to my website. I am a professional director/filmmaker with many years experience. Take a look at my Showreel and CV to see my work.
I'm often asked how I got to be a film director, so here is a little background...
I come out of the indie DIY short film scene of the late
1990s. I wrote, produced and directed a trilogy of 35mm short films entitled The
London Love Trilogy which comprised three genre films: French New Wave, Musical, Comedy
Horror. All three films were about romances across divides - class, cultural and supernatural. The second film Sari & Trainers, a British Asian Bollywood musical,
got me my first agency representation, and when a producer saw it he asked me if
I’d be interested in turning it into a feature film. A few months later we
were filming Bollywood Queen starring a young, relatively unknown actor
called James McAvoy.
Ten years of directing television followed, including
directing the first series of ground-breaking programmes Peep Show and Derren
Brown (both BAFTA winning). 2012 saw a return to feature films, directing an Irvine Welsh written comedy The Magnificent Eleven. The ambitious werewolf
western Blood Moon followed in 2015, set in Colorado in 1887 but filmed in Kent
(the US audience were convinced and bought into it as home-grown product!).
Most recently, in 2018, I co-wrote, produced and directed rock
and roll road movie Burning Men. The idea for the script actually goes back ten
years or so. I was out walking, with co-writer Neil Spencer, on Hampstead Heath,
and we were talking about potentially writing another feature film script (we had written
all the short films together and Bollywood Queen). I love all types of movie
genres, but making a road movie had always appealed to me, given that so few are
made in the UK. I can't resist a challenge. We talked about all the road movies we admired – Badlands, Easy Rider, Kings of the Road, Near Dark and we got excited about
the possibilities, and it just snowballed from there. Burning Men was released in the UK in March 2019.
I continue to write and develop film and TV ideas into 2022.
