Megan Stuart Wallace trailblazing with film

The following is a continuation of the interview with Megan Wallace when she was home over the holidays about her current projects now that she’s graduated from the National Film and Television School in London.

You mentioned you had gotten a business degree, but grew up here doing theatre.

My dad insured that’s what I did. I don’t think I really wanted to that much then. I really wanted to just be an artist and be an actor. I am so grateful. When you’re 17 or 18 you just have no idea what life is going to be like. I didn’t want to study business and marketing, blah. I’m so grateful that I did now, because the path I ended up going down is a melting pot of my creativity and the skills to think about what I do as a business. It has to be sustainable. In hindsight I’m so grateful that my parents were really hard lined about getting a practical degree.

Of all the film schools in the U.S., what drew you to the U.K. for film school?

Instinct, I knew it was time to leave New York for a bit. I had been there for about eight years and I was running a theatre company there that I had been a partner in and helped start. I started to think about film school.

The N.F.T.S. (National Film and Television School) was having an open day and I just happened to be in London visiting friend. The only open day that they had when I was in town was for the Producing Department. I thought, “Well directing theatre is kind of like producing film. At least I’ll get a feel for the place.”

It was this cold miserable March day with hideous English weather. I had on my little pair of stilettos and had to walk twenty minutes up the road from the train station because it’s quite far outside of London. It was pouring rain. I got lost and was late. I finally walked in like this drowned little rat, freezing cold and I’m sitting in the back of the thing listening. It’s so silly, but I swear it was like somebody came and put a warm blanket around my shoulders and went, “You don’t have to look any farther. This is what you’re going to do and this is what it’s meant to be. I know it wasn’t producing that you thought you were going to do. Don’t judge that it’s not the path you thought you were on. Just be with it.”

I came home, did the application, and thought, “If I get in I’ll go, and then if I don’t I’ll look at Columbia and A.F.I. (American Film Institute) out in California for film school producing.” One reason I really decided to go there was in America if you go to do your Masters in film everyone does the same thing and then you specialize within your time there. I applied for a department, to the Producing course, I was going to go for two years and study that job really specifically. That really appealed to me. It’s the only place really in the world that you can study an M.A. in Producing, Directing, or Cinematography. The way the whole school is made up there are six of us in each course in a year.

So it’s very intense, not like a program with 200-300 students.

No, there are about 65 students in each year. It’s very intimate, very small. All the departments make up your heads of departments on a film, like Producer, Director, D.O.P, Editor, and Sound Designer. We all pair up in teams and each of the six teams make up six film crews. That’s how we work. The first year it’s a lot of smaller modules and much more specialized within your own course of study. Then the second year we’re just making our films and it’s really practical and hands on. I came out of film school and went on to my first freelance job doing a promo for Sony PlayStation with industry crew and it was an easy assimilation. They did a great job of preparing us.

It sounds like they put you “in the job.”

With a safety net around you for the things you don’t know yet. They just put you in this bubble and say, “Get on with it.” In the beginning it’s like, “What do you mean? Aren’t you going to teach me how?” Stephen Frears does a lot of tutoring at the school. He did The Queen, Dangerous Liaisons, and quite a number of others films successful in both the U.K. and America. Stephen always says, “You can’t teach someone filmmaking. I can tell you what I know, but there are no hard and fast rules.” Producing is a little bit more analytical and there rules to how you budget and schedule.

Was it expensive to study in the U.K.?

My dad was born in Ireland so I had a European passport. I could afford to go there as an E.U. student which is largely subsidized by the government. It wasn’t very expensive at all. If I’d actually had to pay as an American it would have been almost triple. It’s a smaller community there, so I think the doors that film school opened are allowing me to progress quicker in my career than if I’d done film school and came back here. Even if I tried to work my way up in the business in New York or L.A., it would have taken a lot longer to meet the people I know now in terms of the Film Council, the B.B.C., and companies that make films that travel.

You mentioned that your film school project premiered at Edinburgh?

My graduation film.

Tell me a little about that.

It’s called Outcasts. It is about a group of disabled bandits who kidnap a pop star and 24 hours with them. It’s got a lot of influences of John Waters, it’s a road movie. While we wanted to make a very British road movie, the road movie is a quintessentially American genre, so it has a lot of “Englishized” Americanisms in it. We are developing it into a feature project with interest from the Film Council and some other people. We’d like to make that movie sometime next year.

We worked with real disabled actors which was an amazing experience. We have a really talented guy who has Cerebral Palsy, but I shouldn’t give too much away. It’s a black comedy and I co-wrote it with the director.

So producers don’t just sit back and handle the budget?

Depends, I’m a really hands on kind of creative. When we told our tutors we were going to make a film with disabled people they all went, “Um…okay.” The film school really does try to support the filmmaker in whatever they want to do for their grad film. In our case I think it was a little frightening for them, but a truly amazing experience. Outcasts premiered at Edinburgh this year. Ian Clark and I were both selected as Trailblazers for the film.

I see you were at Austin as well.

It was in San Sebastian, Austin, St. Louis, Dinard, and it’s going to be at the London Short Film Festival in January. It will probably be on the festival circuit for another year, and during that point we’d like to get the feature script on its legs. I really love it.

Not everyone comes out of film school with a film that is in the festival circuit. Would that have been possible in America?

We had massive budgets for our grad films considering all the things we had for free and all the equipment we had access to at the school. We had a nice chunk of money to make the film. We had so many opportunities at the NFTS that I don’t think would have been remotely available to me in this country.

Are you working on a feature film right now?

Yeah, we have a couple of future projects that are moving toward finance. There are two that we’re hoping to make this year.

A medical thriller/horror, but not blood and guts, more Hitchcock, about a group of drug test patients who come into a facility in rural Moorish England on a drug trial for seven days and everything goes a bit mental.

We have another that’s in rewrites at the moment waiting on a significant chunk of money from the Film Council pending the next draft of the script. That is about an actor who gets a job working as an artist-in-residence in a special needs school in one of the disenfranchised communities of South London. It’s actually been written based on the personal experience of three people who are part of our group of “creatives” who have been artists-in-residence at this school. These kids have emotional disorders, autism, and are mixed with kids who have repatriated into the U.K. who have special needs like their English not being up to par. It’s such an interesting mix in the South side of London where there is a lot of drugs, crime, and gang violence. This teacher comes in and spends six months with these kids and that changes everybody’s life. He gets them to be expressive through writing songs about their own experience. The songs are really powerful and moving with the stories these children have to tell at sixteen.

We try to find some sort of hope and redemption in everything that we do. We want to make films that inspire you even if they’ve been difficult. It sends the audience back out with a feeling of hope and the world being a good place to be rather than something that’s dark.

One of the things I like about working in Europe is that the sex doesn’t have to sell. The whole Hollywood mentality oftentimes I find morally reprehensible. There’s ability to make good stuff over there and find the money to do it.

You mentioned the Film Council. Does any organization exist like that in America?

No, there’s no government support for the film industry here. You have tax incentives in terms of certain cities and states to bring business there, but no actual government body that is publicly funded to support making films. We have Hollywood.

Is the Film Council like a granting foundation?

No, not really. They’re an organization primarily funded by the lottery. The Film Council has three divisions. They have a Development Department. They have what’s called the New Cinema Fund, which is there to promote young first time filmmakers in the feature realm. Then the big fund is the Premiere Fund and that funds U.K. films across the board, so very well known filmmakers. The Film Council rarely funds an entire film. The New Cinema Fund will be involved with budgets up to a million. The Premier Fund budgets go up from there. They never fund a whole project, but in partnership. They come on board as a financier and they’re investing in your film. They want to invest in films that they think will go into profit some day. It’s not grant money just given to you.

How does that differ from America?

The Hollywood system, they have everything in house. When they decide to make a film they own a chain of cinemas, have a distribution department, so all the fees are staying contained within the house of Paramount or whoever.

We don’t have a studio system in Europe, so it’s more independent film across the board. Every film is financed by a combination of tax incentives, the government, private finance, maybe some bank finance, and everyone recoups their money alongside of each other as money starts coming back in. You have to pay for sales agents, distribution, and cinema costs.

Organizations like the Film Council make it happen in the U.K. You can make a film without them, but they’re a really nice resource. For them it’s about promoting British cinema and British talent around the world.

I’ve got a lot of things with the Film Council at the moment. There could be a change and the rug could be totally pulled out from under because a new person has different taste in film. It just happens that the people that are there right now we have a real synergy with and I don’t know how long that will last.

Work with it while you can.

The project in Malaysia reminds us that we do both of those things and one doesn’t trump the other. I’ll probably be out in Kuala Lumpur now for two to three months while this project is filming.

Is there any experience you had with Tryon Little Theatre you’d like to remind people about?

All of it really, growing up in a place that was so pro-arts. We have great audiences. The love that these wonderful audiences created for me as a child made me love the performance that has now translated into creation and making movies. Giving people entertainment because they enjoyed it so much, it wasn’t that ego thing of “I am a star, everyone’s watching me.” I remember it more as, “I’m giving these people joy. What I’m doing up here makes me really happy, and they’re laughing or crying and I’m giving it to them.” That felt very purposeful for me, even as a young person that felt like an important job.

It isn’t glamorous, it’s a job and I go to an office every day and I work just like everyone. Giving entertainment back to people is something I feel passionate about and this is the place that made that really ingrained in me. I don’t think the next ten years are going to be easy and all the more important to have a place to travel. The cinema can do that for people. There’s real value in doing that for a job. That’s something a lot of “creatives” fight with their whole life.

Finding the place where you balance what your talents are with an audience that wants to receive and enjoy that.

Being able to know and believe that it is as important as medicine. This is a job, you have to apply yourself, and continue to learn and grow. The seriousness of art as a profession is something I took away from this community. The Tryon and Landrum community is such a melting pot of people who’ve come here at a point in life after they’ve lived in a big city and done a really high powered job. I got to work with really talented and successful people who made a career and a profession out of being an artist. They made me feel that was something you could aspire to and do. I’ll always cherish my childhood and upbringing here in that environment. I don’t think I’d be doing what I’m doing now if it hadn’t been for that. For such a small community there’s so much here and people give their time. The Youth Theatre makes this very professional community accessible to young people and that’s a very unusual thing.

I had a chance to view the short film Outcasts with some friends and all of us gave it a “two thumbs up.” I have a feeling there is plenty more to come from artists like Megan Wallace who have been nurtured by such a talented and professional community.