Lucy Cohen

The steps in getting to the First Cut were quite straightforward and after that I thought that was it, I’d be a ‘director’ now, but it definitely didn’t happen like that. It was then that the challenges really started. Although the film did well critically, there were no opportunities to direct anything further that had any sense of authorship. It felt a bit like after being given the chance to make something I cared about, I would now be given the chance to see if I could fit into the mould of what ‘TV’ wanted and it didn’t feel like there were any possibilities to really craft something in a different way or to experiment unless you were a very established well-known filmmaker. I understood that earning that opportunity had to come with experience, but it felt that after the First Cut – which I thought was my ‘break’ – any momentum behind me as a filmmaker was gone and many of the experiences following it were sending me in the wrong direction. I made a Dispatches for Channel 4 and found that current affairs didn’t suit me at all – there was just no space for character arcs or detail and I just really struggled with having to create something that tonally didn’t feel right. I then worked as a series producer, where I got to direct two out of the five films in the series. It was a horrific experience. I’d worked on very few series let alone series produced and directed on one. The series was based in a hospital so there was loads of compliance to handle, I was sharing an AP with the series director and remember at one point trying to shoot and hold a boom pole at the same time. I was out of my depth, didn’t have the experience to recognise this (although my anxiety levels may have been a tell-tell sign), one of the films I was directing got axed and it really knocked my confidence. 

After that I went back to a producing job for a director I admire. I needed to recover, it was on a subject that I really cared about and knew that there would be a meaningful film made, even if I wasn’t in the role I wanted to be. As I had produced a fair bit, and learned loads from the directors I worked with, I think that I was often being seen as a producer, even after I had begun directing. It started to become really frustrating. I remember going to a meeting with a commissioner, in which I was told – yet again – how they wanted me to produce a film that I worked on the development of, rather than direct it. I think it was the third time this had happened. As I often got close to the subject matter through the development, I always found myself saying ‘yes’ and staying on, but I need to walk away now. I remember her saying, “I don’t know if you have a voice (as a director), maybe you do have a voice.” I thought ‘fuck it’ at that point. It seemed futile to sit around and wait for someone to decide whether I had a ‘voice’ or not or give me a chance, while I lost more and more confidence in the meantime.

Around that time, I had been asked to make a taster for the BBC about a family with a number of children on the autistic spectrum. That was when I met the family who featured in my first feature length documentary, Kingdom of Us. Ultimately, the BBC didn’t want to commission off the back of the taster, neither did Channel 4, but this rejection in many ways was my real chance to make something the way that I wanted. I had met a family who were warm, articulate, fascinating and had a unique story to tell. We decided to keep filming and I would borrow a camera and go up and film in between paid work. After a year or so, Pulse Films came on board and then Creative England and the BFI. It was such a liberating experience to make a film outside of the broadcast television world. It felt everyone along the way was there to help me communicate my vision and the story – however long that took – rather than feeling like everything was held up to a measure of what it was supposed to be, constrained within a pre-determined arc rather than allowed to unfold, and be achieved within a set schedule. I understand that TV can’t work in that way and take risks on every production and they need to have time-frames, but this was a story that just wasn’t going to work like that. The film took four years to make and it was so tough, but I learned so much making it. When we were near completion Netflix came on board and were really respectful of the process. 

Since Kingdom of Us, I have two fiction scripts in development – one with BBC Films and one with Film 4/BFI. While I had always wanted to be a writer, now that I am writing for film and with a view to directing them too – rather than just for print – it makes far more sense that when I did print journalism. 

I am sure I will go back to directing documentaries as well, but since Kingdom of Us came out I have had two children. Disappearing with a camera for months on end is impossible with two very dependent tiny people. However, in the scraps of time between breastfeeds and parenting, writing is something that I can do – it is a way of continuing to tell stories and is a wonderful way to escape into another world. Indeed, having a family has in many ways been a major obstacle to career goals, but as someone once said, ‘the tighter the vice, the more creative the means of escape’, and I am certain it is going to make me better at what I do, even if it does take a bit longer.