The Directors’ Take Podcast

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by the prodigiously gifted editor Mdhamiri Á Nkemi . A BAFTA Breakthrough Brit and Screen Daily Star of Tomorrow, he has a long list of credits which includes The Last Tree by Shola Amoo, Blue Story by Rapman and Ear for Eye by Debbie Tucker Green. With a natural sense of story and rhythm, we...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Ian Sellar, a Director, Screenwriter, Script-Editor and tutor from the National Film and Television School. He has had a key hand in the development of all the major success stories you have seen that have passed through the halls of the NFTS, such as Rose Glass, Nick Rowland, Mahalia Belo...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Ian Sellar, a Director, Screenwriter, Script-Editor and tutor from the National Film and Television School. He has had a key hand in the development of all the major success stories you have seen that have passed through the halls of the NFTS, such as Rose Glass, Nick Rowland, Mahalia Belo...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Director Lewis Arnold, whose directing credits include MISFITS, BROADCHURCH, DARK MONEY, CLEANING UP featuring Sheridan Smith, DES featuring David Tennant, TIME featuring Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, SHERWOOD with Adeel Akhtar and he has most recently directed all seven episodes of the new...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Director Lewis Arnold, whose directing credits include MISFITS, BROADCHURCH, DARK MONEY, CLEANING UP featuring Sheridan Smith, DES featuring David Tennant, TIME featuring Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, SHERWOOD with Adeel Akhtar and he has most recently directed all seven episodes of the upc...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Jacqueline Abrahams , a BAFTA and BIFA winning Production Designer who has worked with directors such as Michael Winterbottom, Yann Demange and Yorgos Lanthimos. We used this conversation to tap into their creativity and to dig down into the collaboration that can happen between a Director...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Amy O'Hara who is a Development & Production Exec at Film 4. We began this podcast as people who are actively working at making our own TV and Feature Film projects, but the pathway towards this goal is extremely rocky, murky, difficult etc... So we brought Amy on to help break this pro...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Louise Kempton , who is an intimacy co-ordinator that has worked on projects such as The Great, Gangs of London and the upcoming feature film Hoard. Intimacy co-ordination is a relatively new role and directors may feel that they are losing control of intimate sequences with this being a ba...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Rob Munday , who is the current Managing Editor of Short of the Week and co-founder of Directors Notes . As a director looking to break into the industry, you may think that gaining laurels from physical film festivals is what you need in order to gain industry recognition, but this isn't n...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Henpocalypse! and general TV star Callie Cooke to help break down what the relationship between a director and an actor can look like. This conversation covers:   -Callie's journey from Northamptonshire to the Film & TV industry. -How she got her first acting gig. -The preparation she d...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by composer Adiescar Chase, to talk us through her journey into composing and how she ended up as the lead composer on Netflix's hit coming of age TV show Heartstopper. This conversation covers:   -How Adiescar got into composing music for TV & Film. -The journey into the industry. -How sh...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by director Joelle Mae David to talk us through her journey into the industry and how she went about directing the middle block of the hit BBC and A24 show, Dreaming Whilst Black from creator Adjani Salmon. As ever this is a craft focused conversation which covers the following:   -Joelle's jo...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Writer/Director Raisah Ahmed. Raisah talks us through her journey into filmmaking, discussing her work as a writer in Sundance Writers' Lab, gaining her first TV directing credits, navigating the tricky world of development and her work on the hit Channel 4 TV show We are Lady Parts. This c...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by absolutely no-one. As filmmakers you may have heard someone mention tone in relation to yours or another directors' work and tone can be created instinctually because of past experience and taste or it can be more consciously crafted. Either way... we thought we would talk about it to outli...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Writer/Director Remi Moses, a recent attendee of the prestigious London Film School. There are no clear routes into the film industry as a director and many people see film schools as a clear pathway, but this isn't entirely the case. With Marcus and Oz's affilliation to the National Film a...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Writer/Director Sam Baron. He talks us through his journey into filmmaking and how he came to win the prestigious Academy Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting competition, which propelled him into the industry. Not everything panned out in the way that you would imagine though and Sam openly ta...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Philip Ilson, the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the BAFTA and BIFA Qualifying London Short Film Festival. As a director looking to break into the industry, you need to get your film into reputable film festivals to platform your work and gain industry attention. The rejection and lack of fe...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas continue with part 2 of their discussion with Director Sarmad Masud, whose credits include Hollyoaks, Channel 4’s Ackley Bridge, BBC’s You Don’t Know Me and Sky’s Bulletproof. He also wrote and directed the indie feature My Pure Land which he shot in Pakistan.    In Part 2, Sam takes us through: -How he...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Director Sarmad Masud, whose credits include Hollyoaks, Channel 4’s Ackley Bridge, BBC’s You Don’t Know Me and Sky’s Bulletproof. He also wrote and directed the indie feature My Pure Land which he shot in Pakistan.    Sam takes us through:   -His early start back in 1999 at Hull School of A...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt BSC, whose credits include Doctor Who, A Discovery of Witches and most recently HBO's House of the Dragon and she is also co-founder of a UK collective of female cinematographers called Illuminatrix . In last week's episode, 1st AD Steven Eniraiyetan de...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by First Assistant Director Steven Eniraiyetan, whose recent credits include Netflix's The Strays, Dreaming Whilst Black by Adjani Salmon and Blue Story by Rapman. As a Director, the people you will be working with closest on a film set is the First AD and the cinematographer, so we decided to...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by absolutely no-one... It's just the two of them, and they ponder and breakdown what they believe the fundamentals of directing is. This chat covers:   -What is directing? -What is your voice? -What is blocking? -How do you communicate information visually? -What is visual language?   Nuggets...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Director Em Gilbertson, a recent National Film and Television School graduate who is currently making their way as a 2nd Unit Director for TV, most recently working on Malpractice which is directed by Philip Barantini and stars Niamh Algar. So we thought we'd bring them on for a chat to exp...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by Film Hub North's very own Ben Taylor, a BFI Talent Exec. With BFI Network funding being one of the most widely accessible funding pots for aspiring filmmakers in England, we decided to bring on one of the people who has a say in which projects are successful, all in an effort to demystify t...

In this episode of The Directors' Take podcast, your hosts Oz Arshad and Marcus Anthony Thomas are joined by prolific actor Amit Shah (Happy Valley, His Dark Materials, Doctor Who). One of the most important collaborations on a film set is between a Director and their cast, so we do a deep dive into what that process looks like to help demystify what it is to work with actors. This covers:   -Amit...