Category: Robot Overlords

Ten Years Ago Today: Robot Overlords and Losing a Cast Member at the Last Minute

Long time readers of this blog will know that I’ve been looking back at my diaries from ten years ago, just as we were prepping to shoot Robot Overlords. We needed more money to make the film and it looked like the BFI were coming to our rescue…

Thursday 23rd May, 2013

Jon (Wright, director) says the BFI thing is looking good. They want to give us a creative director to look at the script. Basically someone to be their eyes during production, and in return we get our VFX budget and writing fees back. Sounds good to me.

We might be losing Eros (Vlahos, actor who was originally cast as Nathan). His agent can’t get the dates to work with filming for Da Vinci’s Demons (a show that Eros was working on at the time). Be a shame to lose him, but Jon’s already looking at other kids.

I resumed work on the (Robot Overlords) novel. Still waiting for the nod from Gollancz… But it’s good to be writing again. I get glum when I’m not.

Katie (my then agent) has sent my stuff to the Doctor Who people! Were were both doubtful they’d even consider me, but they seem to be quite receptive.

We were assigned a creative director — he was credited as an Executive Producer — in Chris Clark, who was terrific when it came to honing the script in the frantic days before the shoot began. More of that soon.

And yes, sadly, we did lose Eros who was a terrific actor, but we did get the brilliant James Tarpey to play Nathan and now I can’t imagine anyone else doing it. But if you’re curious, you can see some pics of Eros on our test shoot day here.

I have no recollection of the Doctor Who thing. Needless to say it never happened. I’m not a huge Whovian, but it felt like a good after Robot Overlords… Though, let’s be honest, it’s the only original* science fiction show on the Beeb, so it’s not like I had any other options. I have a theory that the BBC treats science fiction like religious programming: they have one original show (Doctor Who… and when that wasn’t on it was Red Dwarf) and that’s it. Doesn’t exactly seem fair when there’s countless gritty dramas about cops, but such is the fickle nature of televised drama.

*Original being the important word here. Don’t come at me with ‘But they did His Dark Materials etc…’ That’s based on a bestselling book series. I’d love to see more new and original SF&F on the Beeb, but it’s not going to happen while Doctor Who is fulfilling the geek quota.

Ten Years Ago Today: Robot Overlords, Spitfires and Letting the Grass Grow

Long time readers of this blog will know that I’ve been looking back at my diaries from ten years ago, just as we were prepping to shoot Robot Overlords.

Pre-production was in full swing with location trips by the director Jon Wright and the production team. I could only sit at home and dream of such exotic locations…

Thursday 16th May, 2013

The Robots production and VFX team have been on recces to Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man this week. Some great 360°/180° photos from Paddy (Eason, VFX Supervisor). The one sticking point is the Spitfire: we can’t afford to park a real antique in the middle of a wood, and we can’t — apparently — afford to build a model. Thinking caps on…

The script had the Spitfire hidden from robot drones in a woodland clearing. Here’s the page in the script as the gang chase a boy through the wood and discover the Spitfire…

In the end, we set the scene on the edge of a wood and put the plane under camouflage canvas. Can’t recall who came up with the solution, but it works really well in the finished film…

From L-R: Milo Parker, Ella Hunt, Callan McAuliffe, James Tarpey

Friday, 17th May, 2013

Apparently the BFI are making noises like they might come in with extra dosh. Jon also reports that the locations and crew are great — he’s in good spirits.

A nice report from Screen International today — mostly on the finance, but a mention from Tim Haslam (Producer) on the strength of the script. Another piece on an Isle of Man news site looking forward to the start of production. It said the grass around the castle is being allow to grow after a request from the production.

See, we were into No Mow May long before it was fashionable! The grass had to be overgrown because no human had tended to it since the invasion, and gardening was not a priority for the robot invaders. They were more into harvesting minds!

Here’s that Screen International story. Not sure that ‘strength of the script’ quote is quite what I make it out to be. I guess we all see what we want to see!

The next entry will be on 23rd May where we lose a cast member and discover if the BFI are able to give us the extra money we need. Subscribe to the blog so you don’t miss out…

Ten Years Ago Today: Robot Overlords, pay cuts and solidarity with the WGA strike…

Long time readers of this blog will know that I’ve been looking back at my diaries from ten years ago, just as we were prepping to shoot Robot Overlords.

By a weird bit of serendipity, today’s blog post coincides with the beginning of the strike by the Writers’ Guild of America. Why the coincidence? Well, here’s my diary entry from ten years ago…

Thursday 2nd May, 2013

Met with Jon (Wright, director) to run through the location changes. Bit of bad news — one of our backers didn’t have the million quid they claimed to have, so we’re down another million. Thankfully, the other backers are keeping their nerve and we’re staying on schedule, but the pressure’s really on Piers (Tempest, producer) said.

So let’s skip forward a few days to…

Bank Holiday Monday 6th May, 2013

We’ve been asked to take another cut in pay. Down to £30k for me. Not happy. Won’t take a decision until I’ve discussed it further with Jon.

The idea was that we would have a conversation with our agents regarding the cut in pay before agreeing to it. Now let’s skip forward to…

Tuesday 7th May, 2013

It seems an executive decision was made on Friday night and both Jon and I had our writers’ fees cut. Not happy.

Really not happy (and I’m no longer with that agency). A few of you out there might be thinking, ‘Thirty grand! What are you complaining about? That’s loadsamoney!’ Well, I’d worked on this script for over two years, and thirty thousand pounds does not represent the amount of work that I put into the film. And the same thing happened to me again on Unwelcome. At the very last minute, I was asked to take £50k pay cut because of budget issues. You’re always told that others are taking a pay cut, too, but call me a cynical old goat, but I doubt that Sir Ben Kingsley and Gillian Anderson took a cut in pay. Why is it the writers who are always first for the chop? Because we’re an easy target. We’re often desperate and alone. If this had been a production by a WGA signatory, it’s highly unlikely that the pay cut could have occurred. That’s why I stand in solidarity with the WGA in their strike. They’re fighting for a better future for all writers and this time they’re up against the streamers: Silicon Valley tech companies who really hate unions.

Here’s a little follow up…

Wednesday 8th May, 2013

I got a call from Piers tonight, apologising for and explaining the nature of the fee cuts. Basically, we lost £1.35 million… If the cuts didn’t happen, then we’d lose the film. I appreciated his call.

Piers didn’t have to make that call, so I do genuinely appreciate his gesture (and I later learned that he basically made the film for free, surrendering his whole fee!), but more has to be done in the UK to protect writers from such last-minute shenanigans. Not long after this I joined a writers’ group called the Vipers, and some weeks we would have a guest speaker from the industry. One week we had a producer who, when asked about paying writers to develop scripts before they go into production, simply shrugged and said he couldn’t afford it. I suggested that if he couldn’t afford to produce films, then maybe he shouldn’t be in the business of film production. That went down well…

I’m currently working on a romcom script with a Finnish film company and they’ve paid us good fees to develop the script at every stage. It’s been absolute bliss and proves it can be done, so why do we not do more of this in the UK? The truth is, this is the reality of filmmaking in the UK. We don’t have the scale of economy that Hollywood has (or even Finland, apparently) so we’ll just have to accept it and bumble on… Which is par for the course in this country! Grr, humbug, and other grumbles. I’ll stop now before I start blaming everything on the Tories, which is what my rants usually default to (and with good cause)… Don’t worry. Your normal, cheerful service will resume in the next post.

Ten Years Ago Today: Robot Overlord Rewrites and Panic Attacks…

Here’s an extract from my diary on Monday 8th April, 2013…

Slept badly last night. Panic attacks. It’s only 7 weeks till I leave. It’s becoming a reality now. Jon was looking at locations in Ireland today. Says he’s found a great ravine and a castle.

I got the official go ahead from Piers to work on the tie-in novel of Robots. Started work on the pitch and opening chapters right away.

PS. Jon and I did some good work on the cuts on Saturday. Molinare was empty. We found a quiet nook, ordered some tea and went about cutting thousands of pound from the VFX budget.

Some context: following on from my previous blog where I was asked to write the Robot Overlords novelisation, our producer Piers had to get it signed off by all the other producers. This will become a recurring motif through the making of the film and publication of the book: it could take forever to get a decision because so many people had to sign off on every major choice. It’s not that people were difficult, it’s just that there were so many producers and they’re all busy people.

In order to convince Gollancz that I was up to the job to write the novel, I put together a pitch which included a document outlining the project, a video with pre-viz VFX from the film (still a relatively new and snazzy thing) and about ten thousand words from the opening chapters.

This may have contributed to the late night panic attacks. To be honest, these weren’t anything new. I’d been having them for years, and still get them occasionally (had one just this week!), but I’m sure the big changes just around the corner we’re giving me conniptions. I had arranged to take a six-month sabbatical from work while the film was in production. This would not only allow me the time to write the novel full time, but I could also be more available to the film at its most crucial time.

Molinare is the post production facility just off Carnaby Street and where the film’s editing etc would be finalised. Jon and I were lucky to have it as a place where we could meet and work on tweaks to the script to shave away VFX in order to meet our budget.

Also, as an aside, Margaret Thatcher died on this day. I was never a big fan, but our current leaders make her look almost palatable. Almost…

More diary updates coming soon…

If you’d like to read the Robot Overlords novelisation you can get a signed copy here.
The film is available to download from Apple, Amazon, Sky etc and is currently streaming in Amazon Prime in the UK.

Ten Years Ago Today I Was Asked to Write the Robot Overlords Novelisation

Here’s an extract from my diary dated Friday 5th April, 2013:

Piers has officially asked me to write the film tie-in novel. I ran up to ask Gillian if Gollancz would be interested… they would! It all depends now on a deal being struck (and the film getting a release!), but I might be getting published, along with Claire, in 2014! Speaking of which, the first part of Claire’s advance has been paid: the company’s first bit of income.

So, let’s unpack all that… Piers Tempest was lead producer on Robot Overlords and in the run-up to production there was talk of merch like t-shirts and games, and also a book. I immediately volunteered for it, thinking that this could be a great way to get my first book published. And it made sense for me to pitch it to Gollancz, which is the SF&F imprint at the Orion Publishing Group where I worked.

Me running upstairs to ask Gillian Redfearn (I think she was a commissioning editor at Gollancz at the time. She’s now Deputy Publisher!) if Gollancz would be interested might sound like the deal was done there and then. It certainly wasn’t. In fact, and to their credit, Gollancz were wary of publishing an employee and I all sorts of hoops to jump through yet. But if you’re reading this and thinking ‘Jammy bugger’, then you’re right: I was taking advantage of my position within the company to get my work in front of a publisher. But also bear in mind that I chose to work in publishing precisely for this reason! So much of this business is about who you know, and if Gillian had said ‘No, thank you,’ then I had a long list of alternatives that I could approach. I had hoped that a day like this would come along eventually, and when it did I wasn’t about to let it slip by.

I was a little optimistic on the publication date of the book. The film had a premiere at the London Film Festival in 2014, but wasn’t released until March 2015. The book came out just before in February 2015.

And my wife Claire has beaten me to it in pretty much every field. She got an IMDb credit before me and her books were published before mine! Lottie and Dottie Sow Carrots was published in April 2014.

And the company? I was advised to start a Limited Company to manage the money coming in from our writing. In the UK, if you’re self employed and do your own self-assessment, if you have a good year, followed by a lean year (which is what it turned out to be) you can get walloped by a big tax bill. Having a limited company meant that we could manage the money without having to beg for rebates. And the company is still going ten years later!

Also from my diary that day…

Jon (Wright, director of Robot Overlords) gave me the fright of my life yesterday by sending me a grid with a list of cuts of VFX shots. It looked like we’re cutting back to virtually nothing! But then he explained the colour coding system on the grid. Blue is ‘cut’, orange is ‘cut from the “skimmed” version’ (which we’re preparing for the purposes of closing the deal), but we’re still intending to make the ‘full fat’ version, by chasing that extra £1m. We’re meeting tomorrow to go through the script.

A little context for this: we were still short of meeting our budget by about a million pounds, so we needed to write a version of the script where we could still make the film, but with fewer VFX shots. We had three versions: the ‘full fat’ was as written, the ‘skimmed’ version was with fewer VFX, and the blue version… well, we might as well have made it with stick figures. In the end, I think we shot something that fell between the ‘full fat’ and ‘skimmed’ version. But that’s a diary entry for another day…

Oh, and apparently it snowed that day, too!

If you’d like to read the Robot Overlords novelisation you can get a signed copy here.

The film is available to download from Apple, Amazon, Sky etc and is currently streaming in Amazon Prime in the UK.

Robot Overlords: Test Shoot at Pinewood 16th March. 2013

I’ve only recently realised that Robot Overlords is nearly ten years old, and that we started shooting in May 2013. But before that we had a day of test shoots at Pinewood Studios. It was to see how the kids worked together, and so a set was built of a sweet shop for the scene where the gang stock up on fireworks and sweets and decide what to do next. At that point we had two of our eventual cast, Ella Hunt as Alex and Milo Parker as Connor, and two cast members who wouldn’t be in the finished film: Harry Lawtey as Sean and Eros Vlahos as Nathan. Not sure why it didn’t work out with Harry and Eros, who were very good, but such is the nature of the movies and they’ve both gone on to great things.

Jon workshopped the scene with them all day. As screenwriter, I wasn’t really needed (but there was no way I wasn’t going to be there) and so spent most of the day wondering just how much grub I could pinch from craft services before I was evicted from the studio.

Here’s one entry from my diary for that day…

The big surprise was Milo, who — once you stopped him looking at the camera — was just terrific. Funny, watchable and full of energy.

Here are a few pics from that day on Stage H, Pinewood (and more to come throughout the year)…

Jon Wright on Stage H, Pinewood
From L-R: Jon Wright, Eros Vlahos, Milo Parker (horns), Ella Hunt, Harry Lawtey.
From L-R: Milo, Eros, Harry
From L-R: Harry, Ella, Eros, Milo
Ella Hunt obscured by a clapperboard. Note the film’s original title.
Milo Parker contemplates exploring Vinland.

Robot Overlords Half Price Sale

Before I wrote about witches, I wrote about Robots and it was eight years to the day when the novelisation of Robot Overlords was published! And so to celebrate, I’m selling the paperback at half price for one week only exclusively at the Woodville Village bookshop. That includes the DVD and Blu Ray bundles, and the bundle with all my books. Click here to grab your copy.

Here’s the film’s trailer to whet your appetite…

Robot Overlords is available on digital download in the all the usual places and is currently streaming in the UK on Amazon Prime.

ROBOT OVERLORDS BOOK FACTS…

  • The paperback includes my diaries while we were making the film.
  • It has a list of the whole cast and crew
  • And an exclusive short story called THE MEDIATOR PROTOTYPE!

The sale is on till Sunday 19th February 2023 at the Woodville Village Bookshop, so grab your copy now while stocks last etc…

Grab a paperback here.
Here’s a paperback with a Blu Ray steelbook.

My workshops at the Epsom & Ewell Arts Festival in June

I’m delighted to be part of the inaugural Epsom & Ewell Arts Festival this June! There are oodles of activities to choose from including music, art and literature.

I’ll be running a couple of screenwriting workshops. One for children, one for adults.

First up for the kids…

THE HERO’S JOURNEY – YOUNG SCREENWRITERS’ WORKSHOP

 

screenwriting workshop mgso4 arts festival
Event date:
Saturday, 25 June 2016 – 11:30am
Artist:

Author and screenwriter Mark Stay

Venue:
Epsom Library, Ebbisham Centre.
Ticket price:
£6.50
Book now

Join professional screenwriter Mark Stay for a fun workshop where we’ll look at the ‘Hero’s Journey’, how one page of script becomes a finished scene, and we’ll create our own story using ideas and methods explored during the session. .

Mark Stay wrote the screenplay for the film Robot Overlords, released in 2014, starring Gillian Anderson and Ben Kingsley.

Robot Overlords is set in a world where Earth has been invaded by an occupying force of robots from another world. Every citizen has an implant in their neck that alerts the robots if you step outside. You get one warning… then you’re vaporised!

Suitable for ages 10-12.
Epsom Library, Learning Centre.

Mark will be signing copies of his original novel Robot Overlords after the event.

Event access:
Wheelchair accessible
Then, for anyone 13+ …

‘FROM PAGE TO SCREEN’

WRITING WORKSHOP

 

Mark Stay MGSO4 arts festival 2016
Event date:
Saturday, 25 June 2016 – 4:15pm
Artist:

Screenwriter Mark Stay

Venue:
Bourne Hall, Ewell
Ticket price:
£10
Book now

Join professional screenwriter Mark Stay for a scriptwriting workshop and fascinating insider look at the development of a screenplay. Discover how one page of a screenplay becomes a finished film via storyboards, rehearsal, pre-viz, shooting, VFX, scoring through to the final scene.

Mark Stay wrote the screenplay for the film Robot Overlords, released in 2014, starring Gillian Anderson and Ben Kingsley.

Suitable for ages 13+.

Mark will be signing copies of his original novel Robot Overlords after the event.

Event access:
Wheelchair accessible

Robot Overlords DVD and book giveaway on Instagram…

To celebrate the premiere of ROBOT OVERLORDS on Sky Movies UK today (Good Friday), the lovely people over at Gollancz are having a book ‘n’ DVD giveaway.

To enter, just pop over to the post on Instagram (via the link below), ‘like’ and leave a comment. The giveaway closes at 23.59 on 29th March. Good luck!

 

Try the Geek Apocalypse podcast drinking game…

I had good fun chatting with Steven Hesse over at the Geek Apocalypse podcast. We discuss the kinds of people you meet at MCM Comic Cons, 2000 AD, Pat Mills, indie movies vs Hollywood movies, film tie-ins, world building, plot holes, Robot Overlords and all sorts of stuff.

You can stream it here, or if you get your podcasts from iTunes click here.

There will be a video version at some point and I’ll plonk it here when it arrives, in the meantime enjoy and, if you like drinking games, take a shot every time Steven says “super duper fun”, you’ll be plastered before you know it!