Keep Dreaming and Never Give Up

Life is tough when trying to aspire to be a filmmaker, especially if you have dreams of becoming a great successful one. Think about how many amazing filmmaker there has been and think about how many people there are trying! My Grand Dad always said to me "Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which you gets full first." My Grand Dad was a strange man, my memory of him is him sat on the same chair in the kitchen, sucking on a Polo, watching TV and making comments.

Two days before we started shooting The Truth About Romance I had an actress pull out, a location change, we still didn't have a zoo and hadn't raised anywhere near the amount of money I wanted (less than £200), which meant I still had the problem of wardrobe to solve. I'd worked so hard to get this far and I was completely deflated. My options were running out and I laid on my bed with my head smouthered in my pillow. At that moment I thought my only option was to delay the shoot or call it off completely. I thought to myself "Who am I kidding, I can't pull this off?" Had my dream come to an end...

It was with this moment of disgusting negativity that made me want to push on. I realised that if I was thinking this about myself then other must be thinking it too. The only person that can prove them wrong is me. The next two days just got harder and with more and more problems, there was shit going on in my personal life, problems mounting up with the film, and I'd slept about five hours all week.

Monday morning, the first day of shoot. Both extremely excited and utterly stressed. Over the next 14 days I'd never worked so hard. It was the best time of my life. It felt like I was living a dream, which I was. I'd be lying if I didn't say it was tough, hard, stressful and upsetting, but none of that compared to the fact that I was shooting a film.

One day when I feel it's appropriate I'll go into more detail about the 14 day shoot, because it was a whirlwind and I'm still not sure how I did it.

The point I'm wanting to make is; Everything worth doing is going to be hard, no amount of preparation will make it easy, just easier. It would have been easy for me to give up. That moment when my head was in my pillow and I lost faith the easy thing to do would've been to give up. However, I would've regretted it for a long time. Never give up and keep the dream alive!

James G. Wall