Best Girl Grip

Episode 70: Joanne Michael, Director of Marketing at Cornerstone

This week my guest is Joanne Michael, the Director of Marketing and Distribution at Cornerstone, an international sales and financing company that launched in 2015. 

Some of their recent titles include Herself directed Phyllida Lloyd and produced by Element Pictures, Josephine Decker’s enthralling psycho-drama Shirley starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg, the screen adaptation of Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals as well as an upcoming project called The Fantastic Flitcrofts starring Mark Rylance and directed by Craig Roberts.

Jo came to Cornerstone having spent five years at HanWay Films where she managed the international launches and releases of award-winning films including Todd Haynes’ Carol and John Crowley’s Brooklyn. 

We talk about the intricacies of marketing for a sales company as opposed to a distributor, the creative point of view it requires, what happens when a film goes to a market and the best piece of advice that Jo has ever received.

As someone who had a brief stint working in sales it was a joy to revisit that element of the film industry and also during a year where things have felt decidedly quieter on the cinematic front, to be reminded of the madness and magic of a market. So I’m very grateful to Jo for joining me.

Episode 69: Jayisha Patel, VR Filmmaker

This week my guest is Jayisha Patel, an award-winning British filmmaker who works at the intersection of cinematic film and VR. 

Her short film, A Paradise, premiered at the Berlinale in 2014 and was nominated for over 37 international awards. 

In 2017 she directed Notes to My Father, an award winning VR experience commissioned by Oculus. The film launched at Oculus House during the Sundance Film Festival, before premiering at SXSW and Locarno. It won the UN Women’s Global Voices award for best 360/VR film and it was shown to policy advisers fighting gender violence at the World Economic Forum’s India Summit.

In May Jayisha finished a three-year spell as an artist in residence at London’s Somerset House, where she started to develop her next VR project After The Fire and in September she was named a ScreenDaily Star of Tomorrow.

I was thrilled to welcome Jayisha to the podcast, not least because VR is completely unchartered territory for Best Girl Grip. We talk about her incredibly fascinating journey into the film industry, how she utilises VR to tell personal, poignant and painful stories, how she stays creatively centred and what her experience has been like operating within both the tech and film industries. 

In other news I feel like we breathed a collective sigh of relief at the weekend with the eventual update that Joe Biden has been elected as the next President of the United States. For some context this interview was recorded just before that on Friday and I felt quite tense and tired and then I had this wonderful experience of talking with Jayisha. And even before the news broke, it made me hopeful and curious and connected. So thank you to Jayisha for her time and wisdom. I hope as ever you get as much from it as I do.

Episode 68: Gabrielle Stewart, Managing Director of HanWay Films

I’m excited for this episode because international sales isn’t a realm of the industry we’ve covered massively on the podcast and to my mind it’s obviously a hugely important chunk of the film’s journey, but one that sort of gets maybe less attention, particularly once a film is out in cinemas, we more often than note associate the film with its distributor or producer but sales agents are the bridge between those two entities and who better to give us insight into that world than Gabrielle Stewart whose is Managing Director at London-based sales agent HanWay films.

HanWay are an incredibly prestigious who have sold some astounding films in the past decade, some of my personal favourites include Brooklyn, Carol, High-Rise, Tale of Tales, 20,000 Days on Earth, The Guest, Tracks, Only Lovers Left Alive and Colette. 

Gabrielle joined HanWay Films in 2016 and their current slate includes Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio, Viggo Mortensen’s debut Falling, Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, and Made in Italy starring Liam Neeson.

Gabrielle came from serving as SVP of International Sales and Distribution in Los Angeles for Bloom Media since its 2013 inception and they sold films such as The Nice Guys and Suburbicon. The company has since been acquired by Endeavor Content. She joined Bloom from Exclusive Media where she worked on films such as Rush and Jane Got a Gun. Prior to Exclusive Media, she spent eight years in London at Focus Features International where she served as Vice President of International Sales, selling films by international directors including Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, the Wachowskis, Fernando Meirelles, Gus Van Sant, Alejandro Iñárritu, the Coen Brothers and Joe Wright.

So suffice to say, Gabrielle has a wealth of experience and insight and I feel very privileged to have gotten to talk to her for the podcast. We cover how the landscape of international sales has changed during Covid, the difference working in LA and working in London, how Gabrielle has learnt to manage a team and what it was like being the first ever woman that served as MD at HanWay. There are lots of good nuggets of advice within, so thank you to Gabrielle for sharing them and I hope you enjoy listening.

Episode 67: Malinda Kaur, 2nd Assistant Director

This week’s guest is Malinda Kaur, a second assistant director whose recent credits include Clio Barnard’s upcoming film Ali & Ava, HBO & Sky Atlantic’s TV series The Third Day, British independent dramas Rocks and Monsoon and a little show calling Killing Eve. 

Malinda started out as a floor runner working on Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, before becoming a third assistant director. We discuss in-depth that particular hierarchy and how her responsibilities change depending on both the role, and the project. 

Malinda is also a writer-director in her own right, having made two short films, Amishi in 2016, which was shot by Robbie Ryan and Blind in 2019 which was shot by former podcast guest Rachel Clark. Malinda was selected as a mentee on the 2019 Women in Film & TV mentoring programme for writing & directing and she is currently preparing to shoot her third short. 

It was really heartening to hear how Malinda has balanced her creative ambitions with the need to get full-time work, and how the practical elements of her roles on set have gone on to inform her own filmmaking process.

Episode 66: Dionne Farrell, Development Executive

I am very thrilled to be able to introduce Dionne Farrell as this week’s podcast guest. 

Dionne is a Development Executive at BBC Films where she has worked across several of their releases, including Rapman’s Blue Story and Francis Lee’s Ammonite which is closing this year’s London Film Festival. Dionne began her career as an office runner for Raw before moving into script development as the BFI’s Script Editor Trainee. We talk about those experiences, as well as gaining confidence, learning when to speak up but also finding value in silence, slowness and the idea of not feeling guilty when we’re not being maximally productive, how she assesses projects and trusting her gut instinct when it comes to championing them. 

I’m really grateful to Dionne for her openness and I hope as ever you enjoy the insight into this part of the film industry.

Episode 65: Sophie O'Neill, Costume Designer

This week my guest is Sophie O’Neill, a costume designer whose credits include Clio Barnard’s upcoming film Ali & Ava, costume supervising on British indie films like Jawbone, Iona and The Selfish Giant and costume buying for the likes of Everest and the TV series The Last Panthers. Don’t worry, if you’re wondering what all those different roles mean, we break it down.

We also talk about how she finds inspiration, where she looks for costumes and what happens to them after a production wraps, how getting an agent has changed her career and what her favourite part of the job is. 

This episode was recorded pre-lockown, if you’re wondering why we sound particularly cheery and there’s no mention of the Rona. 

Episode 64: Anu Henriques, Associate Director of Rocks and Founder of Skin Deep

Hello podpals and welcome to Season 3 of Best Girl Grip, I’m very excited to be back with another round of guests who will help guide us through the many different roles in the film industry.

It feels very special to be launching a new series with this week’s guest, because it has been a long-time coming and it was an interview that was delayed due to Covid, and that guest is Anu Henriques.

Anu is a development and production assistant at Fable Pictures, whose films include Stan & Ollie and Wild Rose. Their latest production is Rocks, a vibrant and vital film about a teenage girl living in London who is trying to protect her younger brother from the authorities after her Mum disappears. Anu has a credit as an Associate Director on that film, having worked closely with director Sarah Gavron through development, production and post production. 

Alongside her work at Fable, she is also the founder and co-editor-in-chief of Skin Deep, a creative platform that is redefining culture and amplifying voices of colour through discussions of race, politics and activism through print, film and live events.

Anu and I talk who gets to be storytellers, how she formed Skin Deep to probe that question, the organic and collaborative process out of which Rocks was born and the tools she’ll be taking to all her projects having had that experience.

It was a joyous chat, and having seen Rocks and also having followed the press campaign for it quite closely, everyone involved just radiates such pride and enthusiasm for that film. It’s really infectious and the same can be said of the film itself. I would urge you to get out to a cinema and see it while you can.

In the meantime, here’s episode 64 of Best Girl Grip. 

Episode 063: Brett Story, Non-Fiction Filmmaker

I’ve interrupted my own break to deliver a bonus episode of sorts. It was recorded last week, and I didn’t want to hold onto it for a new season, it was a really mind-expanding conversation if that’s not too self-important to say and I wanted to share it ASAP. 

It’s with award-winning non-fiction filmmaker and geographer Brett Story whose is based in Toronto. I became aware of work maybe last year when I saw The Hottest August at CPH:DOX, a documentary festival in Copenhagen and I was really wowed by it and then I saw Brett speak at Sheffield Doc/Fest and again found her to be a very interesting and illuminating figure in the non fiction scene. And yeah with zoom and these lockdown podcasts, I figured why not reach out and see if she would talk to me about her career. 

Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapeswas awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Her follow-up film The Hottest August was released in 2019 and has screened world-wide and considered to be one of the best films of the year, according to places like Variety, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Sight & Sound and IndieWire. 

Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Infrastructures of Citizenship. Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.

Her interests across the fields of documentary and critical theory are expansive, and include experimental cinema and essay films, politics and aesthetics, racial capitalism and Marxist political economy, and visual geography. We touch on some if not all of those ideas. 

We talk about how academia facilitated her filmmaking interests, how she formulates ideas and then tethers that to form, what production looks like and how she funds her films. It’s a far-reaching and provoking conversation, which is exactly what Brett’s films feel like to me, so it was a joy to connect the dots in that sense and I hope you get something out of it too!

I’ll be back later in the year with Season 3. For now this is episode 63 of the Best Girl Grip podcast. 

Episode 062: Georgia Oakley, Filmmaker (Live at Watersprite Film Festival)

I’m rather excited and a little bit trepidatious to release this episode because it was recorded live at the Watersprite Film Festival in Cambridge back in March and so it feels rather antiquated. There were people there! Georgia and I sat face to face! We mention SXSW being cancelled which Georgia was due to attend with a pilot she directed called Bored. So listening back to this was odd, it felt a bit like a time capsule. But the conversation is still great and Georgia is wonderful, so I am of course very happy to have spoken with her and to do so for Watersprite.

Georgia is a writer and director with a raft of award-winning short films under her belt, including Little Bird which is being adapted into an 8-part drama with Riverstone Pictures. Her first feature 'Blue Jean', was developed through the iFeatures, I think in 2018 and is now backed by BBC Films.

Other upcoming projects include ‘The Isles’, a feature film in development with Creative Scotland and ‘The State of Us’, a six part series in development with Origin Pictures.

I particularly loved this conversation because it feels rare to me that you hear a director speak prior to their first feature being made or released, obviously all the PR is done after the fact, and so it felt special to me to get a bit more of an insight into what that interim bit entails. And truth be told it’s not really an interim, it’s Georgia’s career and one of the things she happens to be working on next is a feature film. And Georgia mentions this later one, about not ever getting complacent or thinking that one film is going to elevate you to permanence in the film industry, it’s all about persistence, so I guess my point is that I liked the idea of divorcing that first feature from the sense of having made it. 

We also chat about staying motivated during development, balancing lots of different ideas, how she stays creatively energised, being mentored by Desiree Akhavan and the invaluable advice she gave and the collective she’s part of called Cinesisters.

Episode 061: Louise Ford, Editor

My guest this week is Louise Ford, a film editor who has worked on some of the most original and startling and accomplished features of recent times. I don’t think that’s overstating it. They include Robert Eggers’ The Witch and The Lighthouse, Cory Finley’s Thoroughbreds and his recent release starring Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney Bad Education, as well as Paul Dano’s directorial debut Wildlife starring Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. 

We talk about a myriad of topics, from Louise’s pivot from journalism to film editing, how in a roundabout she was inspired by 70s Hollywood editor Dede Allen, her approach to editing and what that process actually looks like. We go deep into The Lighthouse talking about performance, and the layering of sounds to achieve such a deeply unsettling finale. What else? Mentorship, confidence, instinct, films... 

I really adored this conversation. I sort of had some knowledge about what editors are responsible for and capable of, but talking with Louise tipped me off just how important an editor is and I just came away with a much better sense of how they do the brilliant and often magical work that they do.