Filmmaker Simon Horrocks On Smartphone Filming, Raising Money & Netflix

“Everyone is used to seeing people filming with their phones… It’s now just part of life so people hardly react. They might just see you out of the corner of their eye if you’re filming and not even bother to turn round”

Simon Horrocks is a screenwriter, producer and director from London. After making his feature film Third Contact and the web series Kosmos, he is now creating a series of short sci-fi films called Silent Eye, all of which he’s shooting on smartphones.

The first three in the series, You Have Been Chosen (about a woman who finds an app that helps her with decision-making, but soon starts taking over her life), ReGen, and The Unlocking Thought, are now available on Amazon UK and Amazon.com (Check out my review of You Have Been Chosen and my interview with its star Zoe Cunningham)

I spoke to Simon about smartphone filmmaking, crowdfunding and the future of movie-watching.

You wrote and directed You Could Have Been Chosen, what gave you the idea for it?

Quite a few years ago after I finished my crowdfunding for Third Contact, which was my first feature, I had this idea for a feature film – that a mentor character would kind of take control of someone’s life.

The original idea was that a social experiment had gone wrong in the past and they were now making a documentary about it after someone had found some footage. So I wrote a couple of drafts but it didn’t quite work, and I ended up doing other things.

I was trying to think of some short Black Mirror-style stories to make and I thought, well this one could work if I just switched it about a little bit and made the mentor into an app instead of a person, and then changed the story into a little short twisty thing. I just took a couple of days writing it and we were filming within a month.
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Is it a short that you want to make into a feature, or do you feel it’s self-contained?

It’s self-contained. I mean it does obviously leave threads, I think if you write something with lots of layers to it then they always leaves threads, a feeling that there might be more to this. But as far as I’m concerned it’s self-contained and we’re just going to make more of these little sci-fi ideas.

You started the MoMo Film Festival in Zurich, for films made on smartphones. That’s been going for quite a while hasn’t it?

I met Andrea Holle [MoMo co-founder] through my feature, which I shot on a low budget without a crew really, and she had this idea that we do a smartphone film festival. She helped me get my film shown in Zurich. This was back in 2013/14 and we were using crowdfunding to get in cinemas.

Lots of people offered to help and were “yeah, put it on in my town!” but she was the only one who could do the social media strategy, getting people to pledge for a seat at the cinema so that if we reached a certain level of seats bought then we’d go ahead.

So we got together and we talked about the festival, and we used exactly the same methods to make it happen.

This is our fourth year and I thought I should really make a smartphone film because I’m promoting this idea. I haven’t actually made a film for three years so I’m preaching this to myself: “Come on! Let’s move the blocks and just make a film”.
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Is MoMo tapping into this growing type of filmmaking that was already getting quite established, or is it driving it itself?

It’s doing a bit of both actually. Recently we’ve started doing meet-ups in Zurich which are going really well, and also in London. And people are getting inspired to make films, they’re coming to the meet-ups, we’re giving them a sort of kick to go “actually yeah I am going to do this”.

They see this happening and feel they’re part of community that’s doing this, and so I think that encourages people to get over some fears and just start making a film.

But also there’s quite a growing smartphone filmmaking thing happening, you’ve got some big name directors doing it.
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And is is it best on an iPhone? An iPhone is what non-filmmakers probably think of with smartphone filmmaking.

I’ve never owned an iPhone so I can’t tell you! We used to be sponsored by Samsung so we had to use their phones. I think there are advantages to iPhones, the Filmic Pro app which a lot of people use was designed for iPhones but it is improving on other phones as well.

Just use whatever you have. A lot of medium range phones now have 4k cameras. And even an iPhone isn’t going to match the picture quality of an Arri Alexa [a motion picture camera system].
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For a lot of people who aren’t in film, when they hear about a film made on a phone they think you get out your smartphone and you start filming.

It depends what you want artistically. We showed a film at the festival in a double bill with my film – it’s a feature film called High Fantasy and was just the actors and the director. There was no crew. The actors were filming themselves as if they were doing a sort of travelogue. The story was structured around them filming each other and acting to each other, so in that sense they weren’t trying to pretend that the smartphone camera was anything other than a smartphone camera.

So I would say that’s the purest form of smartphone filmmaking, and using the auto light meters to do their thing, though you can also try to make it more polished.

Tangerine is the famous one made by Sean Baker. He had a DOP and they put a lens adaptor on [the smartphone], they used Filmic Pro, they used stabilisers and stuff to give it some kind of a filmic effect.
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Do you want to make a feature film on a smartphone?

Yes I’d be happy to, I mean the important thing is to make films. I’m talking to Zoe [Cunningham] at the moment about another script that I wrote in 2012, which I originally intended was going to be a Steadicam film following the characters around this mansion house.

Now you can get these gimbals really cheaply and just stick your phone into it, almost like a Steadicam effect, so I’m thinking right now this could work if we could find a big house. We could probably shoot this as a feature film. I’m happy to use whatever gets a film made.
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Does it speed up the process?

Yeah I think so. You can be much more guerrilla with your filming, you can just film in a train or a cafe.

I met Zoe at the cafe in her office building and she was saying you did some filming for You Have Been Chosen at the weekend there without telling anyone.

Everyone is used to seeing people filming with their phones, we’re used to people taking pictures of each other and filming each other. It’s now just part of life so people hardly react. They might just see you out of the corner of their eye if you’re filming and not even bother to turn round, you know?

You have more issues with people in the background and getting their permission to be in your film; you can run around quickly afterwards asking them, it depends what you think you’re going to be doing with your film afterwards. If you think it’s going to be broadcast you probably need to get permission – if it isn’t, then maybe you can get away with it.
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So You Have Been Chosen, what stage is that at now?

You Have Been Chosen and the second and third episodes, ReGen and The Unlocking Thought, are available now on Amazon UK and Amazon.com and in Germany. They’re part of a series, a sci-fi anthology called Silent Eye.

They’re all written by me. I may get other directors but at the moment they’re all my stories. I have dozens of stories that I’ve had sitting on a shelf waiting to be feature films for the last 20 years.

This time I’m going to go for more hardcore smartphone filmmaking where it’s just going to be the actors in the scene and I’m just going to run round instinctively filming things. It’s going to be much more fluid.
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Indie filmmaking means different things to different people, and when I speak to directors sometimes they like it and others times they find it a bit constricting. Is that the place you want to be? Is it freer for you?

Someone once said to me, how did you deal with all the compromises you had to make when you’re making a film for… well, my feature film was made for £4,000.

But the answer is that there’s always compromises however you make films, nobody gives you two million pounds to make a film and doesn’t want some compromises. So at the moment I’m trying to produce a romantic comedy within the industry and that’s such a complicated process.

I had to change the script to fit European co-production models so France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland are all involved in this script, in the actual story. Because to get that funding you need to have maybe a French actor, or shoot in an Italian villa with a German crew or whatever.

That’s like a crazy kind of compromise and a puzzle that’s actually got nothing to do with the story and more to do with money.
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I saw The Happy Prince this summer, the Rupert Everett film, and the credits are basically just like that – endless production companies and funding sources from different parts of Europe. 

I mean if you’re in the industry it’s very little to do with creativity. Orson Welles said it’s 98% hustle and 2% filmmaking and that’s basically what it is.

It takes years to make a film. Even the big name directors can take 10 years to get their projects, something that they really passionate about, to raise the money.

If you’re happy to have your film go straight to Netflix that’s a new opportunity as well, but that’s a compromise too; the compromise there is you’re going to spend five years making a film and it’s going to go on Netflix and never see a theatre.
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Are shorts becoming more popular? Quite often they seem to be calling cards for features director want to make.

It’s going to streaming; so there’s the 90-minute or two-hour film designed for a cinema experience, it’s designed to get people to pay $5 or $10 or $20 and have $10 worth of coke and popcorn and feel that is value for money. And it’s just long enough so the cinemas can then repeat that process a couple of times a night. But that process is becoming more and more redundant.

Like with musicians, the album is becoming redundant as people just listen to a song they like and they add it to their Spotify playlist. The most important thing is to have your four minute song on a Spotify playlist.

The same thing is going to happen with streaming. The most important thing is that people click Next and they watch one thing, then they click Next and watch your next thing. So it doesn’t matter how long it is, that’s irrelevant now.
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How can you make money from filmmaking and streaming now?

Good question! You have to be relentless producing content because with the Internet even just showing up every day will get you certain number of people. And you have to have a brand, you have to build your own brand. Specifically, your brand has to be somehow different to everybody else’s. And that’s where the money comes from. You’re drilling for oil and nothing’s happening and suddenly there’s an oil burst.

You are your own editor, you are your own producer, and that gives you great freedom to express what you want. If you find what you do connects to what people want, and you can do that every day, that’s how the Internet works.
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How much have you gone down the Kickstarter route? 

I’ve done loads, I’ve lost count. I have a strategy, we were probably successful for a while; using Indiegogo for getting cinemas to show my feature film around the UK and some other countries.

I was running six campaigns simultaneously at one point. It was literally hands-on, nothing romantic about it at all, setting up a Twitter account for Newcastle, finding people that live in Newcastle but like films, following them, talking to them, saying “hey we’re doing this, can you buy a seat?” you know.

I did one campaign last year for a smartphone feature film and I set it a £30,000 target. We’d got £30,000 for Kosmos which Zoe was in so I thought that’s a good benchmark, we could probably get that. And we didn’t for various reasons, my social media presence had deflated a bit as I’d just got really tired of talking to thousands of people online.

So when I did Third Contact, well this is a weird black and white confusing arthouse film so I followed people that followed the BFI, I followed people that follow festivals, I followed people that followed Sight & Sound magazine, as these people might be more open to it. They’re not looking for a film just as popcorn entertainment, they want something deeper.
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• Interview with Zoe Cunningham
• My review of You Have Been Chosen
• Buy Silent Eye episodes incl. You Have Been Chosen on Amazon UK (99p) and Amazon.com ($0.99)
• Review of Steven Soderbergh’s smartphone thriller Unsane