The poorly informed decision to become a filmmaker is not one that occurred overnight; it was a hard thought out, carefully formulated plan conducted over possibly three nights.

I’d always loved films and when you live in a small town and don’t have any friends who want to vandalize the gardens of pensioners with you, you’re left with not much else to do.

Every filmmaker I know was inspired by the films they’ve seen (usually Jaws) and I am no exception to this rule. I loved films for a long time before I realized I could translate that love into a very real pipe dream. I’ve always taken inspiration from many films, but there are five films that really turned on that switch in me that said “Hey Alex, why don’t you have a go at that”.

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10 Things I Hate About You

I don’t know if this one counts, but I remember watching the outtakes during the credits and thinking it looked like an awful lot of fun to work on a movie set and that you could be very liberal when adapting Shakespeare. Although this remains as my favourite teen comedy.

Rear Window

Rear Window will always be my definitive Hitchcock!

I first came across this piece arriving home from school, I’d have been about 15 and most likely have already planned to dedicate the evening to video games and ignoring homework. However there my father was, sitting on the living room floor, eyes glued to the screen, no snacks prepared for his young sons and soon there I was sat on the floor next to him, focused solely on the murder mystery.

Rear Window would play on that channel with relative frequency over the next few years and I adamantly refused to miss a showing.

We don’t see a murder, there are no action sequences, no expensive sets. Just James Stewart in his apartment, watching his neighbours, As someone who grew up on blockbuster films I was amazed that something that took place in just a few rooms could be so effective.

After watching it many more times it eventually dawned on me that to make a film like this isn’t reliant on a large studio backing, but could be achieved by good writing and a small amount of skill…granted I had neither.

The Breakfast Club

I very vividly remember watching this film for the first time and falling very deeply in love with it. I’d spent my teens watching a lot of war films, superhero films and fantasy films and had completely bypassed the genre that was specifically written for me.

I’d never really taken writing a screenplay seriously because “Where on earth would I start?”. The Breakfast Club changed that for me, it’s a simple film about teenagers, they do a lot of talking and arguing and throughout the day we get to know them, their hopes, dreams and the chips on their respective shoulders. It was a simple reminder that I didn’t have to write Citizen Kane, I could write about what was meaningful to me.

Granted this film has not aged well for me, now in my twenties I’ve come to realize that high school politics literally don’t matter and that John Bender is kind of a prick, so in a way its a good thing I procrastinated writing scripts for a couple of years.

500 Days of Summer

Now feel free to call me a heathen, but 500 days of summer was my gateway to experimental cinema….I understand why that may not seem like an apt description of the film.

Granted Andy Warhol did not play a part in the production and maybe it was pretentious of sixteen year old Alexander calling himself a connoisseur of experimental cinema when all he had watched was a non chronological comedy.

Nonetheless 500 Days of Summer conveyed its story in so many different ways that I had not yet seen in its genre, the “Expectation v Reality” sequence, the Halls and Oats Dance Number, Its title cards and interview moments, the use of its aforementioned 500 days. It taught me a lesson that I would apply to nearly everything I went on to write; Story telling doesn’t have to follow the most common pattern.

Rewatches would also serve to teach me a valuable lesson about the tropes other romance films fall into, although I can’t say my work is romantic so in that respect it hasn’t been relevant at all.

Clerks

It should really be no surprise to anyone that Kevin Smith would make an appearance on an Amateur filmmaker’s inspiration list. He has always been the MVP that maxed out his credit cards and pissed off his employer to make a film out of sheer love of the art.

Clerks was shot on a shoestring budget of less than $30,000. Filmed at the convenience store where Smith worked and created with a cast of friends, colleagues and local thespians. The Crew of underdogs would together create a film that spoke to a generation and more importantly to me.

This film came to me at a rather apathetic time in my life, I had dropped out of sixth form, I couldn’t figure out what I was going to do with my life and I couldn’t bring myself to care. I was working night shifts at McDonald’s and finding happiness in talking about films and pop culture with my colleagues. Watching a film about Dante was like watching a film about my own life.

Clerks did play a role in persuading me that it was possible to give filmmaking a go even with limited resources but its more important lesson was again on the topic of what I could write. It was a reminder that cinema can be whatever I wanted it to be and that the best work would come from simply speaking my truths.

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Well that’s my list. I dare say it won’t age well because I watch a lot of films and I steal ideas from them all the time. Quentin Tarantino said “I didn’t go to film school, I went to films”. Nobody can be a good filmmaker without seeing how those before them have done it, I’m constantly finding new inspirations and I owe an awful lot to those who have gone before.

Alexander.