Max Morgan is the writer and director of Breakwater, the first feature film to be made by Oxford students since the 1980s, and May Day!, a documentary about the May morning celebrations. He read English at Christ Church, and graduated in 2024.
Cherwell: Can you tell us a little bit about Breakwater and May Day!?
Morgan: Breakwater, for some context, is the first feature film to be produced by students at the University of Oxford since Privileged in 1982. It came about because my friend Jemima Chen [Breakwater’s producer] and I were speaking to original members of the crew and cast, and they encouraged us to make a feature film and not mess around with shorts, and take on the challenge. The film itself is about the relationship between an Oxford student called Otto and his romance with a retired angler on the east coast of England. It’s about connecting through seemingly nothing but everything. May Day! is a documentary about Britain’s oldest tradition of May morning, and the epicentre of that in Oxford. And it’s about guiding the viewer through all the cultural eccentricities and the different parts of May morning. What was special about that was we had five different roaming cameras around on the morning so we could cover it from all angles, because there is no centre to it – it’s completely scattered all over the city. That’s currently in post-production.
Cherwell: How did you assemble a crew to make these films? Where did you find the students across the university, and how did you get the funding and the technology?
Morgan: The scale of both projects is quite different. Breakwater was pretty big overall; I think we’ve had about a hundred people involved in the project at various different stages. Our production crew for that was about 40 at its largest. I wanted to make the film with a group of mostly students, and so we did a massive call out on the OUFF [Oxford University Filmmaking Foundation] Facebook group, which is such an amazing resource full of people who want to get involved in projects like this. We had a really overwhelming response to the idea of making a feature film, and we pulled most of our crew from that. It was many people’s first time on set because although there’s obviously a really great short film community in Oxford, there’s one camera, so there are limited opportunities to get on set. And so it was a lot of people’s first time, and that’s an exciting challenge for them, and for us as well.
The other way we found crew was through connections that Jemima and I had made from working on slightly bigger professional sets. We found our director of photography, a guy called Evan Bridges, through one of Jemima’s friends from work – Evan was a student at the University of Westminster at the time, studying cinematography. He brought on board his own camera crew who were all students at Westminster or working in the industry professionally. It was a really nice fusion to have people who had a bit more experience and were willing to teach members of our production crew how working on a set worked. We managed to pull it off because everyone was so up for the challenge and really believed in making the film happen. For May Day!, that was a bit smaller, but again we went through the OUFF Facebook page after Isaaq Tomkins, the co-producer, and I developed a core crew from people we’d worked with. We also just messaged people who we thought might be interested in the project from a journalistic or filmmaking angle.
Cherwell: You mentioned that you’d worked on some professional sets before. When did you decide you wanted to become a filmmaker, and how did you turn that into getting onto professional sets?
Morgan: I came to Oxford and I did lots of theatre, and I really loved the theatre scene here. I think that the creative arts scene in Oxford is superior to literally any other university in the UK. It’s amazing how many different theatre venues there are, as well as production companies. I think it’s a really great way of encouraging people to be entrepreneurial and push themselves to put something on. So I did lots of theatre and always wanted to divert into film, but didn’t really know how to – Jemima and I both really had that ambition to get into film together, and so we started to think about how it would happen. One day they were shooting Endeavour, the TV series for ITV, outside Canterbury Gate at Christ Church. I was watching, and it was a really fascinating scene where some guy gets in a vintage car and puts his foot to the floor and belts it down Merton Street.
I asked a member of the crew if they had any jobs going or wanted to take someone on, and so the next day I was in a hi-vis telling people to stay back from the set. It was really cool to be part of this film set. That was the Easter of first year, and I got some more work with the location manager for that – it was location marshalling work, and then eventually a bit of running and just working on more productions gradually over time, meeting more people and getting invited back to work on new shows. I now mostly freelance on locations and production. I was working with the same boss a couple of weeks ago on Midsomer Murders, which was really nice. Jemima was doing the same thing, which is how we met.
Cherwell: What have been the main obstacles that you faced in terms of getting those films made, and the problems in the pipeline of Oxford student to filmmaker?
Morgan: May Day! and Breakwater are such different films. On May Day!, we were running around with a camera and trying to capture as much as we could. And that was a lot more free range – we were just documenting what was in front of us. That still came at a cost, and fortunately it was funded by the Oxford Research Centre for Humanities, which really helped us make it. I think one of the barriers for students making films in Oxford, and for filmmakers in general, is just the cost of making a film. You think you can low-ball it, but when you consider things like transport, additional equipment, lighting gear, covering people for expenses and food, location fees, and insurance, it really starts to rack up.
In Oxford particularly, there’s a lot of amazing resources like the Cameron Mackintosh grant for funding theatre and stage productions, but there’s a real dearth of funding opportunities for short films, and so I think many people rely on grants from colleges. Obviously some colleges have specific art funds, while some colleges don’t, and some colleges don’t really give JCR funding to artistic projects, which I think is a shame. For us, that was a massive challenge with Breakwater and we relied on getting grants from colleges. I was lucky to be at Christ Church, which had at the time quite a good JCR for funding arts – I’m not sure if, because of me, they do anymore.
We did a crowdfunder, and Jemima also came up with the ingenious idea of doing a student art auction, which we turned into quite a big thing. We also managed to get donations from professional artists like Steven Appleby and a really cool painting from Maggi Hambling, who is this fantastic East Coast-based artist. Her scallop sculpture features really heavily in Breakwater as a symbol, so that was really cool. That auction literally gave us half our production budget, and the crowdfunder basically did the other half. But we were making the film and writing and deciding where to shoot based around the constraints of our budget. We were literally writing to a micro-feature – writing scenes in that we knew we could shoot for free or we knew would be easily accessible. I think you have to be very creative with your expectations and taking risks and what you can get away with on such a small amount. So funding, to really bluntly answer your question, is and was the biggest difficulty for filmmakers.
Cherwell: I’d also like to ask about the films themselves, rather than just the process of making them – Oxford as a city and university features in both Breakwater and May Day!. Can you speak about that influence?
Morgan: Obviously there’s such a rich cinematic heritage to Oxford. Privileged, the first feature film that was shot by Oxford students, was directed by a guy called Mike Hoffman, who’s a fantastic director. It was produced in part by Rick Stevenson and Andy Patterson, who both work in the film industry – Andy and Mike have been the most unbelievable mentors and guides through this process. That film starred Hugh Grant, Mark Williams and Imogen Stubbs, and the score was composed by Rachel Portman, an Oscar-winning composer. They’ve gone on to do unbelievable things and become titans of the industry in their own right. That film was about a very narcissistic student, and is a satire on privilege in the university and the age of the last hurrah in the eighties, when it was being made.
Additionally to Privileged, Brideshead Revisited cast a massive shadow over our contemporary vision of Oxford and our understanding of it, and there are lots of other great films set at the university. We were very aware of Privileged, and obviously we had Andy and Mike really helping us and encouraging us through the process – they read countless drafts of my scripts and the film is so much better for that. They were so generous with their time.
We wanted to make the film in Oxford and make use of the beautiful limestone colleges and all the beautiful scenery and that baggage that comes with it, but we also wanted to make Oxford part of the film and break the wall of Oxford and come outside of it. Part of the reason for that was we also wanted to not be considered a student film made by Oxford students, but an independent film made by students at the University of Oxford, which I think for us was a very important decision for our mentality, and for our marketing of the film as well. My favourite day in the whole production was filming in Radcliffe Square one evening, and it’s quite a nice scene where the two characters have had a lovely day in Oxford, and they’re not really sure how they’re feeling about each other anymore. It’s the final chapter in the Oxford part of the film. We locked off the whole of Radcliffe Square using just a couple of students posted in each corner of it. The location lends so much to the story and the film, and makes it look so beautiful.
As for May Day!, Oxford is, as I said, the epicentre of this tradition of May morning, and it has been for 800 years. I’ve had some of the best days and nights of my life on May morning, and I think I shared that feeling with some of the people who made the documentary. It felt like an inherently filmable thing and an idea that immediately worked. I think making that documentary was really fantastic because it enabled us to connect with a community of Oxford that exist outside of the university and is normally very separate from it – Morris dancers, musicians, community artists, community historians, people who love the city for reasons that include the university, but also different areas like Headington, Cowley, Summertown, and the villages around Oxford as well. What was cool about May morning was that it felt like a moment when the ‘town and gown’ were able to meet and see eye to eye and dance and celebrate the coming of summer with each other. It’s a very joyous and unifying celebration.
Cherwell: What filmmakers do you think have had an influence on you?
Morgan: For different projects there’s different filmmakers, but I think the most influential for Breakwater and the way I understand and see film as a medium and an art form is a Cornish filmmaker called Mark Jenkin. In 2016, he made a film called Bait about a Cornish fisherman and the gentrification of Cornwall, which won a BAFTA. He came to Oxford once and did his screening of his second feature film Enys Men, a really beautiful horror film starring Mary Woodvine. He’s really engaged in grassroots filmmaking – what’s exciting about his work in particular is that he shoots it all on film and then he cuts it himself, and he uses basically a Super 8 camera to shoot, and live mixes the sound. His soundtracks are really haunting, really eerie, and I think his framing is really striking; he sets his stuff on the coast, which is a massive setting for Breakwater as well. He has just shot a film called Rose of Nevada with George MacKay and Callum Turner about a ghost ship in Cornwall that I’m very excited about.
Cherwell: Can you tell us a bit about the post-production life of Breakwater?
Morgan: Post-production took about 18 months. We were editing that film from Trinity of second year all the way through mine and Jemima’s third year, and finished in December 2024. That was a process of working with various editors who came on board, and each one shaped the film in a really fantastic way. At the start, that was with some students, who were still involved throughout the process, and then at the end, with a professional post-production house called Box Clever. But the score is all composed by students, it’s being coloured by some students, sound edited by students, so there’s student involvement throughout the process.
We always knew that we wanted to submit to this iconic British film festival, the largest independent film festival in the UK, called Raindance. That was our goal from before pre-production. Last month we were invited to have our world premiere at Raindance, which is incredibly exciting for us. We have five nominations, which is really exciting because our film, which is in the grand scheme of things really tiny, is competing against much bigger, high-budget productions. It’s such a cool celebration of independent, maverick filmmaking. We’re screening on the 23rd and 24th of June at Vue Piccadilly for our world premiere. There have been some really cool films that have been there over the years like Red Herring, Memento, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Black Pond, which was produced by Sarah Brocklehurst and written by Will Sharpe, which was another big inspiration for us in making our film.
We’re hoping to use Raindance to make as much noise about Breakwater as we can, with the end goal of trying to get a limited theatrical run and some distribution at the end of the project. It’s been a delayed gratification of three years for all the work that the crew did in April and May of 2023. Jemima is also just doing her finals at the moment, which is crazy. We’ve watched the film pretty much every day for the last two years, but for some people who worked in it during production, they hadn’t really seen it until we did a little private screening a couple of months ago. It will be really nice for them to finally see the film how it was intended, after putting in a couple weeks of work ages and ages ago.
