Making a Bad Film

No one sets out to make a bad film.

Everyone who works on that film gives it their best, whether it is the director, one of the dressers or the lighting gaffer. They all have high hopes for how it will be received.

Almost every single one of them will be proud of their contribution.

By the law of averages, most of us who have been involved in producing, selling, or distributing more than five film productions will have had bad reviews.

As filmmakers, we should be more sympathetic to others, but sadly, so many are not.

I have read many producers, directors, writers etc of film and television programmes destroy the work of their peers on social media platforms.

Rarely do they do this with the skill or reasoning of a professional critic. Many ooze jealousy or dislike in every paragraph.

What is the point of them writing such reviews?

A friend was telling me this morning that in a WhatsApp group of practitioners of a particular craft, one member seriously attacked the work of someone who does the same job.

What this idiot did not consider is that the person he was attacking was also in the same group.

The critical man has credits for what I would diplomatically call B movies. The man he was savaging has a whole array of A-listed productions under his belt.

The attacker just looked like a fool in a WhatsApp group of over 100+ people.

Twenty years ago, I was working with a filmmaker on a screenplay we were developing who had made many short films. He had talent. However, he also had a big gob and a big ego but a little brain.

He was so full of what a great genius he was and how everyone else did not know what they were doing. This included me as he said things behind my back because progress was slow, which found its way to me.

Not only did I walk away, but it would appear everyone else has over the years that followed because this once young man with great promise is now middle-aged, and he has yet to make his first feature-length film. I doubt he ever will.

In the last few years, I have read critiques by many filmmakers laying into the films of others, who are often better-known and thus more successful filmmakers. They rarely write anything good about them.

Yet, these filmmakers turned amateur critics have films listed on IMDb with fewer than five stars out of ten ratings. One actually has a film with two stars and a couple with three stars. His comments have not gone unnoticed. I was with someone with a senior position on one of the films he took apart in his clumsy way, and this person was sent the filmmakers review by one of the filmmakers Facebook friends.

The man I spoke to sent that review, which had nothing good to say about the film, to every single person involved in that film in any capacity, including all the people who financed and sold it. That filmmakers name is mud with all of them, and he has made a lot of enemies because his opinion of their film is less than charitable.

My last film achieved five out of five stars in the Guardian, the pinnacle of film reviewing platforms, but it took me 55 years to get there. Along the way, I had to put up with countless one and two-star reviews.

I have once or twice written things about other films that I did not care for, but I have never named them. Its high time I stopped doing that, as its just not fair. Taste is subjective. One person loves the pattern on a shirt, and another hates it. Who is right, and who is wrong?

Any producer, director, or writer who adversely criticises another filmmakers hard work is either extremely brave or a special kind of stupid, .......and I suspect I have occasionally been that special kind of stupid person over the last seven decades.


David Nicholas Wilkinson