Michael Pearce

I transferred onto a media course and spent a year making short films and exercises on a bulky VHS camera. They were of course terrible (me and my friends dressed up in charity shop ‘gangster’ suits, meeting on Jersey’s quaint cobbled streets, exchanging briefcases filled with packets of flour) but I started to understand how to block and shoot a scene in a visually interesting way. I wanted to be behind the camera as much as possible so decided to go to a practically focused film school. I went to the Bournemouth Arts Institute as you could specialise in directing and spent three years watching films and making shorts, with each becoming incrementally less shit. 

Though filmmaking is a deeply collaborative venture for a director it can also be a very personal one. You can be acutely sensitive about your work, wounded when you receive criticism and dispirited by the countless mistakes you make. This is true of every department but (in typical director fashion) I think it’s a little bit more true for directors. However I quickly discovered how unproductive it was to let your ego dominate the process so I started to see ‘failing’ as a journey of getting mistakes out of my system (an on-going process). It really is such a long and tough road to becoming a director, there is so much craft to learn and it’s such a collaborative medium, you really need to remain open, honest, curious and generous in spirit, and turn the volume way down on ego, pride, envy, defensiveness etc. You’ll be much more clear-sighted about your work, more robust and appreciative of critique, develop a richer creative intuition, forge stronger collaborations, make more friends and have more fun. 

The university had a phenomenal film library and I think half my degree was spent holed up in the tiny video room feeding my insatiable appetite for movies. Many days were effectively back-to-back solitary binges. I’d curate retrospectives for myself on different directors: Kiarostami, Antonioni, Fassbender, Tarkovsky, Yimou, Lumet, Denis, Campion, Tarr, Dumont, Hankeke etc. A dark room with a TV, a semi-comfortable chair and stack of films, are all the ingredients you need for a mind-expanding experience. I don’t think you can become a director without first being a movie freak, so be as pretentious, broad, niche, highbrow or lowbrow as you want to be, just be an obsessive about it.

I sent some of my shorts to film festivals but received what most young filmmakers receive – a deluge of rejection letters. Ouch. Deep breath. ‘Fail, fail again, fail better’. My graduation film had a bit more success and the experience of going to festivals was incredible. It was my first introduction to an international film community and I met so many directors who were just as passionate about film, but were a damn-sight more talented and ambitious. It really raised the bar for the quality of work I felt I should be aiming for. The competition (as in ‘friendly competition’) wasn’t the person next to me in class; it was the Mexican girl who made a short that made everyone’s jaw drop with her visual storytelling, and the Hungarian dude whose short was a balletically orchestrated twenty-minute tracking shot. 

At the end of my degree I didn’t think my work was in the place I wanted it to be (certainly not compared to the other filmmakers I met at festivals) so I applied to the NFTS to do a MA in directing. I didn’t get in the first time so I worked in a bar, wrote ideas, and used some festival prize money to make another short (with slightly less mistakes) and got in the second time. I loved being at the NFTS. Similar to my degree you were just focused on making films and I found many kindred spirits who became collaborators and close friends.

The shorts I made at the film school started to have more success at festivals, but I still graduated and didn’t feel my work was where I wanted it to be and so I worked at crappy jobs and spent all my spare time writing film ideas, applying to funding schemes, and occasionally getting selected to make one. One of those shorts, Rite, did really well at festivals and kind of legitimized me in the eyes of the industry as a new young filmmaker to watch.