Rob Savage

By this point I was 17 and my A-levels were looming. After exams, we had a long summer break and my only plan was to get drunk with my friends. I decided that I could probably find a better use for that time. Without any real plan, I started telling people that I was going to make a full-length film over the summer. I even set a date. I had no script, no team and no idea what I was doing, but the fear of social embarrassment forced my hand. I’d told everyone I was making a movie, so I better fucking make one.

I was so clueless about the film industry that I didn’t even realise that short films were a thing. In my mind, it was a feature or nothing.

I locked myself away for a week and wrote a rambling script about two teenage fuck buddies who fall in and out of love with each other and called it Strings. I had £3000 that I’d been saving for university, which became my budget. I borrowed an HDV camera off a friend of mine and started to teach myself how to use it.

At the time, my bible was Rebel Without a Crew by Robert Rodriguez, a book that chronicles the making of El Mariachi, Rodriguez’s $7000 debut feature. In this book, Rodriguez advises to look at what you have available to you for free, and write it into your movie. For El Mariachi, Rodriguez had access to a zip-wire, a school bus and a tortoise – and so they all went into the movie. I did the same thing. I spoke to my college, who allowed me to shoot in the empty building over the summer. I worked impressive locations into the script, as well as striking props that I could access for free. Anything that would give the impression of high production value.

We sent out a casting call to every university in the country asking for audition tapes and we were flooded with responses. I selected a handful to come to Shropshire to audition and asked a couple of my college teachers to sit with me at the casting session so that the actors didn’t get freaked out that they’d travelled halfway across the country to audition for some 17-year-old kid.

We assembled a brilliant cast and started shooting a few weeks later. On the first day, I had persuaded all of my friends to come and help out. I was determined to make everything run like a professional film shoot. It didn’t. Our first shoot day was a disaster. The next day, my friends wouldn’t return my calls. Only three friends showed up, and that became our crew for the remainder of filming. From there, things became a lot easier; we moved faster, the atmosphere eased. Everyone was there because they wanted to be.

I ended up taking on every job I could – I wrote, directed, shot, co-produced and edited the film myself, teaching myself each discipline as I went. To this day, it’s the most enlightening experience of my life, both in terms of filmmaking and also human behaviour. 

I didn’t have a computer and so I went to do a film course with the intention of using their facilities to complete the movie. Rather than finding support from the staff, I received a collective shrug. When I told my film tutor that I’d made a feature film, the first thing he said was that I shouldn’t have bothered. He was a dinosaur, thankfully retired now.

Eventually, I convinced the university to let me edit the film at night. They gave me a key to the edit suite and I’d cut from midnight until the sun came up. The problem is, I’d sleep in and miss the actual lectures, or even fall asleep in class. After a few weeks, the head tutor told me that I could either choose my feature or the film course. I chose the feature.

After essentially getting kicked out after a year of university, I ended up sleeping on couches in London while I found my feet. I still couldn’t afford a laptop and so I shot a string of embarrassing corporate videos until I had the money together. Finally, I finished the movie.

The timing was very fortuitous – this was before DSLR cameras were widely available, and so we quickly garnered a lot of attention for having made a professional quality movie with limited resources. The story of how we made the film became as much of a focus as the film itself, and we quickly leaned into this narrative. This taught me the importance of having an easy “hook” for whatever project you’re trying to sell. Strings became “the £3000 feature made by teenagers about teenagers”.

We played at festivals around the world, screening at Raindance for our UK premiere and the Rome Film Festival for our European premiere. The film was bought for distribution by Vertigo Films and released via the BFI, leading to a nomination and win at the BIFAs.

I was 19 at the time and this success led me to sign with Independent Talent, and allowed me to move to London and begin working professionally as a director.