Samm Haillay - The Gun on The Mantlepiece

Sam Haillay is one the most important and exciting up and coming producers in the North East. Through his independent production company ' Third', which he founded with Duane Hopkins in 2001, he has been responsible for supporting a vast array of new talent. He was responsible for producing Hopkins award winning short films and his feature debut 'Better Things', which received high praise when it at the Cannes Film Festival's International Critics Week, in 2008.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to hear Haillay speak yesterday, and found his advice and stories highly engaging and inspiring. The advice he gave was invaluable for a budding young film maker such as myself. Samm talked at length about every phrase a film goes through, from the idea generation and pitch through to filming and post - production. He gave some novel ideas on ways which one might raise money to make a film, recalling one time when he and his colleagues worked overtime packing in a Supermarket during the busy Christmas season, and managed to raise over £1000 in the process. He gave a fantastic tip for the casting process which stuck with me, which is to ask any non-actors who you want to cast in your film to simply look into the lens to see what they do. They struck me as a great tip, as everyone has a different reaction to being in front of the camera, some are too theatrical in front of it, some shy away from it, and some have a natural or even dominating presence when in front of it. Therefore simply asking them to look into the lens can allow to know early on if they are the right person for the job, by simply how they react to being in front of the lens.

One of the things which Haillay talked about which stuck with me the most was the concept of 'The Gun On The Mantlepiece'. This refers to a narrative technique in which a seemingly unimportant item is glimpsed or discussed briefly at the beginning of the story, only to turn out to be important in the last act. My mind immediately went to Edgar Wright's 'Shaun of The Dead'. In the film a rifle is appropriately seem above the bar in The Winchester pub, and the characters argue at several points in the narrative over whether or not it is a real gun. In the film's final act, it does in fact turn out to be a real gun when Shaun accidentally fires it, and it is then used by the characters as a way to fight back against the zombies that are closing in on the pub. This technique is also known as 'Chekhov's gun' after the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, who summed it up as "If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." If it isn't essential, then you shouldn't include it in the story.

 I also had the opportunity to watch a fantastic short film that Haillay produced, Jade, directed by Daniel Elliot, for which he received the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The film takes a rather generic soap opera - esque plot, that is, a teenage girl gets pregnant by her boss and tells her boyfriend that it is his, and films it a such a subdued and cold way that really makes it feel fresh. It's a very bleak watch and really makes you feel uncomfortable as you watch it. There is very little dialogue throughout and no music whatsoever, with much of the story being told through characters faces and actions.The final shot of the film, which can be seen above, really stuck with me. It ends with Jade looking directly at the camera, at us the audience, as if to ask "what would you have done?". The director then breaks the 180 rule by showing Jade's POV of the rain outside the car windscreen, and then cuts abruptly to black, leaving us feeling melancholy as the credits roll silently. I really thought this was a great piece of film making and urge anyone reading this to check it out.