I had wanted to make a short film for a long time. I’d directed a lot of trailers and promotional videos beforehand, which I always hoped would be practice for something more my own. I’d also written a couple of plays, which helped me hugely in constructing the story. But The Wishing Horse is my first short film. 

Find your story

It’s a real challenge having to tell a story in ten minutes, but the best shorts are ones with a strong narrative.

The Wishing Horse is only ten minutes long, but I’ve tried to tell a story that plunges you deep down into the main character’s head, into her melancholy and dreamy world. It was also important to me to have some resolution: a lot of short films are mood pieces, or first acts of stories yet to be told, like business cards. I wanted to create something small, but complete, and hopefully that comes across in the finished film.

It’s based on a myth that if you touch the chalk white horses of England, they will grant you a wish. A girl, Lily, who is in mourning for her father, starts to see a strange white horse when she’s by herself. Whether real or imaginary, it helps her deal with her grief.

Assemble a dedicated team

The project started when I asked Aidan Grounds, who produced Playhouse shows like The Hothouse and The Seagull before graduating last year, if he wanted to turn a script I was working on into a short film. Aidan said yes, which was quite a leap of faith because I hadn’t done that much on the scale we wanted The Wishing Horse to be. We then recruited Emily Precious, who had also produced tons of theatre while at Oxford. Em and I got on almost instantly. She has about fifty folders for her emails and colour codes them all. 

Next, the three of us started putting together a team. It was comprised mostly of Oxford graduates – I think it’s natural really to want to continue strong working relationships – but we added some very good current students as well, and now that we’ve got to the post-production stage we have been lucky enough to enlist some industry professionals.

Scout out acting talent

We auditioned widely in Oxford and in London and eventually cast Imogen West-Knights as Lily. Imo is a finalist at Exeter College, and she played the part beautifully. We were concerned about finding a natural screen actor, as we were used to working with theatre, but Imogen convinced us immediately: despite her background in comedy she brings a very graceful subtlety to the part. She took the finesse you need for comic timing and very elegantly used it for a more serious role.  

Prepare for shooting

With everything in place, I was still very nervous before our week long shoot. There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong, but we had perfect weather every single day and the crew were phenomenal. People were often working on three or four hours sleep a night, and no-one complained. In the end, the whole thing turned out much better than we had imagined it could.

Don’t be shy asking for favours

Post-production is going well, mainly thanks to peoples’ goodwill in giving us discounts on filming permits and a camera. Many of our friends also backed us on Kickstarter, which we were very grateful for. Now Molinare, responsible for films such as The King’s Speech, and Air-Edel, who recently did the music for Anna Karenina, are generously helping to finish the film.

Get it out into the world

The last stage is still to come though, and that’s distribution. We’re knocking up a list of film festivals to submit to at the moment and will push the film as hard as we can over the coming months. I really hope it does well – at the first meeting I had with Aidan we decided that we would aim to screen it at at least one good film festival.

I’d like the film to be seen in Oxford too. I really feel that the film scene is changing in the university at the moment. I’d like The Wishing Horse to be part of that. So many more people are making short films and trailers than a year ago and the quality keeps improving. 

Get support from the Oxford Film Fund

Last year, I set up the Oxford Film Fund with Jess Campbell because we were impressed by the high standards of Oxford theatre, but felt that the same wasn’t true for filmmaking. We wanted to make filmmaking in Oxford more collaborative and communal, so that people getting started can draw on the experience of those who have already done it. 

I think that is happening now. TAFF and OUDS have already been a huge part of this, and the idea is that The Wishing Horse will keep the momentum going. Everyone on the team (apart from the professionals!) has a learnt a huge amount from the project, and that knowledge should be passed on to current students through the Oxford Film Fund.  

No more excuses

I think the only way to learn filmmaking is to just do it. I hope that’s what The Wishing Horse will encourage other students to do. To find out more about the project, visit our website at www.thewishinghorse.com. 

If there’s any theme that unites the several dozen pilots to be seen on American screens a few months from now, it is ‘the single word’. After the success of last season’s Revenge, series creators seem to have a fascination for creating hype around one particular act or concept. Gone are the shows named after families, like the seventies hit The Waltons or The Sopranos. Police procedural or detective series such as Law and Order or CSI also seem to have fallen out of fashion. The pattern for the upcoming season’s selection of pilots is the single-word title.

One of the forthcoming series creating the most hype is ABC’s Betrayal. ‘Isn’t that the name of a Harold Pinter play?’ you might ask. But the commonness of the name is not really at issue. If the project were a film or play, it might still stand a chance despite its unoriginal title. But how is the idea of Betrayal to fill a series intended to go on for four, five, or maybe seven years? The premise of the show is a bored female photographer, stuck in a stiff, dull marriage, who begins an affair with the lawyer for the defendant her husband happens to be prosecuting. Among the critical responses for previews of pilots so far, Betrayal is probably the most panned, despite having the most conventional and maybe even accessible storyline. The initial plot of the series arouses some interest. But the problem with it as a series is its lack of one theme. In examining the hit television dramas that have been aired on our screens for the past thirty years, each one has revolved around one particular setting or one particular goal which has always allowed something new to happen. The abundance of legal dramas – L.A. Law, Boston Legal, and most recently The Good Wife, means that scandal and power play will always be on the cards. The second most popular category is the medical drama – where strange diseases and risky operations, plus a character’s life on the line every week, tends to hook viewers. Otherwise, more unconventional institutions have domineered the series – like the Italian mafia in The Sopranos, the White House in The West Wing, and a family business-run funeral parlour in Six Feet Under. Other dramas which don’t depend heavily on their settings depend on their characters. Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives relied almost wholly on the extent to which they garnered viewers’ sympathy; precisely because both dramas had four female leads around whom the series revolved.

If we take this new drama Betrayal, what is the series actually about? Betrayal? And, in that case, how many betrayals will there be? Will there surely not be a temptation for the series to become a legal drama – given that lover and husband are attorney and prosecutor? Or will this just be a drama focused on the characters all betraying each other? If so, how do we know who is ‘good’, and who is supposedly ‘bad’? Would it not be easier to simply have the series revolve around its protagonist Hannah?

The other series planned for ABC likewise don’t show much promise, with one recent article telling the readers there is ‘not much to celebrate’. Another one-word title drama, Resurrection, is already apt to create controversy. It focuses on a small boy who ‘returns from the dead’ thirty-two years after his untimely demise. One has to question how much ‘resurrection’ there plans to be in a series initially about the comeback of this one boy. If it wavers somewhere between fantasy and reality, how much can the audience handle that? Even the most successful vampire-oriented shows have their share of relationship problems most audiences can relate to. If the subject of a show is resurrection, is it going to tell us about how difficult it is to connect with the living when one comes back from the dead? And, furthermore, this being a completely impossible idea, is that something we would want to explore?

Although one-word titles can often be limiting, of all the names of forthcoming series nothing is quite as exclusive as Killer Women. Immediately there is something clichéd about such a name; and when the viewer finds out what it really alludes to, it just becomes laughable. To some it might sound like a documentary about female murderers. Actually, it’s a drama about women in the highest ranking investigative branch of the South: the Texas Rangers. It’s a police procedural with a twist, but its Mexican predecessor, Mujeres Asesinas, was responsible for its ambiguous name. To give it even more of an anti-police procedural slant, the lead detective is a former Texas beauty queen. ‘Why?’ you might ask. Does that make her a ‘cooler’ detective?

In terms of whose list exudes the most charm, NBC scores slightly better. The Blacklist has James Spader as an ex-con prepared to sell out his former co-cons to the FBI, and in particular, a certain female agent played by Megan Boone. The premise of the show certainly outdoes a lot of its competitors; as a fugitive spared prosecution for his effort to collaborate could make for some interesting intrigue, illicit romances, and twisted loyalties. It does have the capacity, however, to become one of those thrillers where the loud film music tells us more about the action than the dialogue. One of the common trends in today’s television series market is having the soundtrack do the talking for you. Why? If a murder takes place on screen, we don’t need the banging of drums drowning out all noise. Or if there’s a love scene, there’s no need for any brass instruments. What we see will translate the message. To have the message transmitted through ridiculously unusual camera angles or a blaring soundtrack is the equivalent of someone coming out onstage mid-Romeo and Juliet, and telling us: “They’re in love; it’s very dramatic, be suspicious of what’s to come.” The viewers get the hint. 

When it comes to obscenely implausible plots, nothing quite wins like NBC’s Crisis. It centres on the ambush of a group of school students including the President’s son, which then plunges the whole nation into the unthinkable: a crisis. All very well for the first episode, but will there be a crisis every week? Or is this going to be a six-year series about America being besieged by some group of kidnappers? It has the potential to make a good B-movie, but not a successful series. If it’s lucky, it won’t be substituted by a mid-season replacement.

That said, Crisis has nothing on CBS’s Hostages. It is about a doctor, recently asked to operate on the President, whose family is taken hostage by a corrupt FBI agent. The agent then demands that she kill the President to save her family. It will be interesting to see how long it takes her to make up her mind, and for how long the show can have the title ‘Hostages’ with her family no longer being ‘Hostages’. Unless of course, it becomes a show about the FBI kidnapping White House-associated people and their families at random, something I’m sure would sit comfortably with the actual Federal Bureau of Investigation. For all the massive hype the series is bound to receive (it stars Toni Collette and is produced by Warner Bros.), the direction which the plot could go in is unwaveringly unpredictable. Of course in most series this is a good thing. But here the very concept which infuses this series seems lost. 

The next of the CBS dramas is Intelligence, about a superlatively clever guy who is the first to have a microchip inserted in his brain which allows him to ‘detect anything’. His ‘intelligence’ means that he must be guarded by a Secret Service agent. There seems to be a desire to replicate Homeland, purely, it must be said, because it won the most Emmys last year. Crisis has a fictitious President; so does Hostages, and here we have another series citing secret service agents. Again it’s something which might be intriguing for viewers with a penchant for high-tech thrillers, watching people breaking into computers and mind-reading, but what are all the rest of us supposed to do?

The rest of CBS’s new shows appear to be sitcoms, and it’s Fox which has possibly the most believable idea for a show: Rake, a drama about a womanising, gambling, father-lawyer played by Greg Kinnear. Based on a successful Australian series, at least it stands a chance of being renewed for a second season. However, that depends entirely on the main part. If all the drama revolves around the lead, then it’s Greg Kinnear who carries the show on his shoulders. Critic Jaimie Etkin has already written of the character: “Kinnear’s Keegan Deane is not charismatic in the least, he’s just a backwards mess.” So one can only hope.

Lastly, and most disappointingly, cable channel HBO does not look like it has a new hit on its hands. Although its schedule is not yet absolutely certain (unlike network television schedules), so far the most talked-about series is Getting On, a US adaptation of the British sitcom about doctors and nurses working in the geriatric wing of a hospital. More promising is the conceit of Criminal Justice, about a man who wakes up in the morning to find his party girl mate stabbed to death, with no recollection of what happened. The only reason that it’s promising, however, is because it has James Gandolfini. Its focus not being sufficient for a multi-year series means that it will only run as a long mini-series. Another hyped-up programme, The Missionary, does have some potential. A period drama, it follows an American missionary in Berlin in the late 1960’s, who somehow becomes involved with the CIA. At least it might salvage the channel’s prestige, and make up for the holes in viewing schedules that ABC and CBS are about to create for the average American.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

The club in which Gabe Day is set seems to have the ambience of Babylove, the clientele of a Monday night at Purple Turtle and a gurning DJ of the sort you might see supporting his cousin at Carbon. Incompetence, personal disagreements and a general atmosphere of Jäger-laced chaos provide the comedic backbone to this highly promising piece of new writing.

Rory Platt, who wrote the play and directs alongside Kate Legh, has done well to give his actors naturalistic dialogue free of the cliché and sloppiness which typifies much student writing, especially comedy. There is a laser-like accuracy in the way he consistently finds exactly the right words each situation demands; a reference to a feckless DJ sniffing “Toilet Duck” and a dismissal of the club as a “wet-arsed indie night” are two examples of this wit and precision.

Less convincing is the narrative arc concerning a televangelist’s prediction of doomsday, which coincides with the less eschatological chaos within the club. The connection feels somewhat arbitrary, despite Platt’s attempts to explain it to me, and it is to be hoped this will not detract from a play which feels more like an episode of a sitcom than anything more laden with ambiguity and portents of doom.

It is Fawlty Towers which springs most immediately to mind. The relationship between club promoters Charlie (played by George Ferguson) and Kate (Sara Ahmed) is in many respects a carbon copy of that between Basil and Sybil. Ferguson does an excellent job of manifesting a deeply unappealing cocktail of Cleese-esque bluster, bombast and prejudice, and this is tempered by the sardonic sniping of the equally convincing Ahmed.  Some of the dialogue, particularly the profanity, does sound unnatural in Ferguson’s pompous tones, but whether deliberate or not this artificiality in fact befits his characterisation as a man utterly out of his depth.

If this is Fawlty in the Club, then the role of bumbling waiter Manuel is taken by the manically gurning DJ Cooper, a role performed with gusto by Michael Roderick. The comedy here derives not from a thick Catalan accent but from the amphetamines Cooper has been shovelling up his flared nostrils by the bucketload. Physically, his impressive performance nears pantomime, as the jerky exuberance of the chemically impaired is matched by moments of glassy-eyed earnestness and different parts of his jaw appear to move entirely autonomously of one another.

Vocally, he does miss the mark a little; his delivery is too forceful and his cadence at times too aggressive for a man in the grip of ecstasy. It is also a shame that Simon (Nick Fanthorpe) is reduced to the role of a sober straight man, as Cooper writhes on his lap sharing intimate philosophical truths and complimenting his eyebrows.

With other cast members Maude Morrison and Priya Manwaring absent due to exams, and scripts still in hand, it seems likely these issues will be ironed out by the time the company makes the daunting trip to a two-week run at the Fringe. The cast is strong enough and the script packed with enough vivacity and bite that Gabe Day can aspire to great things, bringing wit, charm and the spirit of Oxford’s finest clubbing establishments to Edinburgh this summer.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Midway through watching the Merton Floats’ accomplished production of Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance this evening, it occurred to me how surprising it is that the piece is not better known. The play is wittily scripted, its plot satisfyingly intricate and its characters hilarious, yet I had never come across it until a friend mentioned it to me earlier this term. This is all the more surprising when one considers the popularity of the plays of Oscar Wilde and the books of P G Wodehouse, both of which, to a greater and lesser respect respectively, can be viewed as the play’s literary descendants.

The play is immediately familiar territory to anyone who has seen Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, as the play tracks and trivialises the romantic exploits of a small group of eccentric Victorian aristocrats over the course of a short stay at a country house. The plot becomes increasingly complex as characters fall in love left, right and centre, and go on to deceive each another as to their true feelings and identities.  The play culminates in the aftermath of a duel and ends predictably and satisfyingly with the two principle younger characters, Charles Courtly and Grace Harkaway, agreeing to be married.

The production was a little slow to get going. Vyvyan Almond as Sir Harcourt Courtly impressed from the start with his studied floaty and mincing mannerisms, but was, along with the other actors, initially a little mechanical in his delivery. Things improved rapidly, however, and by the end Almond was thoroughly convincing as the flamboyant but aging dandy. Perhaps the best and most consistent performance came from Benedict Morrison as Mr Richard Dazzle, a friend of Charles’ and in large part the orchestrator of the events of the play. Morrison’s channelling of Frankie Howerd camp was a delight to watch, his variety of tone being matched wonderfully by his always animated facial expressions.

The rest of the cast were also uniformly very good. Joshua Wilce was excellent as Charles, impressing with his ability to turn quickly from the jocular irreverence of Charles’ alter-ego, Augustus, to the gormless weirdness of Charles as he misleadingly presents himself to his father, Sir Harcourt. Sophie Eager as Grace Harkaway and Matt Small as Squire Max Harkaway were solid as the play’s sweet but mischievous heroine and her avuncular if slow-witted uncle. Both were occasionally a little quiet, although this was probably because their characters were among the least flamboyant. Carrie Grierson as the lawyer Mark Meddle was satisfyingly both officious and unhinged and Emily Troup was brilliantly bumbling and reminiscent of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz as Lady Gay Spanker’s hapless, henpecked and incongruously female husband.  

Alice Caulfield as Lady Gay herself was as boisterous and obnoxious as could be hoped from her name, her laugh calling to mind P G Wodehouse’s description of someone’s laugh as like ‘a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.’ Last but not least, James Mannion as the butler, Cool, and Linnet Kaymer as the maid, Jenny, acquitted themselves well, Mannion stealing the scene on several occasions with his acerbic, deadpan delivery.

Much credit must also go to the play’s directors, Tim Coleman and Finola Austin, and to its producers and assorted technical staff. The play was very well chosen for its setting, the Merton gardens with their steps and hedges providing a very convincing country house. The costumes were excellent, a highlight being a particularly pungent purple overcoat worn by Sir Harcourt. The production was full of nice little touches which combined to create a very professional atmosphere. Two of my favourite such touches were the use of oddly specific signs (‘afternoon c. 5.42pm’) to indicate the setting or circumstances of some of the scenes, adding to the general feeling of surrealism, as well as using the act of bringing furniture on and off stage to develop the romance of the two servants.

To conclude, the play was largely a delight. Admittedly, it was a little slow to get going, but I suspect this was due to first night nerves. All in all, I don’t see why, with marginal improvements, the play should not be well on the way to five stars in future performances.   

Anyone who has been around this term surely cannot have failed to notice the recent spate of Al-Jazeera events at the Union. The man behind all the big names and TV cameras is none other than Mehdi Hasan, the Political Director of the Huffington Post and the host of Al Jazeera’s new Head to Head series.

The format of the show, for anyone who didn’t manage to make it to any of the recordings, is meant to be highly combative. As Mehdi says, “this is not a BBC HardTalk interview series where I’m a neutral presenter. The whole conceit of this show apart from doing it in the Oxford Union with an audience full of Oxford boffins is the fact that I am opinionated and I come to the interview with a perspective and a strong view. The name of the show does describe what is going on – we are going head to head.”

His guests are no ordinary fare either, including the ex-head of the FSA, Lord Adair Turner and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Mehdi has faced some of the toughest opponents possible, covering topics from the failure of global capitalism to the role of the US in the world. Although as the host, Mehdi found that the best debates were not the ones he expected – “The ones I thought would be the really interesting ones for me personally because of my background and my interests were Dani Dayan, the leader of the settlers in the West Bank who came out from the Occupied West Bank in order to do this programme, and Irshad Manji, the lesbian Muslim so-called “refusenik” who’s been very critical of Islam and Muslims… but actually in the end, I think the best debate and probably the most important debate given what’s going on in the world was the one which kicks the series off this Friday, which is Bernard Henri-Levy.”

Henri-Levy is a French Philosopher of equal fame and infamy, a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy and a passionate proponent of humanitarian intervention. His episode is dedicated to the issue of foreign military intervention, and was one of the more fearsome trials of Mehdi’s resolve. “He’s regarded as one of the cleverest men in the world, so someone like myself, who got a 2:1 degree in PPE going against one of the world’s great public intellectuals could be slightly nervous!”

Not that Hasan is any slouch. Throughout the series he has proved more than able to score points against his opponents, memorably stunning Tom Friedman with the suggestion that Israel should face similar sanctions for its nuclear arms as Iran does. “The point about that is that a lot of commentators like Tom, famous and respected and talented as they are tend to engage in egregious double standards and one of them is, for example, the nuclear debate. At the moment, if a Martian was to arrive from outer space, he might wonder why the “international community have sanctions on a country that doesn’t have nuclear weapons rather than the country in the Middle East that does have nuclear weapons, on the country that does allow in UN inspectors to its nuclear sites as opposed to the country that never allowed in UN inspectors to its nuclear sites.”

And, in the pilot (a one-off Christmas show that spawned the series), Hasan took on one of the so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism, Richard Dawkins, in an interview (as the option to debate was originally turned down by the professor) that resulted in Dawkins attacking Hasan’s Islamic beliefs as naïve, equivalent to belief in fairies.

Hasan seems to have taken this in his stride, in the spirit of public debate – ”I think what it’s indicative of is of a growing strain of slightly intolerant, slightly self-obsessed, quite arrogant New Atheists, who want to ridicule religion and believers and marginalise us in public life and mock us. That’s fine, we live in a free society – do what you want – but some of us are going to push back.” Less acceptable to him, however, is how the interview degenerated into a confrontation.  “He turned down that opportunity, but during the actual programme … he decided to try and turn the tables and start mocking my beliefs and questioning why I believe in miracles, which is certainly fair enough, but is a little bit disingenuous given the fact that he was given the opportunity to debate with me and turned it down.”

Mehdi’s beliefs seem, to some extent to define his writing, but this is, he argues, merely contingent on the political reality of the world in which we live. “When I was at the New Statesman, a very secular leftist publication, people would complain that I always wrote about  religion, God and Islam, and part of me wanted to say “Do you think I want to?”. Muslims don’t want to be in the public eye all the time for all the wrong reasons,  I don’t want to have to write pieces saying that suicide bombings aren’t Islamic, I wish there weren’t any suicide bombings. … I wish I never had to write any of these pieces and I could just write about austerity or the NHS, but, unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in.”

However, he is no doctrinaire apologist for UK Muslims. He has, on many occasions, spoken out about problems within the community, even at the risk of giving ammunition to their enemies, both in the tabloid press and the extreme political fringes. He claims, however, that this is not the same thing as helping these enemies – “I think the fact that I’m a Muslim myself – it’s not that it gives me cover, as some people have accused me of – but that I’m writing from within the community without perhaps the agendas you see on the comment pages of the Express or occasionally the Mail. And that’s what’s missing. When people say you’re just as bad as the other critics – not at all – Goodness Gracious Me was able to put out a series making fun of Asians in a way that a bunch of white comedians wouldn’t have been able to do.”

Hasan has himself come up against the barriers of what it is and, more to the point, isn’t acceptable to write about in the past. His piece on abortion for the New Statesman, setting out his feelings about the emotional complexity of the matter in a pro-life manner seemed to take over the Twittersphere for at least a week, enraging many and pleasing few. “All the pieces I’ve ever written on Israel, anti-Semitism, on Islam, on terrorism, on suicide bombings, on the Iraq war, on Iran – I’ve had some pretty heated reactions to pieces I write. Never have I had a reaction like that.” Mehdi has since expressed regret about the way in which he expressed himself in that piece, but does still feel that the discussion is worth having, if not necessarily through the medium of microblogging. “You simply can’t have that debate, not on Twitter, not even in column length, you need book length. If you’re at university, as I was 14 years ago, you’ll have to write essays about the ethics of abortion … vast sections of moral philosophy are devoted to the subject.” The complexity and passion behind the issue seems to have deterred him from writing any future pieces on the subject.

However, abortion aside, there is no issue which Mehdi seems unwilling to debate, which is what made his events at the Union, and the programmes that resulted, such an interesting, informative and even exciting watch.

Head to Head will be broadcast at 8pm every week from Friday 7^th June on Al Jazeera and will be available online soon afterwards.