SAXON: How to make a movie without a studio... Mike chats with Greg Loftin

I don't know about the rest of you lovely OWF readers but I want to make my own films. But it's often a nightmare process when you haven't got an 'in' anywhere and you're left with a budget of zero. With empty pockets and options running low you have to rely on that magical technique that has more mythology than the Shaolin monks: guerilla filmmaking. Coming up for release in the UK is a film that honed its underground instincts for years before leaping into the distribution market and it's called SAXON. A strange drama that unfolds on a UK council estate, SAXON is part Lynch and part UNFORGIVEN but all guerilla. I've caught up with writer/director/producer Greg Loftin to find out how the whole process happened....

So how long was the idea for Saxon gestating before shooting began?

The script had a very long timeline, I was working on it for six years before we started the shoot.

That is a long time.

It is, and that's because it wasn't a full time thing for me. But it was also my first script and I didn't know how to write a script. I thought it's just be a fairly straightforward thing where I took the idea for a walk, but I ended up in a lot of cul-de-sacs! It took me a long time to realise just how much of a craft it is, and I started to read the books and go along to scriptwriting courses.

Did you find those useful? I've always been a bit dubious...

I did, very much so. Euroscript ws particularly useful for me, they run intense one to three day workshops that cover all of the things that you know, deep inside, that it's important to get a handle on in order to make a really good story. Especially the character-based, three act structure stories.

So the script was six years in the making, can you even remember what inspired it?

I can. But writing a script over that period time does mean it changes shape! But it's really an accumulation of experiences I've had when, for various reasons, I've kicked around a few housing estates. And talking to residents of failing estates I was blown away by the appalling and abject conditions some of the residents were living in. There were buildings with signs saying 'beware of falling concrete' and lifts that didn't work, and all of this created anger at the landlord who becomes a malign force in their life. So the council as villain was the genesis of Saxon.

The estate itself was pretty desolate, was it one that was earmarked for tearing down?

Yeah, actually. It's a place called Ramshaw Estate and it doesn't exist any more - we shot just before the bulldozers pitched it. It was ideal for us really because it was a kind of ghost town with just a few residents left, and we actually included some of them in the film. But the estate itself was almost a character in the film, an insular world that has these really wide concourses and slab bunker buildings with a grim underground parking lot that gave a great sense of this vandalised, nasty place. We had pretty much the run of the place and, because it was the council's last gasp to use the place, we didn't have to pay too much of a fee. The basically gave us this huge bunch of keys and said 'Welcome to Saxon!'

Sounds great.

Yeah, and because the estate was in Croydon, which isn't so easy to get to, a lot of the crew just ended up camping in these empty flats for the duration of the shoot and we had barbecues and things in the evening. It was a wonderful experience.

You're from a post-production background though, and I've always heard that they make the best filmmakers because they can script and shoot for the edit. Did that make it any easier for you?

To a certain degree, yes that's true. What we say of editors is that they are first and foremost storytellers, but of course they don't write the original story. What they have is a keen grasp of structure and possibilities. I think it was Bresson who said that a film is born three times: once as a script, once in production, and once in post-production. And each of those is a fresh mode of storytelling. In postproduction, other possibilities become apparent: the ordering seems moveable and you start viewing the footage with economy.

So did you feel you lost any of that objectivity by editing Saxon yourself?

I would never recommend anyone write, direct, and edit a project because it can become a closed system. You become blind to possibilities. I mean I was involved in all areas just because we didn't have enough money. So because of the worry about it being a man talking to himself, we made certain we had a really thorough screening programme for people to review it. We must have organised nine screenings before we locked off!

How did you go about fundraising for Saxon?

I'm probably not the best to tell this story! But the backroom heroes were producer Elise Valmorbida and production manager Sam Parsons. But the first thing was that we got a second mortgage, and we joined the NPA and their producers' course taught Elise a lot about the guerilla filmmaking process. One key instrument was setting up a limited company and using a government backed scheme called EIS, a way of backing small risky ventures. We also raised money from friends, family and wellwishers, as well as from a website we set up, although the website wasn't that good. But really the major thing was making the film an exciting thing to be a part of, making people feel they're part of a great project which they can be in, come to festivals with and so on. And Saxon has been a really great journey! And Sam Parsons' role was largely blagging a lot of stuff for us, and she was a perfect give to the production.

And obviously finding a distributor after all this must've been hard. How did you go about that?

It's really a case of knocking on enough doors, but it's also important to know which doors to knock on. There are quite a few small, boutique, arthouse companies that are well worth while contacting. And once you get a distributor on board early it makes festivals so much easier to get into, it makes the whole thing look more significant. But another bonus for us is that the screenplay has been published. It's not just a screenplay though it's also a kind of guide to guerilla filmmaking. It's essentially all the newsletters that we produced during the process, these were sent out to shareholders, friends and others who had invested. It adds up to a compelling story, these kinds of low-budget feature that call in every favour to succeed are really monumental efforts. And this charts the peaks and troughs of that. SAXON is available on DVD in the UK on 12th January.