Marcus completed the NFTS Directing Fiction MA course in 2021 and his films have since screened and won awards at several BAFTA and Oscar Qualifying film festivals. His horror/thriller The Retreat premiered at Sitges Film Festival before releasing online via Short of the Week and Alter.
His Graduation film Caterpillar also had a successful festival run, winning Best Student Film at Norwich Film Festival and a Royal Television Society Award. Upon graduating Marcus was selected for an elite sixteen month mentorship scheme with WarnerMedia where he shadowed the show-runners and Directors on HBO’s House of the Dragon, finishing in July 2022.
Since then Marcus has co-created The Directors’ Take Podcast which aims to demystify the pathway toward becoming a working director and is currently finalising his latest short film, an original science-fiction piece called Space-Plug. This project is a part of the Disney Imagine UK slate of films and is due to have its world premiere in 2024.
When did you know you wanted to be a director?
I wasn’t one of those children who grew up with cameras in the house or who had family members in the arts or anything like that. As far as I’m concerned, I just came out of the womb reading books. I don’t remember ever not being able to read and I could read unaided by the time I reached school. I was obsessed with Dinosaurs and Enid Blyton books. I think my obsession with reading short stories gave me a bit of a grounding in storytelling from a young age. That extended to my ability to write as well, and my parents were called into the school several times because I was a five-year-old writing clever stories and poems. It was even suggested that I get a scholarship to a private school, but as we were very working class at that time, my parents were against the idea through fear of bullying as they wouldn’t have been able to afford anything extra curricular.
I eventually lost interest in school as I wasn’t challenged enough or given the support I needed to learn. My parents did their best but weren’t able to push me academically as they worked a lot individually and the school never had any homework to give me, even though I would frequently ask. Secondary school was the same and I eventually just coasted my way through the system and ended up leaving with only two GCSEs, even though I was initially very gifted. I think this failure at school meant that once I found something I enjoyed doing, there was a lot of space in my head to attack it, which is what happened.
After a failed attempt at becoming a plumber and then as an administrator, I went back to college to pursue a career in sports coaching, as I enjoyed football. It was there that my friend suggested we should do a podcast, which we did weekly for roughly nine months. It was this that reignited the creative spark in me, and I realised that I should pursue media at university instead. When I got to university, I made friends in the first week and they were all doing a filmmaking unit, whereas I had chosen to do radio due to my previous experience as a podcaster. I stupidly decided to follow the new friends into their filmmaking class and weirdly within a few minutes of this lesson my life instantly made sense. It was everything.
It all came very naturally from there and I knew that making films is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. I feel so fortunate to have experienced that because I know a lot of people go through life searching for clarity professionally. I’m extremely thankful to have had such a profound moment through either luck or fate. From there, the love and obsession was intense and I did everything I could to keep making things, it didn’t matter how. I’d make films on my own with my phone. So, it was really from that point onwards that I wanted to direct because I would always have ideas for stories and in my obsession for research outside of it, I would always have techniques that I wanted to try, so I would naturally lead the group projects. I was about 22 years old at that time and I have just followed that love ever since.
Once I realised, I was supposed to be a filmmaker, working backwards from there I realised that there were a few moments in my life that pushed me in this direction. One was my love of dinosaurs, coinciding with the release of Jurassic Park. The obsession translated over perfectly because there were real dinosaurs on screen, so that was pivotal. Another moment was when I snuck downstairs late at night when I was eight or nine and my dad was watching something on the sci-fi channel. He said that ‘the first thing you need to do when watching something is to figure out the plot’ and so from that point onwards I was unconsciously analysing films and cartoons in an intense way. Then when I was 18 my friend brought round Oldboy to watch under the premise that I would never guess the twist… and I did before the first act had finished. It was in that moment, I realised that I understood the mechanics of storytelling. It all feels serendipitous really and I’m extremely thankful for opportunity to make films.
Once you knew you wanted to pursue a career as a director, what where your first steps in achieving this goal?
It was all about making as much as I could. I went to university late and hadn’t made a film until I was twenty-two, so I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. I’m also from Northamptonshire and had absolutely no idea how the industry functions or how to break into it. So, I didn’t really try to if I’m honest, I just made as much work as I could. I tried to learn as much as I could and put out as much work online as possible. It was about having faith that the universe isn’t inherently cruel and that if I worked solidly enough in a single direction, I would eventually get one big yes.
I used my university projects/group work to come up with a script using a new technique or to push myself creatively with tone or genre. Then outside of that, I would use my student loan as a wage and book out equipment from the media stores at university in order to make videos for free, in London. I would typically cover events, shoot music videos, poetry nights, red carpet interviews, acoustic sessions etc. That was all in my first and second years of university. By the time I reached my final year, I had built up a list of clients and was more often than not being paid for my work, as I was doing it to a professional standard. I had a company registered called ‘Fresh Take Media’. In total, I probably made around sixty videos alongside my course, that I would have either shot or edited, and a lot of times both.
When I wasn’t making work, I was on YouTube learning new techniques and transitions for the filming or post-production process, to make sure that my work looked as professional as it could. This exposure to making work and getting feedback was so important, and it helped push me into becoming the technically minded filmmaker I am now. I also worked as a runner on two National Film and Television School student films and another time as a 3rd AD during this period, where I saw how more professional sets worked and what each department did, which was extremely helpful to get a sense of.
What obstacles or set backs did you face in becoming a director?
Whilst I was getting technically stronger as a filmmaker and my use of equipment, I didn’t put as much time into the mechanics of storytelling and character, so the fiction-based work I made wasn’t the strongest. This is something I’m constantly trying to work on now. I applied to the National Film and Television School Directing Fiction course in 2014 with my graduation film, but I didn’t even get an interview, which was totally justified. After working on the films there as a runner and 3rd AD, it felt like it was the best place in the country to make the steps toward becoming a director, so it really was a bit of a dream to attend there. With that initial rejection though, I made complete peace with the fact that I might not ever go and just decided from that point onwards to focus in on myself. That’s all I have control over.
I ended up doing a Master’s degree at the same university where I studied my BA, as I was eligible for a free scholarship due to receiving First Class Honours in my undergrad. It was here that I stopped freelancing and really dug down into myself with no distractions and began watching and writing a lot more films.
When I left university and started trying to make my films on the outside, that’s where I struggled for funding and I remember applying for BFI funding a couple of times, which were all unsuccessful. I went through the process of development with them once as a script got shortlisted, but I ultimately lost out at the final decision because I didn’t have anything recent to show. At the time this hurt a lot, but upon reflection it was totally justified, and it saved me from myself. From that point onwards, I’ve made a lot more peace with the process of rejection and I don’t really see obstacles anymore, I just see moments where I need to work harder to push past a field of resistance.
How did you develop your voice and hone your craft?
It’s a constant process, but it started at university where the lessons would provide me a direction to aim at, then I would go away and do the additional learning on top. I’d be on YouTube learning new techniques, I’d be watching films and following the paths that filmmakers I admired took into the industry. I think for me in watching so much work, I would start to build a taste for the kinds of films I enjoyed, what I liked about each, analysing them, trying to understand how the narrative functions, what makes a good story, the visual language of each and how I can put myself into the work that I make. It is from researching the filmmaker’s personal stories that you get a sense of how they came to create their own stories that made them successful and this is what I was working to replicate. Trying to be honest as a human and really leaning into myself.
A lot of the work for me has been internal, to dig down into myself, to push myself, to be the first judge of my own ideas and to throw away ones which aren’t good enough. If I have an idea and it feels quite simplistic in terms of its set up, I will work to figure out how to take it several steps further. So for example in my most recent film Space Plug which, is a sci-fi, the story started off being about a person growing up in a blank white room and being fed by someone in a hazmat suit, but from there my personal task was to dig further into myself and to make it more and more alien. It is through challenging myself that my work becomes unique, usually a bit weird and tonally a bit surreal, even if it is grounded.
A lot of the honing I’ve done, has come from being obsessive. To make as much work as I possibly could. To build my taste to the point where I know what I like and don’t like. To live as much life as I can inbetween to inform the story and characters’ I create. Then it’s about watching/reading everything I do and being honest enough with myself about where each aspect of the story or project falls down and the things I could or can do to remedy it. Weirdly enough, the more honest I’ve been with myself and the deeper that I’ve gone inside of my own head, the more I’ve realised my taste is pretty weird and the execution of my ideas is pretty dark. I’m not imposing this on my work, it’s just a summation of my sensibilities and where I am in my life at the moment, so this is how my work comes out. Maybe in 10 years time I’ll be making sweet rom/coms.
How did you get your first break?
When I graduated University because of the portfolio that I’d built I got headhunted on LinkedIn to be a video producer for a top fifty corporate and social media production company. This was a direct result of the portfolio that I created and my ability to deal with clients. That meant I had a stable job, I had a reason to move to London and I was making work constantly. It also gave me access to a higher level of kit and budgets than I’d ever been used to.
This was very important because up to this point I had been wholly creative, but here I had to make work to rigid deadlines and deliver it for a client, not myself. That was a part of the creative industries that I needed to be exposed to, so that I could reach the point where I could do this as a job. The other big break was when I got selected for the Directing Fiction course at the National Film and Television School with a film I shot on a weekend with about five members of crew and me acting in it amongst another few friends.
I had written a good few short films whilst I was living in London over the course of about three years, but I wasn’t getting any funding to make any of them because I didn’t have any good fiction films to show, only a documentary. So in making a film out of nothing and it getting me into the National, that felt like a big break. Beyond this, when I graduated I applied for a shadowing scheme with Warner Bros. And ended up being selected to be mentored by the showrunners and directors on HBO’s House of the Dragon for the duration of the first season. This was my biggest opportunity to date, as this is the biggest scale of work that I could possibly observe and is ultimately where I want to end up. It’s a blessing to have been involved on a production like that and for so long because directing a show like that doesn’t feel intimidating to me now. It’s deeply ingrained in me. I feel like I’ve seen the top of the mountain now and I have all of the tools and knowledge to begin making my ascent.
TV Credits:
Film Credits: Bubzy (2016), No Exposure (2019), Swing (2020), The Retreat (2020), Caterpillar (2021), Space Plug (2024).
Photograph: Samuel Dore