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talent spotting
Compiled by Ben Falk
Giles Asbury
Having for a father the man who for many years drew Garth, the Daily Mirror’s comic strip strongman, has been both a help and a hindrance to up-and-coming storyboard artist Giles Asbury.
“He says I’m crap,” laughed the 27-year-old, “but that I’m better than he was at my age.” An inter- media fine art graduate from Kingston University, he grew up sur- rounded by his father Martin Asbury’s cartoon strip drawing and later storyboarding for films like Goldeneye, Chicken Run and Aliens3. Initially, he was more keen
to go into directing but when a friend asked for help on a proj- ect, Asbury was thrown in the sto- ryboarding deep end and decid- ed to give the career a go.
He helped out with various projects for free to gain valuable hands-on experience until his father finally asked him to collab- orate on storyboarding Monkey King - a Hallmark adaptation of the Monkey Magic TV series.
Since then Asbury Jr. has built an impressive resumé, storyboard- ing for a range of projects most recently for the BBC, Marc Forster’s Neverland and Richard Loncraine’s Wimbledon – The Movie.
“Some directors will give you a script and say ‘off you go’ - that’s more fun. Others will sit down with you and do it shot by shot. But it’s always interesting to see the final film and see what a director has done with the storyboard: whether they’ve followed it closely, or done something totally different.”
Although he enjoys story- boarding, Asbury is still keen to branch out into directing and this way, he adds, “seems like a good way to get into it!”
Sheila Hayman
Sheila Hayman is not so much new talent as starting-over talent. The award-winning director recently took time out from her career to have two chil- dren (now six and three and a half) and although she’s contin- ued to write during her stint as ‘Mum’, she’s longing to get back into the thick of things.
“I think I was arrogant before,” she admitted. “I thought ‘oh, I’ll have these babies and then I’ll just start work again, I’ll write screenplays and in three years I’ll be living in Hollywood.’”
She’s not far off doing just that as it turns out. While bringing up her nippers, Hayman, 45, wrote two novels, Small Talk and the recently released, Are We Nearly There Yet?, has written four screenplays – one of which has been optioned – and just been commissioned to adapt a book for the screen.
As for living in Hollywood, Hayman owns a house there from her stint in LA before she had the children. In 1990 she won the BAFTA Fulbright Fellowship and spent it on a year long screenwrit- ing course at USC where she experienced culture shock.
“I’d come from this rarified world of documentary and was being taught by a guy who’d written Teenwolf and Commando and had a picture of Traci Lords on the back of his loo door.”
She stayed in LA directing doc- umentaries but returned to writing when the children came along. She’s now keen to get back into directing and has written a short film she’s looking to get produced.
“When you’re directing you feel like this sort of Amazon - you go out, capture your prey, bring it back to the editing room and present it.”
Andrew Pulver
The first thing Guardian Film Editor Andrew Pulver does in his interview is ask to move somewhere else. He is worried that his work colleagues will over- hear him talking about himself.
“I don’t like talking about it – I’m shy”, he admits. If Pulver’s short film (the reason he’s on the other end of the questions today) was bad, you could understand his desire to be clandestine.
But A Fever In The Blood – a 12- minute comic film noir he adapt- ed from an Ethan Coen short story and directed – is already a hit on the short film circuit.
Yes, there actually is a short film circuit and Fever has already scooped a number of awards, the most prestigious being the Kodak BAFTA Short Film Award last October.
Ethan Coen would be happy. He should be, seeing as he gave Pulver his personal go-ahead. “I got hold of the number of his office and by some fluke he answered the phone,” Pulver remembers. “He wrote me a let- ter saying, ‘I give you permission to do it on the strict understand- ing you don’t commercially exploit it,’ which is fine by me. I wasn’t looking to sell it.”
Thanks to a full-time job and a small window of opportunity, 37- year-old Pulver didn’t bother with the official funding route, gather- ing the money himself and bank- ing on that old short film faithful.
“We didn’t pay anybody. The spend budget was ten grand, but the actual budget budget, was about a hundred and twenty. That’s what it would have cost, if we had paid for anything!”
But the training at part-time film school AFECT and an obvious love of cinema gave him the confidence and the skill to make his mini-epic.
“I made a series of really terri- ble films and sort of learned to fail. I brought all those lessons into this one and I think it worked all right.”
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