Olly Blackburn

In this case, it had been a self-made set back. Something I see in myself and other directors is that a lot of our issues can be self-generated, which is a deep shame, as directing is already fiercely tough and competitive and there’s massive external challenges to overcome, like getting an agent, getting a job, getting the next job, getting through the day, making an underbudgeted show work, keeping your eye on the creative vision when there’s a million details to fix, and everything else because it never ends. You never – in my experience – reach the place where it’s all sorted, you’ve nailed it, there’s no more struggle left. You’re always fighting battles, trying to achieve something or get the next job. So then we add to that the hindrances developed from our own preconceptions – I should be making this not that, I should be handling these relationships differently, christ what am I even doing in this relationship!? And then on top of that is the direct-it-only-if-you-feel-it conundrum: you should never make something unless you really believe in it but… if you’re methodically building up jobs to get ahead, how can you avoid doing something you don’t 100% believe in? My best advice is find a big element in the work that speaks to you and focus your creative intensity on that. It may be an emotional theme in the story, it may be a visual technique, it may be that it’s so different to what you’ve done before you just want to try it out. However, if you can’t find that simple cornerstone to anchor your enthusiasm on it will show in the work one way or another. We can’t escape our instincts.

You can’t always get it right, every career is built on mistakes – like Samuel Beckett said “try again, fail better” – but the more you work, and keep working, the more you’re exposed to different styles of producer, actor, DoP, editor etc… the more you’ll learn from them, and about yourself. And like the Magnificent Seven you slowly start to pull together that crew of compadres you love and trust, and believe in – and believe in you – that lie at the heart of any successful directing career. This is a collaborative art, you’re not only as good as your actors and technicians etc – you’re only as good as the enthusiasm and trust you can inspire in them. Finding those people is trial and error over a long series of jobs that will teach you all sorts of things.

The second obstacle is a very specific one. I managed to make my first film, which I co-wrote, and it was called Donkey Punch – there was a lot of noise around it, it premiered at Sundance to a packed room and that thing happened, where all the American agents descend – it made a big splash. It was an amazing moment. The film got a lot of press. iT was very controversial and divided people massively, which I embraced – I love confrontational genre films with a brain, one of my absolute favourite directors is Paul Verhoeven – but it is a Marmite film. You’ll find equal amounts of people who think it’s brilliantly made and psychologically complex as think it’s a complete abomination. I have a Daily Mail full page column by Amanda Platell framed on my wall calling it the sickest most depraved film ever made and a column from Baz Bamigboye calling it one of the best made British films of the year – both written in the same paper! Go figure! Part of that is it’s just a completely full-on film that you should never sit the family down for after Christmas lunch, unless you want to freak your family out. Part of it was it’s a bit ahead of its time– it confronts toxic masculinity head-on and is open and equally gendered in its representation of sex and nudity, long before explicit shows like Euphoria were in the mainstream (interesting fact: the film earned an NC-17 in America for one reason alone – not the violence, not the sex, not the female nudity: Tom Burke’s penis. Which says all you need to know about American film classification). Its impact still ripples on – to this day people tell me how gripped they are by the film while others are completely horrified to learn I made it. But this other thing also happened – when I did finally get the holy grail of an American agent off the back of Donkey Punch, I ended up being offered loads more films that were kind of watered down versions of what we’d done – generic teen horror movies and pretty gnarly torture porn films. If you’re making a film as extreme as Donkey Punch you need to go all-in, you can’t fake it, you have to be 100% committed. We wrote the film with strong ideas about male rivalry and social conflict, embedded in all the tension and horror, and I just couldn’t re-enter that full-bore territory unless it was something I totally believe in.

So I wanted to try something else rather than making more films about teens and boats, and I didn’t just forge ahead and use the spotlight to move straight into another film. There were other separate things going on at the time that drove these decisions, but the end result was I didn’t have something else ready to shoot, “Just like Donkey Punch, only a little bit different” as an American agent once told me. That was a mistake. I made commercials again and that kept me directing. Eventually I did make the difficult second film, it was a horror-thriller called Kristy, written and conceived as a stylish Hitchcockian suspense piece and produced by Harvey Weinstein. 

Which brings us to the third set back.

Kristy is a fun film to watch with a proper cult following – check it out on Netflix! It was also the most gruelling shoot of my life, encompassing some ghastly things. In fact, it was one of the worst experiences full stop. Without going on for a long time all I can say is you will all have some really tough directing experiences where you question yourself and your instincts. You will have setbacks. It is part of the journey. But if you’re ever unlucky enough to find yourself in a poisonous situation where powerful bullies are trying to destroy you; contact me. It’s a horrible place to be and you’ll need advice and support from people outside the toxic bubble. At the time, my agent sent me a photograph of Mohammed Ali all bloody and pulped at the end of the rope-a-dope to say… just surviving this production will be your victory.  

After that I vowed not to make a film again unless the circumstances were right and to do the hardest thing possible for a director to achieve… stop being known for just one thing and do as much work in different genres as possible. That was when my career as a TV director began. 

A good friend at the time recommended me for a TV drama series that they were casting called Glue written by Jack Thorne and produced by Eleven Films and I started for the first time making TV drama, moving from show to show, always trying to step up, working with really interesting writers in as many different genres as possible from drama to procedurals, to tech thrillers to costume drama. The most recent thing I’ve done was setting up Sanditon by Andrew Davies, which must make me the only director to have an NC-17 midnight movie and a Jane Austen adaption to their name! That’s one of the greatest things about this era of TV – if you keep working and meet the right producers and writers, say yes (and no) to the right sort of things, you can get the ability to flex your directing muscles in so many different ways – I’ll always have a special place in my heart for cool dark thrillers though.