Tag: Jon Wright

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.

Unwelcome at the Sitges Film Festival

Unwelcome, the film I wrote with director Jon Wright, premiered at the Sitges Film Festival last weekend and I’m still buzzing from the experience. Here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it already…

The Sitges Film Festival has been around since 1967 and is one of the best horror/fantasy film festivals in the world, so it was a genuine privilege to show our film there last weekend. This year’s festival was the first full-blooded version of the festival since lockdowns ended and they sold over 70,000 tickets this year for 350 screenings over ten days. It’s one hell of an event, with a reputation for incredible audiences who start cheering once the production logos start at the beginning of the movie (except Netflix, apparently… their logo gets booed!).

Five of us travelled to Sitges: myself, director Jon Wright, editor Zsófia Tálas, director of photography Hamish Done-Ditmas, and VFX Supervisor Paddy Eason. We were excited/tense/nervous (delete as applicable) because this was the first time the film was going to be seen by real people. I was whisked straight from Barcelona airport to the midnight screening on the Friday night. This was in the smaller pop-up cinema with 3-400 people. Jon and I said a few words, sat to one side, and waited as the lights went down…

The Sitges audience did not disappoint. They cheered and whooped and applauded. It was simply mind-blowing and such an incredible relief. The film wrapped almost two years ago and its release has been waiting out Covid, Omicron, the collapse of Western Civilisation’s economy etc… So I had no idea if was actually any good. Would it play for an audience? Thank you, Sitges for showing us that all our hard work was not in vain.

On the Saturday morning, Jon and I did interviews for radio and press (it’s testament to Jon’s generosity that he asked me along to these… not every screenwriter gets this treatment!). All the interviewers had seen the film the night before, and loved it and asked really insightful questions. I did feel sorry for our translators (Elena Martínez for the first presentation and the press, and Aina Girbau for the premiere) who had to make sense of my often rambling answers.

Saturday afternoon meant the big premiere in the main 1400-seater theatre. It was sold out, packed to the rafters. We walked out on stage and said a few words and it was like a dream. As the opening credits rolled and the wonderful Sitges audience cheered and clapped I was finally able to relax and wallow in a little moment of bliss (I’ve struggled to enjoy these big moments in the past). The end of the film got another terrific reception, and as we got up to leave we found people still standing and applauding us. It was a bit of an out of body experience.

On the Sunday, I wandered around Sitges. A beautiful town with beautiful people. We’re all fired up and want to return with another another movie as soon as possible. Gracias, Sitges, hasta pronto!

All photos by Miguel Anxo, courtesy of Sitges Film Festival.

From L-R: Hamish Done-Ditmas (director of photography), me, Jon Wright (director), Zsófia Tálas (editor), Paddy Eason (VFX Supervisor)
Big venue!
Jon giving the the translator something to laugh about.
Doing the Abbey Road walk onto the stage.
Thanking the amazing Sitges audience.
One for my mum…
Getting a little bit The Great Dictator here…
Me with my favourite film director.

The Little People Movie Has Wrapped

The news is out! The Little People has wrapped and the cast has been announced.

And what a cast: Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Stranger), Douglas Booth (The Limehouse Golem, Loving Vincent), Colm Meaney (Chief O’Brien!!!), Jamie-Lee O’Donnell (Derry Girls), Chris Walley (Young Offenders) and Kristian Nairn (Hodor!!) — The press release left off Niamh Cusack (Heartbeat), who is a bit of a legend in our house*.

And what a crew! The magnificent Jon Wright is directing (and we worked on the script together and it’s one of the happiest writing gigs of my life). Producer Piers Tempest optioned the script in March and suddenly we were shooting in September – just incredible.

I was only set for a few days, but I can tell you that cast and crew were working in the most extraordinary circumstances, under strict Covid guidelines, but they were tireless, always professional, courteous and good humoured. I’ve been able to watch the dailies and assemblies and they’ve knocked it out of the park. It looks incredible, the acting is sublime, and I can’t wait for you to see it.

IMDB has most of the cast and crew here… Have a look at some of their previous credits. Here be legends.

*When I was about 17 my aunt Marion wrote to Niamh asking for advice for a young actor (me!)… and Niamh replied with words of encouragement. It meant so much to me and I was delighted to be able to tell Niamh when we met on set.

Jen Williams – Even Aliens Have Issues

Really happy to have spoken to Jen Williams on the Bestseller Experiment podcast this week. Not only is she an award-winning fantasy author and founder of the Super-Relaxed Fantasy Club, but she’s a jolly nice human being, too. I’ve been a fan of her stuff for a while, but if you’ve not read her before then check out The Ninth Rain, which kicks off her latest series. I’m convinced she’s invented a new genre: GrimFun – you heard it here first…

In this episode you will discover…

  • Top tips for building and writing captivating characters
  • When character should come before plot
  • The importance of a complex villain and why even aliens have issues
  • And how you can be super relaxed and meet your heroes

CLICK HERE to listen now!

*

Oh, and don’t forget to grab a copy of our book BACK TO REALITY now!

 

LUCY VINE

Five tips for writing around a day job…

Writing while holding down a full-time job can be a bit of a ‘mare at the best of times. Some authors write late into the evening, some get up at the crack of dawn. I’m lucky enough to be able to weave into my working week, and I thought you might want to see what my typical writing week looks like, followed by five tips that you might find useful. Firstly, here’s what this past week looked like…

MONDAY
AM
I live out in the sticks now, so on a weekday the whole family is up at 6, out the door by 7, and on our various busses and trains by 7:30. My commute into London takes about an hour and forty minutes. Plenty of time for writing! I’m fed and caffiened by this point, and raring to go. I generally get my best stuff done on the morning commute.

This particular morning, I was working on my first Woodville book. I’m currently about halfway through and it’s like wading through treacle, but progress is progress.

LUNCH
Mondays are podcast launch days, so I spend my lunch break on the social media for the new episode.
My wife Claire is a gardening blogger and author, and I worked on uploading her new gardening eBook to KDP.

PM
I’m working on a couple of projects with Jon Wright at the moment and he had been tweaking a pilot script we’re working on, which I reviewed on the train home and made a few light edits.

TUESDAY
AM
More Woodvile work. Averaging about 500-800 words each morning.

LUNCH
More Bestseller Experiment social media and I also send a newsletter out on my mailing list with details of the show.

PM
Worked on formatting Claire’s new eBook on Parsnips… very different to my usual stuff, but it’s nearly sowing season and she needs to get these online pronto!

WEDNESDAY
AM
Woodville – good progress. About 1000 words.

LUNCH
I added hyperlinks to Claire’s eBook. She links to seed companies and her videos on Youtube, so there are loads of them! Far more than any novel. I also worked on tweaking the keywords and metadata for Back to Reality and that afternoon I got a telling off from Amazon for adding a subtitle that has text that isn’t on the cover art. We were threatened with having the book removed if we didn’t amend it. Grr.

PM
Script rewrites on the train home for the thing Jon and I are working on. Really good fun as these are light changes, as opposed to the first draft slog of the Woodville stuff. It’s tempting to stick with this tomorrow morning, but I must be disciplined!

Mr. D and I had planned to record the podcast tonight (we usually record on a Monday), but due to all sorts of extenuating circumstances (and Canadian weather!) we’ve have to postpone it. Will we get an episode out in time for next week…?

THURSDAY
AM
Woodville. Hitting my stride with this noise. Daily word count is improving.

LUNCH
I listen to the interview I recorded with next week’s guest, making notes in anticipation of recording the pre- and post interview stuff with Mr. D. Also make further tweaks to Back to Reality’s metadata. Claire and I also got our PLR statements. In the UK, every time a book is taken out of the library the author (and illustrator if applicable) gets 8 pence! My statement could pay for a takeaway pizza. Claire’s could pay for a nice weekend away!

FRIDAY

A day off from the day job at Orion. I spent the morning at home and Jon popped round to make the final changes to our pilot script before sending it off to our agent. We read it aloud, acting out the parts and pising ourselves laughing. Very good times.

In the afternoon, the Canadian weather eases and Mr. D’s power is back on, so we record Monday’s episode, plus the Deep Dive episode for Patreon listeners. Poor Dave our editor only has a few days to cobble our witterings together!

SATURDAY

Dave sends us the rough edit of the podcast and I listen back, making notes and suggestions for edits, as well as writing the description you read on the website/iTunes etc and the keywords we use for the blog.

No other writing done today (apart from the first rough draft of this blog!)

In the afternoon, I read an excerpt from a friend’s book and send him some notes.

SUNDAY

Today is our wedding anniversary, so me and the family went to see a movie and had a cheeky Nando’s for lunch, and now I’m writing this blog, but I’m already thinking about what I’ll be writing tomorrow…

 

Five tips for writing around a day job:

  1. Spot and schedule: Spot those spare moments in your week and schedule those as writing times. They don’t have to be long. We’ve had guests on the podcast who can work in fifteen minute bursts. Little and often works best. Set reminders in your calendar and stick to them. There’s a temptation to be flexible with these times as it’s not a “proper job”. I’m very protective of these slots and treat them with the same weight as meetings scheduled for my day job.
  2. Shut out distractions: You might be working on the train, or the office, or a busy home. There will always be noise and distractions and, if you’ve only got half an hour in which to write today, then those distraction will eat that up in no time. Find a quiet spot and shut the door. Make it clear to your colleagues and loved ones that you’re not to be disturbed. If you do work in an office, get away from your desk if possible. Otherwise, you’ll have colleagues interrupting you with work queries in your break. At work I’ve been known to stick a Post It note on my headphones with “Sorry, can’t talk: Writing” written on them… It works! Your colleagues might think you’re mental, but it works. I love a pair of comfy noise-cancelling headphones for my train journey, and I currently use an app called Scape which plays woodland noises etc, which I find really conducive to productivity (I still have music playlists, but are finding them a little too distracting at my age!).
  3. Finish mid-sentence: If you’ve only got a short time in which to write, there’s nothing more likely to eat into that time than you sitting there, staring into space, wondering what to write next. I try to finish any session mid-sentence, so when I return to writing I simply finish that sentence/thought/scene/paragraph and I’m already up and running.
  4. A.B.T: Always Be Thinking. You might not be able to write all the time, but you should engage your brain for some good, solid thinking as often as possible. Five minutes on your hands? Skip back to what you were last writing: what were the problems? How can they be solved? What happens next? And whatever you think of, for the love of criminy take notes! If you’re anything like me, you’ll have forgotten everything by the time you get back to writing.
  5. Write early, edit late: This is a personal one, and perhaps more to do with being middle-aged and sluggish, but I work on new stuff in the morning when I’m bright and breezy, and edit that same work in the evening when I’m lacking buzz and energy. I also have a method that I call Be Kind Rewind: whenever I get stuck, I’ll go back and edit/rewrite the previous 500 or so words. By the time I’m done working on them, I usually have enough momentum going that I crash through any block that I might’ve had when I started.

If you found those helpful, please share with your fellow writers. How do you work around the day job? Please leave your comments below…

My First BA Conference (and jeweller’s robbery!) – My Writing Diary Ten Years On – May 1st & 2nd 2007

 

The Booksellers’ Association conference is an annual gathering of the great, the good, and (in my case) the liggers of bookselling and publishing. Orion was paying for one of our customers to attend the gala dinner and I went along to be their handler for the evening. This is when the BA hands out their awards, the Nibbies, and there’s sometimes a quiz, plenty of food and drink, and jewellery shop robbery… Maybe that last one isn’t as common? Maybe they laid that on just for me…?

Tuesday 1st May, 2007

 

Harrogate: The Booksellers’ Association conference. Only here for the gala dinner this year. Journey up was fine. Knaresborough looks like a great place to explore: steep and cliffy. Harrogate is a perfect little town and Betty’s Tea Room smells glorious. My agent got back to me on Dead Man’s Finger*. I don’t need to make a decision till next week… Hopefully I’ll get to meet with Jon (Wright) tomorrow to discuss God Of Scarecrows**. We’re planning to meet at King’s Cross tomorrow afternoon.

Off to the gala dinner. It’s too hot to be dressed as a penguin.

 

Wednesday 2nd May, 2007

 

9:50am. On the train to Leeds… Amazing! Just seen the end of a robbery in jewellery shop in Harrogate! I was happily strolling to the train station when, from around the corner, I heard a woman scream, followed by a series of bangs (three, I think), then a red car came screeching around the corner. Its windscreen was bashed, presumably as a result of the banging I heard. Not gunshots, but someone trying to smash the car’s windscreen. I couldn’t see through the cracked glass to identify the drivers. The car sped away at high speed, but before it had even reached the junction at the end of the road, there were three or four people already on the phone to the police yelling its registration number into the receiver. There were at least a dozen other witnesses to the crime, so I figured I wouldn’t be needed. In the two minutes it took me to reach the station the air was full of the noise of sirens and police cars and vans were in hot pursuit. I guess it won’t take them too long to find a red car with a smashed windscreen.

The incident proved what I’ve always feared: I would be a rubbish witness in court. The car was red, a C reg, and I can’t even remember the name of the jewellers’, although I’m pretty sure it was in Prince’s Street.

Anyway… last night was okay enough. Mark Billingham was MC and managed to inject life into some old gags and there was a fairly funny turn from Al Murray, the pub landlord.

Richard Littlejohn proved himself to be the twat I’ve always imagined him to be: he declared Alastair Campbell to be a mate and then proceeded not only to slag him off, but also suggested that Campbell was responsible for the death of weapons inspector Dr. Kelly. This prompted Mark Billingham to splutter, ‘Fuck, if he’s your friend, what do you say about your enemies?’

Littlejohn’s response was, ‘You should hear what he says about me!’

You should hear what we all say about you Littlejohn, you hate-mongering little fuck.

Home, 11pm. Had a good meeting with Jon this afternoon. He had some good ideas for The God Of Scarecrows. I will have to change the ending. We also discussed an idea. More of a framework for a short film that can exploit extremes of sound. Thinking cap on…

Tired now. I’ve spent too long today in trains and taxis.

 

The car was a Rover! And it was red, and a C reg, so maybe I’m not so bad an eyewitness after all? There’s more here… No idea if they ever caught them, but if you’re looking for an eyewitness with a ready-written statement, I’m your man!

 

 

 

*I have zero recollection of what this is.

**A short film idea that I still bloody love, and might fold into a book project I’m tinkering with…

 

Film London Microschool: Day Two. My Writing Diary, Ten Years On, Tuesday 10th October, 2006

Ten years ago, my horror-comedy script Waiting For Eddie had a producer, a director and had been chosen for the first ever Film London Microwave scheme, which was designed to produce at least two debut films with a budget of £100k. And day two saw the script get some serious interrogation from some industry professionals. Would it be knocked out in the first round, or would it pick itself up, battered and bruised, and ask for more…?

Tuesday 10th October, 2006

Day two of Microschool. Jon (Wright) and I had a meeting with script editor Toby Rushton that was so good it gave me goosebumps. He started by saying some very nice things about the script, we then all agreed on some of the problems. He liked the suggestion in the script that the house has something to do with its murderous history. Jon and I were initially wary: we didn’t want to go down the Amityville Horror route, but then I latched on to the slaughtered Victorian family in the Fleetwood sequence and we now have a new character called Cassandra and an ending that is ten times better.

Poor Dean (Fisher) was stuck in the basement at the Institute Francais, poring over the budget with all the other producers. He’s still wary of making of making Eddie for £100k, but Jon is more optimistic.

This was the first time the script had been read by anyone not directly associated with the film, and it was something of a relief to be told that it wasn’t a steaming turd, and how dare I call myself a writer? I remember the goosebumps came when Toby took a tiny part of the script — a throwaway line about previous murders in this haunted house — and started talking about how we could extrapolate that into something bigger, and by the time our session was over we had a new character and a better ending (and I had a ton of revisions ahead of me… years of them, in fact).

Getting feedback and notes can be a traumatic experience, but this was such a thrill to be given permission almost to dig deeper and explore these characters and situations all the more. At the end of day two I was certain of one thing: our film would get the £100k and would be made within the year (spoiler alert: nah).

For more on Day Three of Microschool, tune in tomorrow!

Film London Microschool, My Writing Diary, Ten Years On, Monday 9th October, 2006

My script Waiting For Eddie had a producer, a director and had been chosen for the first ever Film London Microwave scheme, which was designed to produce at least two debut films with a budget of £100k. But we weren’t the only ones, of course, and first had to survive a week of Microschool: a kind of Bake Off for filmmakers. Jon and I were treated to masterclasses from producers, writers and sales agents, while our poor producer Dean was sent to a dark basement for a week of budget school (some people get all the luck). Reading this ten years on I feel like I come across as a cocky little know-it-all. Don’t worry, dear reader, the next ten years of trying to get scripts off the ground will knock that out of me…

Monday 9th October, 2006

Day one of Microschool. An up and down sort of day. It started with some sales agents telling us exactly what sort of things they were looking for in a film. A lot of what they said could be filed under “The Bleeding Obvious”, but it was surprising just how few of our fellow filmmakers have twigged to the basic tenets of writing for a market. Some just want to experiment at the artistic end of the spectrum and that’s great, but I think Film London are looking for a hit to come out of this scheme and, as far as the comedy films are concerned, we’re the only one of this scheme that comes close. That said, there’s a lot of work to do this week: budgets need a rethink and the script will need to be knocked into a practical shape. Dean is torn: he’s still totally convinced that he can get £400k for Eddie, but Jon and I feel that we should really get our teeth into this week and go for a win!

This was my first time surrounded by other filmmakers in a hotbed of talent and competition, and it was pretty intimidating at first, but you soon discover that they’re just as terrified (or as full of shit) as you are, and you start to realise that you might actually deserve a place at the table here.

You hear people talking about breaking into the film industry like you just need to kick down one door and suddenly you’re a filmmaker. It’s nothing like that at all. More a series of incremental inch-like shuffles in a never-ending post office queue, but while you’re in the queue you get talking to others who have just as far to go as you and before you know it you have a peer group and a sense of belonging. I’ll always be grateful to the Microwave scheme and Dean and Jon for getting me a place at the back of the line, and I’ll stop now before this metaphor completely exhausts itself.

More on day two of Microwave tomorrow!