And what about the premise? A man resigns and wakes up in an exact replica of his home, but in a mysterious (and secret) coastal village. A place established purely to house top level global operatives with too much information that decide to retire/quit/defect. A retirement home for spies, pure genius. But the devil is in the details, and so it is with The Prisoner. The no name policy, with people assigned numbers in order to identify them, the uniform blazers, rover, the stunning town (Portmeirion) used as the village. The whole show was a political allegory, a 1960′s conflict between individualism and collectivism. The philosophy of Sarte and Mill, all wrapped up in a Kafkaesque nightmare, but with Egg chairs…..

I’d love to know what the Christopher Nolan rumoured film would have been like. People have been frequently negative about the possibility of a feature film adaptation, using the argument that it wouldn’t work as well as it does in a TV format. I find these sorts of arguments deeply suspect. Anything can be adapted, it just has to be done so with awareness of the medium it is being adapted into and with intelligence and creativity. What rarely works is taking a product in its existing form and transferring it into a different medium without adaptation. It’s one of the reasons why The Harry Potter films didn’t completely work and Lord of The Rings did. Peter Jackson ignored the purists and adapted (sometimes dramatically) the books into scripts appropriate for cinema. Often leaving segments on the cutting room floor that work brilliantly in the books, but simply would’ve slowed down the movie. Sadly with HP we ended up with ‘faithful’ adaptations that lost focus and meandered. Books are not cinema, just as TV and theatre are not. They can work together, but it takes a little adaptation.

I’m looking forward to watching the last few episodes of The Prisoner again and excited about the current crop of new TV emerging, much of which shows promising originality. For example the excellent Homeland. A show that boasts a brilliant female lead in Clare Danes troubled Carrie, or the recently phenomenal Sherlock, and it’s stunning lead Benedict Cumberbatch. More please…

It’s an arbitrary number of course, but I found that giving myself only ten options did help me to think quite carefully about what I believe are some of the really important basic principles of directing. I’ve tried to focus on broad aspects that are applicable regardless of your style/approach. I’ve also focused on common rookie mistakes that most of us have made at some point.

1. Be true to yourself. Don’t try and make a film you think someone else wants to see. Make a film YOU would want to see. Not everyone will like it, but it will be the truest expression of your own personal themes.

2. Listen to everyone. Forget your ego when it comes to the film. Your primary role as a director is to have a clear vision. You’re next most important role is to be a filter for the valuable ideas that your team will contribute. If you’ve done your job when assembling the crew, they will be a good team with good ideas. This doesn’t mean you’ll agree with all the ideas, but it will give you the best set of options.

3. Practice, practice, practice. Make films as often as you can. On a video camera, on a film camera, on a mobile phone. Technique needs to be practised. I can’t recall how many times colleagues have said to me that they’re ‘saving themselves’ for something important. Or that they will direct when ‘a good enough idea’ comes along. That’s completely counterproductive. Where Glengarry Glen Ross had the ABC of real estate as ‘Always Be Closing’, the ABC of film could be seen as ‘Always Be Crafting’. The more you make, the better you’ll become. I put 4 x projects on my CV as dramas that I’ve made that I consider good enough to exhibit. I’ve easily made over 300 short films on weekends and evenings over the years. Most edited in camera, some more seriously in offline suites, most of them just a spontaneous and fun way to play around with technique, all of them invaluable practice.

4. Do most of the conscious analysis in development and pre-production. This should be where the really analytical thinking takes place. Dissecting the script, characterisation, set design, casting, crewing. If you come to the set and people are confused as to what they’re supposed to be doing then you did something wrong in the prep. Production always throws up surprises/problems/things that only work on paper, but these are the normal obstacles to be overcome. You shouldn’t be working out what the film is about or who a main character is on set (unless you’re Wong Kar Wai).

5. Always think about the bigger picture. Market the film from day one. Find a hook, something that will grab people’s attention. It may be the set-up, something about production, a controversial theme, whatever. Always be thinking laterally when it comes to your film. It’s not good enough to say I’ve made this film, now what? Have an endgame in mind, make a note of images, themes, comparable films, marketing strategies, what’s being made at the moment, who your audience is, anything that might be useful. This way you pave the opportunities in advance so that when you’ve finished the edit you have some idea of how to get it seen/heard. People don’t come to you, take the film to them.

6. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. As a director you spend most of your time answering questions. However, you have a team of experts there to collaborate with. For my last film I performed most of the major roles myself. I was spread way too thin but I wanted to remind myself of what each role entails. It’s a good idea for a director to have a practical working knowledge of the major technical roles. However, I couldn’t tell my DOP whether a 16mm or 28mm lens will be best to create the image I’m looking for. I can communicate the structure and feel of a shot that I want, but I’m relying on their technical knowledge in order to collaborate in its creation. I’ve met many directors terrified to ask for advice on set for fear of looking like an idiot. You won’t. You’ll look like an idiot if you don’t ask when you obviously need to. Everybody knows that nobody knows everything….you know?

7. Listen to your instinct. It’s not superficial or flaky to find yourself in a position on set where you wouldn’t be able to verbalise your reasoning behind a shot or a performance element. ‘It just feels appropriate’ is not a cop out, it’s an expression of the kind of process often involved in thinking creatively. Production is a different process from development (at least for some directors). Creating a visual language often involves working with your intuition. You’re simultaneously working in themes/characterisation/mood/scene objectives and the body of information you’ve built up during development. Or put another way, when you feel your way through a scene you’re accessing a lot of unconscious material. I’ve tried to ‘think’ my way through the construction of a scene, but ‘feeling’ my way through is always more successful. Lots of times I’ve watched a scene from an old film that I made and suddenly realised why I made a particular choice all those years ago, that I wouldn’t have been able to tell you at the time. Lynch famously won’t be drawn on his creative reasoning. True, in some people’s hands this is a golden ticket to simply justify anything and do what they want. For many directors though, it’s an expression of their creative process.

8. Be on time.

9. Say thank-you.

10. Don’t forget about sound. By far the biggest error new directors make is obsessing about the visual design and forgetting about the sound design. Sound is as much a part of the atmospheric experience as the visuals. Even more importantly sound can communicate emotion in a way that pictures can’t. If you don’t believe me just go watch The Haunting (original 60′s version) or The Conversation.

Another example of the importance of film is the fact that it incorporates so many of the major pre-existing art forms. Music, theatre, photography, painting, design, writing, and performance. Film demands the same level of quality in these areas as would be expected from each of the separate art forms individually. In my opinion, the cinematography of Vittorio Storaro is as praiseworthy as the photography of Nick Ut or David Bailey; the screenwriting of Paul Schrader or Aaron Sorkin is as skilled as the writing in the novels of Paul Auster or Kurt Vonnegut. The finest screen performances of Robert DeNiro are comparable with those in the theatre of Laurence Olivier or Michael Redgrave. Yet film has an additional task: for a film to be really great it must not only excel in the individual areas, but they must be synthesised into a cohesive whole. Film is a new visual and audio language and its greatest unique contribution is the editing process, where so much of the meaning emerges. This is also what makes film more than the sum of its parts, not just a greatest hits compilation of things we’ve seen before.

If the above is all true then it’s fair to say that film is an important area to study. If so why is it so poorly regarded in the UK educational system? The language of film is everywhere. TV, advertisements, home movies, cinema, in screens on buses, in screens on the underground. Rather than the industrialised position of the past, the technology has become available to nearly everyone. These days we have the capacity to make a film on our mobile phone, yet film is still rarely taught in school. You might find an English teacher using Polanski’s film adaptation of Macbeth because it’s more fun for kids than reading Shakespeare. However, it’s less likely that said teacher will explore the use of light, sound design, music, or mise en scene to evoke emotions, character, and thematic qualities. More likely all analysis will be drawn back to the original text. It’s a missed opportunity because the film isn’t just the text captured on a camera, it’s an entirely new artistic interpretation of the material. Sadly the image of film education in the UK remains that rather outdated idea of a lightweight and disposable subject.

There is some hope. Don Boyd was quoted in an article in the Guardian recently as saying ‘Teaching film should be as important as teaching literature, languages, history, economics and science.’ He’s right, and his hope that our society might evolve their view of film as a ‘worthy’ topic of study is a promising one. Similarly Cary Bazalgette wrote another Guardian article about the difficulties of establishing the study of films in school. As an employee at the BFI, and being involved in the UK Film Council’s 21^st Century Literacy Strategy, she knows better than many the challenges of communicating this to the government and working it into the curriculum. Though she does cite some hopeful signs of film education transforming at primary school level.

Part of the problem to be overcome is fear. Fear of allowing people to teach film in a way that links with the ways actual filmmakers approach film. It’s as if the subject is too lightweight to offer enough material in its own right and so it draws on other subjects in some misguided desire to legitimise itself. This is not to say that teaching theory or connections to separate areas of study is wrong, far from it. However, the subject would benefit from appropriate links back to the intentions (conscious or unconscious), and the critical thinking that filmmakers actively engage in. Perhaps then the subject can be more academically focused on film itself, and offer more insights into the practical realities of filmmaking.