BECOMING A FILMMAKER

An aspiring filmmaker recalls his battle to break into the U.K. film industry.

A lot has changed in the movie business since screenwriter William Goldman published his landmark Adventures in the Screen Trade in 1983. But one thing has stayed the same—the sheer difficulty of making it in the movie business. “Rejection became a constant companion, each ‘no’ a tiny pinprick to my inflated self-belief,” Pinto recalls in his breezy account of his efforts to find production work in the U.K. film industry, adding that “doubt threatened to consume me, whispering insidious suggestions that I should retreat, that I wasn’t cut out for this grueling pursuit.” A passion for movies is a prerequisite for any aspiring filmmaker, one that Pinto acquired growing up in Mumbai, the capital of India’s “Bollywood” film industry. “I’d sneak onto local shoots after school, chai in hand, watching runners dash, gaffers yell, directors pace,” he recalls. “It was a circus, and I wanted to be the ringmaster.” He learned the basics of film craft at London’s Met Film School where he was “dead set on becoming the next big director—think Scorsese with a curry obsession.” The author is at his best describing the grim reality of “bollockings, cold coffee, and 14-hour days” he encountered as he took just about any job he could get on a film set, from gaffer to production coordinator and, eventually, cinematographer. There’s also plenty of useful advice and tips for future film wannabes. “The game is not about how well you do something but how often you can do something after being rejected,” Pinto observes. However, possibly because, unlike Goldman, Pinto was something of a film neophyte when he wrote his book, there’s a dearth of anecdotal meat on its bones. The last third of the book gets dry as Pinto delves into light meters, lighting ratios, Unreal Engine software and other technical matters. But he’s surely spot-on in his prognostication that “the future belongs to those…who can compose a shot inside a digital jungle as beautifully as one in a real rainforest.”

Vividly presents the mundane realities behind the moviemaking glamour but is short on storytelling.