ABOVE: I asked the AI to draw me picture of Darryn and I walking his three Boxer Dogs on a beach in Marbella to reflect simpler, happier, more innocent times. Few kinks to be worked out I think.

INTERMISSION OVER, LET'S CONTINUE....

Part 4: The Instinctive Film Years

Sometime in the early 2010's I was made an offer I couldn't refuse. Darryn had started a new Production company in Berlin, Germany and wanted me onboard as head of IT and Creative Director. It was going to be bigger than anything I had done before by some margin and we would actually be only making and marketing films this time. I was highly dubious after our past experiences with Oh! Marbella, but I was assured that this time we had someone on our side who would literally change the game for us. 

A few unverifiable statistics for you. Films are about the riskiest type of investment you can make as a private investor. 95% of all of them lose money. If you were to successfully complete 50 films, 47 would lose money, 2 would break even and only 1 would be the breakout hit that will make more than 10x its original budget back. 

To quote Walt Disney: " You don't make films to make money, You make money to make films"

So who does invest in films?

In very general terms, there are two types of people who invest in films. The first are the egomaniacs and the narcissists. People who just want the recognition that comes with being part of a movie, to hang out with movie stars, do cocaine off a strippers bum, get to go to the ludicrous launch party in Cannes and most importantly use it as a way to get girls. YES, that sort of person!  They usually talk a good game but don't have nearly the financial clout they pretend they do. They are useful as they are natural risk takers, but they just tend to be vile people in my experience.

The second type are the geeky investors with the mega well paid,  but uninteresting office jobs, that never get invited to interesting parties or have interesting friends. They have worked hard and selflessly their entire lives and now they just want to do something creative with their money. Girls and sex don't really enter into it with this crowd, they got where they are because they are socially awkward. They have the money, know the financial risks to the penny and will take them because they can afford it.

Our game changer came in the form of the second type. Tim McMovie (Not his real name) was a software developer from Holland and not just any particularly software either.  Tim designed security software for banks and was one of the wealthiest people you have never heard of. Tim wanted to use his money to invest in films and as such was willing to bank roll us for five years and provide film investment capital to the value of $50 million dollars. Yes, you read that right.

With this sort of backing we were able to lease a pretty sweet office in the heart of East Berlin and get to work. 

A quick side note....

Berlin is amazing, probably my favourite place I have ever lived, it's a true twenty-four-seven city, always somewhere to go, something to do, but unlike most cities, you can do it for next to nothing. The street food is exceptional and it was cheaper to eat out every meal than actually buy groceries. There are parks everywhere and public transport runs on time. What makes it great is the weirdness of it all, one moment you are sipping champagne on the roof of SOHO house, the next you've been invited to a party at a new nigthclub, you arrive and its actually a gay Jewish nightclub that's down twenty flights of stairs in a concrete basement full of smoke.  It's so industrial and so alive and like Marbella I feel a pang of sadness watching the rapid gentrification of East Berlin as investors buy up property, push up rents and replace rather than renovate its unique combination of German architecture mixed with concrete elements of communist rule.

During this period we were literally the golden boys of Independent Film in Berlin. Everyone wanted to talk to us from Oscar winning directors and screen writers to every distribution company., actor actress and model. We got all the best tables, invited to all the best parties and people knew who we were and we would get the attention and service normally given to proper celebrities. It felt absolutely unreal.

We had a small team of about 8 of us in the office to help read our script submissions and put together our first slate of films we wanted to produce. Some were our own original concepts, others we optioned for development and some just needed a cash injection to finish production. We literally optioned or commissioned dozens of projects. I would help script edit but I was also in charge of marketing and using a new thing called social media to help raise awareness of our projects to potential fanbases.

This is where once again, it starts to gets complicated. You see Tim was only really willing to bankroll the films he liked himself for artistic reasons. We had plenty of low budget horror and zombie movies we could churn out quickly for easy revenue flow, but Tim was only really interested in financing all the high concept arty stuff. Now, I can slog through pretty much any script and as a writer I consider it a privilege and a duty to finish anything a person has actually managed to finish and submit in the proper format. But some of these projects.. Yeesh.... So far up their own anuses with flowery prose and existentialist crap, I was happy to be done with them. just so I could read another campy vampire romp off the pile on my desk (The record stands at 4 vampire movies submitted in single day as the record). 

Anyway we somehow managed to develop a slate of about a dozen projects that Tim liked ranging from the art house pictures he wanted to a few we considered safer financial bets. 

Head to TRAILERS to see projects we helped develop and/or finance

Just a little side note here, but if there is a single piece of advice I can offer as a producer it is to never, ever give a first time feature directors final cut of their film, no matter what. Some of these convoluted art house productions we produced could have been workable for a casual audience with some simple editing, but the brick wall you face when confronted by the singular creative vision of a first time auteur is simply not worth the hassle.

These Directors despite often looking like unkempt messes are also all experts in contract law and manage to sneak in the smallest of contract changes that allows them to keep creative control of a project. As such several productions of ours ended up in limbo as they were just too confusing to sell to a distributor and the director wouldn't release the project with the edits we needed. Thus starts years of legal battles where you cannot get hold of the various parties because they have given up their worldly possessions to go film a micro documentary about harvesting kelp in the Atlantic ocean for two years.

But, for the most part it was a very fun and creative few years, I loved the city and I was finally moving away from internet content and becoming more and more involved as a script editor for our various projects.

Then something completely expected happened. The sub prime mortgage crash in the US triggered the global downturn in 2008. Tim's promise to invest in further projects vanished almost over night as his stocks and holdings took a hit. Our other investors vanished into the woodwork as well and we were left with a lot of exposed money in unfinished or undistributed productions.

What people don't know about film finance is that by the time distributors, advertising and various other top tier investors have taken their cut it can take upwards of five years plus before even the most modest amounts of cash start to trickle back to the production company that created the damn thing.

We literally had to go into suspended animation for a couple of years until things improved. Luckily the one project Instinctive Film produced during this torrid time was a very successful apocalyptic survival film called "The Divide". Filmed in Vancouver it found itself in a bidding war with several big distributors and as such made the investors a lot of money from day one. 

It helped secure new investment for the company so we could work on a few new films and also start the most ambitious project we would ever attempt.  FEAR PARIS.

Part 5: Fear Paris and the beginning of the end

Fear Paris was a horror anthology film like no other, ten stories and ten directors all filming against the gothic backdrop of a warped version of Paris. These directors included Joe Dante, Xavier Gens, Timo Vuerensola to name just a few. The cast had Alfred Molina, Riz Ahmed, Cara Delavine, Peter Stomare amongst others. I was the main writer and script editor for the entire project and it was a very big deal, so big that we threw every available resource we had at it.

Head over to the FEAR PARIS main seciton here.

We dedicated almost two years to its development and by Feb 2012 we were finally ready to begin pre production. Then the worst thing in my creative life happened.

It was the Berlianle film festival and Darryn, Laura Rister (our LA based exec producer) and myself were sat in SOHO house discussing Fear Paris and awaiting the phone call to let us know that production could begin. It was all supposed to be a matter of procedure at this point and we were excited and in high spirits, it was all finally about to happen. 

Two hours pass and nothing. At this point I think Darryn and I were deep into our third bottle of Malbec and the enjoyment phase had given way to nervous and deep gulping as we started to realise that something might be amiss. The adrenaline that had been gradually building within me all afternoon had cancelled out the warm fuzzy feeling of the previously excellent wine. 

Finally the call arrives and Laura heads outside onto the terrace to take it as phones aren't allowed inside. She returns a few minutes later and calm as a clam she breaks my heart "They have decided to put their money into another project".

It's a 50/50 co production, without company A to escrow half the production budget, company B wont commit either and then it will all come down like a house of cards.

The ramifications take a few moments to settle in as Darryn and Laura begin desperately sending out text messages to their contacts as they try to somehow rectify the situation. They are both incredibly persuasive people, probably the best smooth talking problem fixers I have ever met, they would surely find a way to fix things and get us back on track, its what they were born to do, what they are best at...

Spoiler warning: 

They fail 

If this were a movie, then about now a trombone shot is just smashing into my worried face. I know what it means... It's over. We are well and truly fucked. What's worse is that I know from both a personal and professional perspective that this would be my peak. I would never get closer to producing my dream film.

An hour later and it's confirmed... Fear Paris is over. 

The project could be changed, dates moved about, but all the elements are in place now and we will never again have the current and amazing cast, crew and directors available for our shooting dates. I leave alone almost immediately to go find a local bar so I can drown my sorrows properly, If I had stayed a little longer and left with Darryn I learned I would have gotten to share an elevator with Rod Stewart. What a terrible day.

Over the months and indeed years I edit maybe another 20 versions of the script, most watered down, fewer stories. lower budget. I never feel the same about it again. We have also invested almost a million euros of company capital to get us to this point and it once again leaves us in relatively dire straights. 

Something would come along though to save our necks, it always seemed to...

Morgan Kane

Ryan Wiik was an old acquaintance from our teenage days in Marbella. He was Norwegian and probably the most confident person I have ever met in real life. He had caught the acting bug after a small cameo in one of our earliest productions and with his eyes firmly set on superstardom he pitched an audacious plan to a small cadre of Norwegian investors.

He would use his confidence and their money to create the façade of someone who had already made it big in the industry. He rented a house in the Hollywood hills (One that belonged previously to Diana Ross I believe) and pretended he was a powerful movie mogul from Europe. This illusion of grandeur opened all the right doors in all the right places and allowed him to effectively jump several rungs of the Hollywood ladder without any of that horrible business of working hard. He would use his mysterious profile to raise money for his production company and for several years it worked like a charm. He lived the life of a millionaire, drove a Ferrari, dated celebrities whilst all the time spending his investors money and accomplishing precisely nothing.

He did however have one stream of revenue. He had the online, Ebook and film rights to Norway's best selling fictional hero. Morgan Kane a misogynistic gun slinging cowboy from the wild west.  The book series consisted of 75 books in a variety of languages and even though he had only formatted one of these books so far, that one book made him 10k a month in sales, such was Kane's popularity. The ultimate goal for Ryan was to play Morgan Kane himself in a series of super high budget feature films. 

He wanted us to put together a team to format the remaining books (700+ of them across 20 languages) as quickly as we could, whilst also using our contacts to help find him a director and cast. I was used to formatting large amounts of files from my Marbellalife days, so I learned how to use Ebook formatting software, crunched all the numbers and put together a schedule for converting all the books. I was confident that once we had done a few trial runs we could put out 16 books a week. It literally could not have been simpler.

We pitched Ryan our plans, but there was a snag, Ryan was already in too deep and confided to us that he had spent his investors millions and they were now suing him for fraud. We were his last attempt to salvage something and he couldn't afford to even pay the deposit to secure our services, which was already several long weeks overdue. He was literally asking us to do it all for free. He couldn't even afford to get his flight from Berlin, back to L.A. without our help.

At this point the company could no longer afford to pay my monthly retainer, but I still had plenty of freelance script projects I was working on, so I didn't mind staying put in Berlin for the time being. Unfortunately the building we were living in and also working out of needed us to leave. They had been waiting for almost five years to pay off a tenant so they could finally get the permits to do a full refurb of the building and increase rents. With the old man across from us finally gone (He held out for a six figure sum BTW), they also wanted us gone until the renovation was complete.

The office was packed up and placed in storage. With things so precarious it made sense for all us to work remotely from our homes. Trouble was I was also about to be homeless as well.  So I packed my suitcase and grabbed a flight to the UK where my now amazing wife Becky allowed me to stay with her. I thought it was only going to be temporary, but more than anything else in this entire story I am glad that I never was able to return to Berlin as it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

PART 6: Bear Trap - The final hurrah!

"The thing we were most worried about was how we were going to do the special effects for the bear. The Production manager, just laughed at us. "Special FX?!?" We will use a real bear, this is Romania!"

The final project I would work on under the instinctive film Banner was a micro thriller called Bear Trap. I wrote several drafts of the script in a 6 week period and though it was far from my best work, it was certainly the fastest I had written a 90 minute thriller. 

 It was a snow movie about a father who loses his two children in a blizzard when their car crashes and they are kidnapped by a crazy local woman. There was also a bear that was constantly hunting the father.

The presale presentation I designed is available to download here

We decided to shoot in Romania for several reasons, cost being the main factor and we had a list of things we needed for the production. The thing we were most worried about was how we were going to do the special effects for the bear. The Production manager, just laughed at us on Skype.. "Special FX.. We will use a real bear, this is Romania, they are everywhere. Anyway we have a slightly bigger problem, but I am sure it will be resolved by the time you get here!"

I asked the AI for a photo of me in the mountains of Transylvania with a bear... good job AI. Not bad at all.