Tell us about that choice and what it's like.

Yeah, it was a bit of a paradox, 'cause I do...

I kinda take all those credits, and I do...

Yeah, I write, I direct, I shoot, I edit, I do the sound design, and I do the music as well, but I work with a very important team of collaborators.

So in, in one sense, I'm working...

You know, I'm, I'm in, I'm responsible for all of that, but I couldn't do that without this huge team of collaborators.

And I think I've just sort of gradually, through my career, fallen into that way of working.

How important are festivals like this to independent filmmakers like you?

Mm.

And I went from at that point I would call myself a filmmaker And every credit was kinda me Right And I thought, "No, I, I, to be taken seriously, I need to be a director or at most a writer-director." So then some of my films from that period, I've got pseudonyms for the cinematographer and the editor and stuff like that.

And now I'm in the period where I've gone back to, I just give my credits that I've done, you know, the jobs that I've done, I give them, I credit them to me, and I'm, and I'm happy now going back to calling myself a filmmaker.

Mm.

I'm a filmmaker, 'cause I'm not pretending that I work in a conventional way.

Mm.

But the thing is, like, Rose Nevada's got, you know, you sat through the end- Mm ... presumably you sat through the end credits.

Right.

Yeah.

I've suddenly realized where I got 30 years from.

Um, but it, that, that, it didn't go anywhere.

I didn't have any...

I didn't have the next scene even for that film.

And so Mary said, "Well, you know, what happens next?" And I was like, "I don't know what happens next." And she said, "Well, what if not everybody in the community is surprised that the boat has come back?" And that was the moment where it really opened up for me, and I thought, "Well, that's r- that, that's really interesting 'cause it stops being a film about solving the mystery of where the boat's been.

It starts being a film about the mystery of why not everybody's surprised that the boat has been away.

Yeah

[laughs]

It's, it's an LA film.

But the interesting thing is I, I, I saw it when I was a kid, and I, I never realized it was where it was set.

And so I grew up on the North Coast of Cornwall amongst...

In, within surfing communities really.

And I watched this film when I was very, very young.

Uh, I think it was a friend's brother's friend turned up at the house with a VHS copy of it, and we watched it.

As soon as they're back surfing.

Mark, what did you want to communicate through this story? Or was it just simply a genre exercise to have fun and let

loose? I was quite lucky with the starting point of it, really, because I needed to write something.

We were just about to shoot Ennis Maine, the previous film, and then the pandemic locked us down.

And I needed to do something during the lockdown.

So I needed to just pull an idea out of thin air and just start working on it until we could shoot Ennis Maine after the lockdown.

And Mary, my partner, who is in Rosa, Nevada, she said to me, have you got any ideas? And I was like, well, I've got one scene, which is this fishing boat that arrives back in the harbor one morning having been lost at sea for 30 years with all the crew lost.

And she said, well, what happens next? And I said, I don't know.

It just literally made my appreciation for the sound work of this movie just multiply.

Yeah.

But I've got a huge team of collaborators around me that, you know, it's really good your term sounding board, you know, because I am all the time, you know, when we're shooting, it's constantly that.

It's constantly compromises.

It's constantly changing things in the moment because things can't be done.

And I'll always double check with people.

And I've got people who...

I completely trust within my crew.

I

[laughs]

...

so, you know, people get it, and I think, "Yeah, that is..." You know.

And sometimes there's things that I hadn't thought about, and I thought, "Well, yeah, of course it's that, and of course it's that." So it's not like a sort of winning number or anything.

It's just like I, I would...

And I never realized.

I, when I was editing the, this film, I started thinking...

Mm-hmm.

looking

back at it now.

I made films using mini DV and then the HD came in and I wanted to use all these new digital cameras and stuff.

But I haven't got that kind of brain to keep up with that technology.

So what happened was I was still working on films and writing and I had stuff in development and I was making stuff.

But I was getting more and more separated from the sort of practicality of making film.

The actual, you know, operating the camera or even understanding how the camera works because the digital... filmmaking the way you lit stuff changed and all that kind of stuff the discipline of Of just shooting what you needed disappeared and I got more and more sort of separated from that and I didn't I didn't realize that I was separated from that until I got ill and had to have a emergency operation just a minor operation, but I just had a few weeks of recovery where I sat on the sofa and Just couldn't really do much And it was brilliant because when you can't do anything, you suddenly think about all the stuff you want to do when you can do something and you really prioritize it.

And