d never studied film, I set about writing, directing, producing and editing a short film as part of my application.
I have no problems admitting it was total dogshit. My budget was £50. I roped in some kids from a local youth theatre in Fife and used their miniDV camera, a Canon that only shot 4:3. The mic was taped to a broken broom handle from the garage (cliches are cliches because they’re true), I had no lights, no crew, I used locations I knew I could get for free, I crossed the line on my first ever dialogue scene and had to go back and reshoot it weeks later. I had graduated from art college at this point, but because iMovie was the only editing program I knew how to use I had to sneak into the building during the Easter break to use their Macs (luckily they hadn’t changed the door codes).
I applied to the NFTS in May 2004, and found out I had an interview about a month later as I was about to start a shift at Sainsbury’s (where I was now working full time). To this day it was one of the happiest moments of my life. The interview panel was entirely Scottish and included a recent graduate who had done quite well for herself. Her name was Lynne Ramsay, and the very fact that she had seen my piss-poor little short and seemed to take it seriously was mind boggling. Looking back, I was way out of my depth and suffering severely from imposter syndrome before that was even a thing. Sure enough, I was turned down… and so began a series of crushing rejections interspersed with fleeting moments of hope that I will summarise below for the sake of brevity.
2004 – Cried over rejection letter. Continued to work in Sainsbury’s full time. Received phone call from Lynda Myles, head of the directing course, who encouraged me to apply again the following year. Argued a lot with my parents because I had turned my back on my degree to pursue filmmaking. Started volunteering at the youth theatre, making more shorts. Tried acting. Watched more films.
2005 – Got blonde highlights. Was now DJing to supplement my wage from Sainsbury’s. Reapplied to the NFTS with a new film, in which I ripped off the structure of Amores Perros. They felt I wasn’t ready for the two-year course, but would I like to try this new one-year course based in ‘up and coming’ Shoreditch? Desperate to get out of Fife, I quit Sainsbury’s and headed for London. The course was deliberately lo-fi; 12 students all pitching in on each others films, running and gunning around London with slightly better miniDV cameras. I have never been so poor, but I learned a shit load. Watched even more films. Applied for the two-year course again. Rejected again. With my tail between my legs I returned to Scotland.
2006 – 2009 – Using the youth theatre as a foundation, I set up a media company with a good friend from art college making corporate films, websites, branding and print. I also wrote some plays, kept making self-financed shorts, kept watching movies. I was also becoming very jaded by how difficult it was to break into the short film scheme run by Scottish Screen (as it was known then) and was considering having one more crack at the NFTS. My fiancée wasn’t exactly thrilled, but she left a good luck note on my pillow on the first day of shooting my application film. By this stage the budget had increased six-fold to a jaw dropping £300 of my own money.
2010 – In the summer of 2010 I was finally accepted onto the Fiction Direction MA at the NFTS. At the fourth time of asking. In fairness, it was the right time for me – I was older, I knew more about cinema, I was slightly better at my craft and most importantly I had more life experience. The rest of 2010 was spent begging wealthy people or charities for money, and convincing my partner that blowing our savings would be a good investment down the line.
It took me seven years to get into the NFTS. Some people can do it sooner, or don’t need film school at all, but I had to work at it. I’m still working at it. That’s part of the fun.
What obstacles or setbacks did you face in becoming a director?
I think I’ve touched on some of this above, and film school had its own challenges, mostly financial, but thanks to my partner (who moved to London with me) and doing some work on the side via the media company, I scraped by.
But going to film school is like learning to drive; you’re in control of the car but a grown up always has their foot over the brake. Leaving film school is like going on the motorway for the first time, and you’re constantly trying to keep up with all the other directors who are vying for work, or trying to establish themselves. I was fortunate that I got an agent right after graduating but that doesn’t guarantee you work, it just means you’re a professional – someone has assessed your showreel and decided you are probably worth paying for the privilege to direct.
I graduated from the NFTS in 2013, and didn’t get my first proper TV gig until February 2016. Those three years in between were the toughest I’ve faced, even tougher than the seven years before film school, because I was in my early 30s and renting in London is ridiculous. It wasn’t all doom and gloom; I was commissioned to make a short for the BBC iPlayer, I made a dance film for i-D magazine, I did a few corporate gigs to keep the money coming in, plus I started to develop the idea that will be my debut feature. But by and large it was an endless run of financial pressure, self doubt, frustration and fear whilst simultaneously trying to stay physically fit, mentally sunny and creatively engaged – I was watching up to three films a day, trying to develop movies and TV ideas and attending meetings for projects that invariably didn’t lead to anything concrete. Plus I couldn’t land a TV gig because of my lack of experience.
At this point, I have to remind myself I’m not a heart surgeon or a pilot – no one lives or dies based on my success or failure. But if you care about the craft of storytelling and you’ve sacrificed a portion of your life to the pursuit of it, it does gnaw away at your confidence and your energy. But I’ve come to realise these obstacles are important, because they forced me to consider whether this career path was really for me. This will sound pretty ruthless, but all those obstacles and rejections helped me reaffirm my desire whilst simultaneously cutting down the competition. My mantra during The Wilderness Years was pretty simple: ‘Somebody quit today, and it wasn’t me.’
How did you develop your voice and hone your craft?
I made films. There is no substitute for actually doing it. In the early days, I rather cynically made the films I thought people wanted to see but once I got to film school and saw what sort of movies got my peers fired up, I realised I had to make the films I would pay to see. It’s a fundamental difference I wish I’d figured out earlier but every film I’ve made, even the failures, have all helped me improve my visual language, my grasp of tone, my ability to collaborate with actors and crew. The two-year bubble that the NFTS provided was huge, obviously.
The other obvious thing is I watch all kinds of films and television. At least, I did before I had kids, plus there’s a perverse irony that the more successful you become as a director, the less time you’ve got to watch stuff. There are also several very good books on the craft of directing that I try to read once every couple of years. I’ve listed them all at the end of this questionnaire.
Aside from glueing my eyeballs to a television screen for several hours a day – I try to inhale a wide variety of stuff. Museums, galleries, theatre, photography, books, architecture, video games, fashion, music, listening to and observing people in airports, on buses, in restaurants. It’s all valid and it all finds its way into the work somehow.
Looking back, that three-year period of inactivity after film school was extremely beneficial for me. I watched and read and digested so much stuff with all my free time it made me desperate to put all those things into practice on a set. This will sound weird, but when I watch my film school work back compared with the stuff I did after, there’s no comparison – I can almost feel the desperation to direct in the later work! The staging, performances, shot selection, the use of music, the cutting – it all feels incrementally better, because I had a lot of time to reflect and continue learning about my craft before I put it into practice. Obviously, I’d rather have been on set straight out of film school but I feel I used The Wilderness Years to really understand more about the stories I want to tell and how to tell them. I guess it’s important not to be afraid of the down time.
It’s also important to remember that the voice of a director never stops developing, ever. The most exciting thing about this career is that there is no finite point where were we can put our feet up – the next film is the first film, with a whole new bunch of mistakes and surprises waiting to be discovered.
How did you get your first break?
My first break was arguably getting into film school. But then there’s another set of hurdles leading to the next break, which was getting an agent. The Class of 2013 was a bit of a vintage year at the NFTS; seven of the eight directors got agents straight after graduation, which was partly down to talent and partly down to a fresh batch of young agents who were looking to build their rosters.
The next break after that was getting my first proper TV gig in 2016 – two episodes (commonly called a block) of the Scottish continuing drama/soap River City, but the reason I got the gig illustrates the strangely circuitous route of most directors. Three years earlier, the editor of my NFTS graduation film had met a development exec at Screen Scotland (as it’s now called) and dropped my name. Turns out this development exec remembered a short I had made five years earlier, and he in turn introduced me to a Scottish producer who was looking to develop projects with new Scottish talent. We kicked some ideas around over the next few years and we even had a film officially in development, which was a welcome slab of cash during The Wilderness Years.
Anyway, development is a hard slog and the producer (who had previously produced on Eastenders and Holby City) took a gig producing on River City to steady the balance sheet and brought me on to direct.
So that break was actually eight years in the making, from a short film I made through to a few chance encounters and then finally a job. That’s how mad and tangential this industry is and why no meeting or opportunity is wasted. People move around, they talk and they recommend directors (or editors or DoPs etc) who have a smidgen of talent and aren’t assholes.
I wouldn’t say I had an edge on anyone else to get the job, I just happened to make a connection that stuck and it led to something else – that’s the stuff that’s a bit scary to compute when you’re starting out because you feel like you can’t control it. But the one thing I could control was my work ethic and I worked really, really fucking hard on River City, putting into practice everything I learned during and after film school. The experience of working at that break neck pace (16 pages a day) with a variety of actors, along with the short films that showed my style as a filmmaker, was instrumental in me getting Clique for BBC3 in 2018. Clique then led to the next gig, which led to the next gig… and before you know it you’re in the club.
Some people like to put career progression in this industry down to luck, but as the saying goes, ’The more I practice, the luckier I get.’ I hope my journey shows that rather than it being all about luck, or the Big Break, or being Steven Spielberg, more often than not it’s about hard work, baby steps and not being a dick. Talent helps, but it doesn’t hurt to learn your craft. It won’t stop you being a genius.
TV Credits: Clique (2018), River City (2016-2017).
Photograph: Laurent Liotardo