How I work.
Every project arrives differently — a finished script that isn't landing, a hunch and three interviews, an archive nobody has opened in forty years. What stays constant is the order of operations: understand the project and its author before touching the form, build the documents only once the story knows what it is, and choose the strategy last, when there's something real to position.
- 01
Read everything, then ask the harder questions
Every draft, every treatment, every note in the margin — including the versions that were abandoned. Then the conversation that matters: why this story, why you, why now. Most projects already contain their answer; it's usually buried under the version the author thinks is expected of them.
- 02
Find the spine
Once the material is on the table, the work is structural: what the story is actually about, what it opens on, what it withholds, where it turns. This is the stage that decides whether a film holds together — long before anyone worries about how to present it.
- 03
Go into the archive and the field
Documentary and archival projects need evidence, not intention. Footage, records, testimonies, photographs — found, verified, cross-referenced and dated. Fiction needs its own research: the era, the milieu, the vocabulary. This is where a project earns its authority.
- 04
Build the documents
Pitch deck, treatment, look book, application file — written and designed as narrative objects, not summaries. A funder should feel the film in a few minutes, not merely understand it. Everything here is in service of the spine found in step two.
- 05
Choose the road
Which festivals, which broadcasters, which grants, in which order, and in which language. Positioning done at the end, once there is a real object to position — and adapted for each market the project needs to travel through.
Projects come in at any of these stages — and often only need two or three of them.