The Early, Funny Ones: Your First Experiences Making Films Are By Far The Best

You'll never have as much fun as those first films. Everyone comes together and feels the possibilities. You shoot at 6am all the way through till 4am and no-one cares because you're in it together, doing something, and everyone had forgotten what it was to do something.

And you scoff down a bar of chocolate at 2am and a cake at 2.04am and get talking to some bearded helper about your cinematic influences and you chat to the pretty girl who's helping out just because it gives her something to do and she tells you how she secretly wants to write scripts.

You laugh like crazy because the acting is so bad and no-one knows what they're doing. But everything is so important, it's like bomb disposal. You must must must make this movie because life depends on it. You run down the steps holding some cable and feel all buzzed up on life.

You take a break between scenes in some freezing cold field and everyone is eating bananas cos' you asked people to bring food and Michael brought fifty bananas because he's crazy.

Everyone is crazy, jumping off houses with cameras and climbing onto houses that belong to strangers; all because the shot is needed. The film is everything. We were sleepwalking through life and now we're movie makers, and this could be a masterpiece.

It's the last night of filming and we've snuck into some farmer's barn and everyone is in love with everyone and Paul has a crazy idea to film it upside down from the hole in the roof. I want to impress the girl, the girl wants to impress the bearded guy, and the bearded guy wants to impress upon us his greatness. So we all dive in and climb our way up to the roof and balance the camera using sticks and bananas and hope.
Filming ends and no-one wants to go home, because we all have work or school or unemployment in the morning. It's back to something and it isn't the movies.

You never get this back. The pure joy, the wonder, the naivety. It's everything.

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Schools & Education - Wake The Fuck Up!

I have done some talks and workshops in schools recently, and am part of an organization that works with troubled youths, trying to help them see that the world is bigger than the bully in the playground.

But the bully isn't just in the playground. He's in the staff room. He's in the system.

I met this girl today who told me her dream. To be a singer and actor. She's never told anyone that before because when you're thirteen and you tell people you want to sing and act they think you're insane.

They don't like insane in society. They don't like ideas and dreamers. They wanna teach us maths and science, even when we hate maths and science. All they teach most of us is how to add up how low our paychecks are and then how to set fire to them with a Bunsen burner.

There was this other kid who we met because he's the 'bad kid', which is code for 'black' and 'gets restless during French lessons'. We gave him a folder and said "make it your own." We thought he'd write his name and class number. Instead he designed graffiti. It was amazing, and he did it for the other student's folders too. 

But schools don't get that. They think singing and graffiti don't lead to a career but knowing 3.14 is Pi does.

I was 12 years old and I was exactly how I am now, but less tall. My English teacher told me "Writing isn't your skill, find something else". It hurt. But she was my teacher. I didn't write for fun again for five years, and school was a nightmare.

I lost five years of my growth as a writer and it's because my teacher said I can't do it, and I believed her. 

It's time to wake the fuck up. The talent of young people is getting squandered. It's hard to be an entrepreneur from a prison cell, or from behind the counter at the supermarket. By then most people are dead. Because when you have big dreams the system doesn't allow you to exist.

And the system is broken. Half the people aren't working. I know geniuses who went to university because that's what was insisted, and now they work part time doing admin in the back offices of shoe shops. Everything is fucked yet we still make them call the teachers "Sir" and we still make them read shit that has nothing to do with who they are.

It's time for the educators of our young to wake the fuck up. I don't know how we do it. But the world is changing. Our young people are Facebooking and developing iPhone apps. It's different now. But still the artists suffer. 

That girl today was so shy about wanting to sing. It doesn't HAVE to be that way. That shyness isn't nature--- its growing up and having to push your aspirations so far inwards that pretty soon you convince yourself that not only do you not want to sing, but you really want that extra shoe shop shift.

I've got nothing against the shoe shop. I just know that people have bigger dreams. It's hard enough if you know what you're doing and have resources; but when your teachers, schoolfriends and everyone around you is forced to be exactly the same as everyone else, you get oppressed. You get stuck at home.

The world is a giant place, dreams come true. But we can't keep killing it at such a young age. Because how you are at 14 is usually how you are forever. Let's make it about possibilities and uniqueness. 

It's down to us as individuals -- as teachers, parents and teenagers. But there are also larger forces. Our governments, the men in grey suits who run the schools, and God knows who else. School is a place to learn, to have your mind opened to the possibilities. It's almost never the thing I just said. We need to change that.

Wake the fuck up.

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