Interview: Diary Of A Bad Lad’s Jon Williams

Diary Of A Bad Lad is a no holds barred, unflinching look at the British underground crime scene told through the eyes of a cinephile documentarian who finds him self in too deep with the  subjects of his latest project. Having a limited five day release on the dailymotion.com website last year, Diary Of A Bad Lad was viewed by over 167,000 people which created a wealth of interest in the film. Mr. Williams kindly spared some time to discuss the film and to also reveal that UK & Ireland distributor Classic Entertainment is set to give the feature  a UK theatrical release targetted for late April, with UK & Ireland DVD across the Hight St release late May/early June. The film’s web-site can be found here.

How would you describe Diary Of A Bad Lad to Reelloop readers not aware of the project?

It’s a no-budget film about what happens when documentary filmmaker, Barry Lick, sets out to make a sensationalist crime documentary on the cheap. His aim is to penetrate and document the lives of the major players, the people who import the cocaine and launder the profits through the property market, rather than the unreal no-marks of your typical Brit gangster flick. And he thinks he can flatter them into cooperating with him.

Where did the inspiration come for this project? It seems to not quite fit any of the established genres currently in vogue in British film-making.

I hate the word genre. Shakespeare wrote comedies, tragedies and history plays. Genre is a word so that sales agents can pigeon-hole films into one sentence sales pitches. We didn’t start out with a genre in mind, we started out with a story. The inspiration came from the fact that, whether you like Guy Ritchie films or not – and personally I don’t – the characters in them a totally unreal. I was more interested in people like the guy in Manchester who built a whole chain of mobile phone shots by importing cocaine – and who only got caught because his name was mentioned in a phone conversation between two Colombian drugs barons which was being recorded by the DEA. These people aren’t mindless moronic hard men, but brilliant actors living two different parallel lives. The other inspiration was the Belgian no-budget satire on serial killer movies, Man Bites Dog.

The film was recently made available to watch free for a five day period over at dailymotion.com. It proved a resounding success being viewed over 167,000 times. What do you think it was about your film that connected with such a sizeable audience?

The fact that they’d put Roxanne Gregory’s arse – and the fact that she’s dressed as an S&M dominatrix porn queen – on the home page!

Do you believe this run will ultimately help with DVD sales?

Definitely. But what’s important is that it’s all been part of a very long process. Sometime ago we had secured a standard ‘all rights’ old model distribution deal, but things only really started to take off for us after we took all the rights back and started doing things ourselves. And I’m not putting any blame on the distributors, it’s just that the ‘old model’ doesn’t work anymore. But what had happened was that we’d kick started a whole New Wave of underground filmmaking in the North-west of England that’s now grown so large that it was the major focus of the Salford Film Festival in November. Word started getting around and a long-established company that mainly operates in supplying the High St DVD market expressed interest in acquiring some limited UK rights. They looked at the screener and thought the film was great. Then, just a week later it was the hit of the Salford Film Fest. Then we sent them a copy of the extras-laden Special Edition DVD that we’d produced ourselves – which really is not like anything anyone has ever done before – and they spotted that there was a huge potential to actually make theatrical, DVD and internet work together in a way that would build a real long-term connection between the film and the fans. Then Renderyard negotiated the dailymotion.com screening and in one long-weekend we crashed in at number 3 in their all-time ‘official content – film and TV chart’, and since then everything’s gone mental and we’re all working flat out to get it out there as soon as possible.

With the increasing difficulty of getting true indie films into cinema screens what are your thoughts on utilizing the internet as a future model of distribution?

Indie filmmakers have to realise that when you’ve completed your film, the job’s only half done. You have to be involved in every aspect of ‘getting it out there’. In the UK that means that, as well as everything else, you have to campaign for a more level playing field. Unlike in most other civilised countries we can’t release our films as ‘un-rated 18’; instead we have to pay huge fees to a censorship body. Most British film festivals get subsidies to show ‘non-British’ films – seriously(!) – and the government hasn’t got a clue. For too long people have not complained because they thought complaining would ruin their chances of getting any money from the UK Film Council. But we not from London, we’re from ‘up North’, and there’s nothing we like better than a fight. Internet? Right now you can make your film available as a download on a ‘make a donation’ basis – and if it’s something people want to see and you’re telling them about it through all the internet channels, you can maybe make £2,500 per month. But you’re also building your fan base so your next one should do better – and maybe give your first one a lift too. It’s up to you, you have to be creative and your efforts can bring rewards. And you’ve actually got an advantage – you are interacting directly with your fans. Do the middlemen have any fans? We all know the answer to that, people know how they’ve been ripping everyone off for years, and that’s a big reason for ‘illegal downloading’ – it’s a way of people getting their own back.

Diary Of A Bad Lad is both brutal and graphic in its depiction of sex and violence. Did this make getting the films £5,000 budget together more difficult? How was funding raised?

It wasn’t raise at all. It took nearly three years to shoot. It was done on a profit-share basis, everyone who was involved was gambling on it being a success. Whatever the expenses were I paid for them out of my own pocket. So it cost me about £30 a week – how much do you spend a week on booze?

Taking such a long time, was there any point exhaustion may have caught up with you or you may have considered packing it in? How did you keep the cast and crew motivated?

This is another thing. The myth has spread around that the way you make a film when you’ve no money is to shoot it over a few weekends, one location, improvised dialogue and so on. In other words there are people who’ve been telling people to go out and make shit. Just about all the great first time no-money films took years to make; so I’ll repeat what the likes of Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi have said, you’re looking at it taking more than four years. Heck, the script alone took almost a year to write; and as it wasn’t really like anything else I ended up having to write it as an unconventional novel first. Michael (Booth, dir) and I knew it could only be made in everyone’s spare time and would take years. Everyone knew what to expect. Everyone knew they were involved in something special. It was like we created this parallel reality, this ‘other Blackburn’ that we went off and had a great time in every now and again, and we came back with the footage of what happened on our trips.

Of course, if it had been shit, it would have soon fallen apart and we wouldn’t have got past first base…

Similarly it took a few years from completing the film to it finding the large audience it recently did. That must have felt like a complete vindication of your hard work and effort.

When you make a film which, whenever an audience sees it, they can’t stop talking about it afterwards; that every time you just have to sit in the audience with them because you can never get tired of feeling that buzz, then you can never give up. It’s what you do it for. We just knew that if we kept on building that grassroots support then one day the film would achieve critical mass and things would explode.

A film mentioned by one of the characters during the film is Man Bites Dog. It is clearly an influence on Diary Of A Bad Lad both in the faux documentary shooting style and the satiric message accusing the media of being complicit with criminality and many of society’s ills. What examples would you suggest highlights this currently?

It’s everything. The popular media has gone to the dogs. It’s all celebrity and sensationalism and Simon Cowell and ‘reality’ this and ‘reality’ that. I mean, recently the daughters of some East End gangster made a ‘documentary’ about their dad! You can take this piss out of literally any aspect of it.

With the aforementioned satiric impulses and graphic violence and sex on screen, Diary Of A Bad Lad is a hard film to pigeonhole. Who do you see as being the audience for this film?

Oh there are two: the first is that you need to be a certain type of person to have even heard of Man Bites Dog in the first place, so the film appeals to film buffs, and the more hardcore they are the more references they’ll either spot or read into it. So at that level it’s pure arthouse. At the same time it’s one for the lads to sit round with a collection of various recreational drugs and a six-pack or three, and spend ninety minutes being naughty boys and letting the film mess with their heads. Hey, that’s the audience – arty boys and girls and bad lads and lassies!

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