Charles Thompson has been involved in the production of some of the most interesting short films to date and he has now almost completed his first feature The Mexican Standoff
 

I have been an independent producer for the last 5 years and I have been working a lot of the time with people creating on the fringes of the industry. People whose visions are not accepted readily by the mainstream. I am intrigued by some of the work that they do and the kind of narrative they develop.

In 1992, a friend of mine brought a script to my house, I read it and I said this is the first film I will produce. That film was called The Collector.

The Collector had a producer already attached and I first worked as the line producer and subsequently as producer. By the time I became involved in the production the director and the then producer had initially found a lawyer who was interested in putting up the budget, it wasn’t the whole of the budget, only £3,500. He had given about £800 to the production already but then became reluctant to give the rest and it became my job to get the rest out of him, which I managed to do with great difficulty. I found a few other private investors who put in sums of £500 or so and I put in some money myself. We also won the first London Production Fund completion award and the Four Corners Production Bursary for 1992/3, the latter allowed us to use Four Corners’ production and editing equipment. The film is 11 minutes, 16mm, B/W and is based on a Yoruba folktale, telling the story of a man who can’t and won’t pay his debts who encounters a fearsome debt collector who never fails to collect. The film was shot in a high contrast lighting, expressionist style and dealt with the themes of destiny and death and is the first film by talented Nigerian writer/director, Ade Adepegba. In the end we made the film for £5,000 and it went on to become very successful, Channel 4 purchased the film and it ran in the West End for over six months supporting Reservoir Dogs and Spike Lee’s Clockers. While the exposure in commercial cinemas was very important it also helped to produce revenue, and the £1,500 we earned went straight to the lab that blew up the 16mm print to 35mm. I think it is one of the very few short films which recouped most of its production costs, something that I am proud of and an achievement I always want to repeat on subsequent films.

After that I became more confident and I started letting people know that I was available to work as a producer. I was approached by other filmmakers with other scripts and in the last five years I have made promos, EPK’s and four other short films by first time writer/directors. They are: Greed - wr/dir Clive Richards; Dead Tone - wr/dir Sebari Diete-Spiff; Distinction - wr/dir Avril E. Russell; Red Mercury - wr/dir Steve Rogers.

In 1996/7 I worked with Newton Aduaka to try to produce his first short. We made a lot of applications without much success, because of the strength of the script the project got shortlisted on many occasions but we didn’t get any funding. In the end I had to step off the production because I was unwell and I had no money so I had to get a paid job. I advised Newton that if he really wanted to make the film he should cut the budget down from the £40,000 he wanted, to about £5,000, he should convert anything he could get his hands on into cash and try and raise some money that way. He did that and along the way sold his car and bought a smaller one, raised the money, made a wonderful film and did very well. I was credited as a line producer by helping with various bits and pieces.

With regard to these films they’ve all been financed by private investors, friends, business people I know, or partly by the directors themselves. However, the last short film I produced, Avril Russell’s first film Distinction, got a production award from the East Midlands Art Board for £11,000 and it was screened on Central Television.

With regards to financing shorts I think the thing to do is...

Full article published in Filmwaves - Issue 5, Summer 1998. Subscribe now!