The Directors: Matthew Thorne

Matthew> I get excited about scripts that have either a real idea or story in them already, or scripts that deal with real people and real communities. (We all know some don’t – it’s okay to admit this I think!)

These are the scripts that have always led to the best work for me. Scripts with a real idea get me excited, because if that base is there, then I can focus in on applying an interpretive layer of my own approach and style instead of trying to just get it to ‘work’. Having the bedrock there makes that space for play and interpretation even

stronger.

Scripts that work with real people and communities are also just great fun, I was taught by a social worker to meet people ‘where they are’, and I think that is something we get to exercise when we work with real people. We get to exercise our ability to make space for them to be involved in the telling of their story, and we get to learn about ourselves (and our society) in powerful and important ways in doing so.

Matthew> Mostly it’s a very organic and fast process. When I read a script, I read it as a film almost immediately. Images appear in my mind very clearly from the page. This means the process of writing the treatment story is fast, and direct. I just follow that inside voice.

It’s in breaking down the other more practical elements where the considered work come in. In that back and forth between Production, Agency, and Client of building what must be done (and how) that we find truly interesting, unique ideas. Through that process I test my expectations, and we grow the idea again together. I believe that kind of collaborative process is very important. To build from clear ideas (a clear script, then a clear treatment of that script) towards a collective work.

Without that collaboration the work can’t be good for me.

Matthew> There is a great concept that I heard once, it says that the person who is the best placed to take ‘right’ action is the one who is an “Insider / Outsider”. It came from a research paper done into the outcomes of major companies after bringing on new CEO’s. They looked at the history of the newly hired CEO’s and found that the companies that performed the best were those led by people who had spent time working inside (or closely) with the company, but that had also worked for considerable time outside of it – ideally those who were not inside the company at the time they were hired.

They suggested that the “Insider / Outsider” was most successful because as an ‘Insider’ they have intimate experience of the thing/organisation/idea and can understanding it on its most fundamental levels, but having left and now become an ‘Outsider’ they are also able to also see the organisation clearly and without innate bias.

I think being a Director in this industry is a little like this process. You provide an outsider perspective on something informed by an intimate knowledge of film craft, story, and art, which you support then with an ’inside’ understanding of advertising as a form, alongside the specific product, strategy and concept. So yes – I think research is very important for a Director. It’s how you become an ‘insider’ on the work.

Matthew> The most important relationship is with the Creative team. We must become each-other’s champion. At the end of the day, we will always be the last people standing in the fight for the absolute quality for the work.

When it happens that way – when you really get in to each other’s pocket - it makes for an impenetrable team, and almost always the best work. I also love how we come equipped with very unique and complimentary views, built around a shared sense of creativity and story. I cannot fully understand the work without them, and I think they cannot fully execute it as a film without me (or at least– in the way I would execute it as a film). At its core is a deeply symbiotic relationship.

All the best relationships in my work (and life) are like this. I try more and more to build around the idea that we do it ‘together’. I think this is very important also in how it challenges the inbuilt nature of the Patriarchal structure of filmmaking, and our generally competitive, antagonistic socio-economic structure.

Matthew> Magical realism! Docu-fiction! In these things there are always the most interesting, and impactful stories and ideas.

Magical realism gives space for a world that is incoherently coherent, and docu-fiction gives us a filmmaking approach that is able explore these inconsistencies within the power of what we know to be real.

What is our world if not a mix of always competing dualities (truth/fiction, right/wrong, good/evil, magic/reality, sublime/everyday). All of life, I think, is a journey towards being able to hold both in one’s mind in each moment.

Matthew> I am always very interested when people describe me as a visual director. I have never seen myself this way.

The things that most fascinate me are always people, stories, and places. My Mother was a theatre director, and I came to filmmaking because it was a creative format that allowed space for my loves of acting, story, performance, work in community, the power of the image (and some kind of philosophy) to be combined. Imagery plays a part in that interwoven patchwork – the film as a visual medium is so powerfully transformative in how it is evocative of the state of dreaming – but it’s never my natural focus. The visual language grows naturally from the work as suits each story, but without the story and the intimacy it is ultimately empty.

Matthew> Nothing that can be discussed without incrimination 

Matthew> Yes! I have been mentored by many incredible directors and producers to whom I owe a great deal. Without those opportunities I would not be a filmmaker. It’s a loveless, thankless profession and almost impossible to learn at a film school, and often impossible to really develop relationships with other Directors to learn from after. So how else would you figure it out? It has to be through the shared knowledge offered by those who have the desire and generosity to mentor you. I’m open to sharing that also, out of a great sense of debt to those who did the same for me.

The more voices we have in filmmaking, art, life the better. We can only hope to hear from all peoples, walks of life, political conceptions, backgrounds, and spiritual conditions, as we try to build an honest picture of our world. I think it is our great privilege to live in a time of such pronounced and important cross-cultural transformation and transliteration, our ideas and notions must now be tested by a much greater sense of understanding than they once were. This current conflict and growth can only bear greater fruit in the long run.

I think our challenge is not around ‘diversity’ itself. But instead the challenge will be how to retain the genuine authenticity and diversity of voice and background, as we pursue a world of equality/equity. Especially in the face of such powerful and singular media landscape.

Matthew> About mid-way through our second lock down - in that little period after society had worked out the world wouldn’t end, but before we’d worked out if everyone would go bankrupt or not – I was complaining to an older artist and mentor about how the pandemic had ruined my career.

He laughed at me, and said it was the best thing that could have ever happened. I pushed back, and he gently, and patiently explained that I had been given the opportunity to ‘get off the speeding train’, an opportunity he wished he had in his younger years in this industry. Time to stop at the platform, check the departure board, look around the room, and ask “is this the right train?”.

He was right. I was stubborn at first. But eventually I took his advice. In that enforced time out, I asked myself seriously if filmmaking (or art in general) was really what I wanted to do. A scary question to ask oneself when you build so much of your self-image around it. The answer was yes (just).

But when I asked the same questions of my ‘way’ of living life, the answer was a resounding no.

Before the pandemic (and in the aftermath of my Father’s death) I was a borderline alcoholic, a chain smoker, I never exercised, I had no conception of how poor my eating had become, I had developed high blood pressure at the age of 25, and I had put on about 20kg of bad weight. I realised the stress of the way I was approaching filmmaking, and adversting was killing me, and so I changed things.

That process of learning to look after my health has changed how I work more than any book, or practical knowledge ever has. It gave me a way to view life with a longer-term understanding, and with a sense of constant evolution in place of constant trial and error.

This has made space for a great deal more empathy, kindness, and love of mistakes than ever existed before.

I am grateful for the chance I got as a young person to get off the speeding train and look around, I think that patience made me a much better filmmaker.

Matthew> The medium is not the message, I think.

The story, and the idea – while best if sensitive to how they will be realised – are at the end of the day completely translatable to any form or format. I approach it all the same way – in the end I am just guided by the question ‘how does it make the viewer feel?’.

I think if you get that right – if you make people feel things - it can be anything. It is through ‘feeling’ that we change.

Our interior life works on our external thinking (not the other way around, as we often life to imagine).

Matthew> I cannot even begin to describe how terrified and excited I am about AI – just as a human. All these other formats and changes will be dwarfed by this I think. But from what has been explained to me by those who know far more about this, I think it is impossible to ignore that reality that the world is about to be transformed in fundamental ways. Perhaps even more than it was with the advent of electricity. Isn’t that an interesting time to be alive in?

It’s so immense a technological shift, I have no idea what will happen, and I don’t think anyone really does. We organise human history into epochs mostly around technological reality (from ‘the bronze age’, to ‘the nuclear age’), so I think it’s fair to say that we are on the precipice of a new era – in the most literal sense.

Filmmaking is an expensive and exclusive process. The ability to have a tool that allows language to become a way to speak our films – our stories - to life (at least in some part) seems to me an incredible thing.

It may also be the end of everything as we know it – but that could be interesting too. I’m not sure AI can really ‘create’ yet. But it can definitely think. Hopefully this means that in the short to medium term, AI can do the day to day work of marketing, and we can be freed more and more to work on the real stories and ideas.