The Greatest Stories Ever Told

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Posted on Monday January 18, 2010, 15:54 by Nev Pierce in Under The Radar

Short films seldom find attention in the pages of Empire.

This is because we’d be inundated with up’n’coming filmmakers seeking publicity and sadly there just aren’t enough hours in the day to deliver extensive coverage of these mini-movies.

Done In 60 Seconds is, of course, an exception: Empire’s competition of minute-movie adaptations of full-length features. You can enter it here.

There are also various other initiatives and competitions out there, designed to encourage would-be filmmakers.

This weekend I was a judge at one such shindig – where the prize was professional production assistance and a budget of 20 grand for a 7 to 15-minute feature.

This twist, for those looking to enter ‘The Pitch’, was their film idea had to be based on the Bible.

The good book isn’t a single one, of course: it’s made up of 66 separate tomes sandwiched together. Each is stuffed full of stories, so there’s plenty of material.

From Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ, filmmakers have often sought biblical inspiration and spun stores in their original setting.

But for The Pitch, the idea wasn’t that entrants should recreate a biblical age, but re-contextualise biblical stories.

So, one of the 10 finalists presented the story of the Prodigal son as a kind of disaster movie, another wanted to turn the tale of little-known character Lamech into an 18th century story of paranoia, infidelity and death.

The variety was impressive.

My fellow jurors were BBC documentary-maker Anna Cox, composer Martin Kiszko (The Killing Of John Lennon), Oscar-winning stop-motion master Nick Park and David Suchet (who I most recently saw not as Hecule Poirot – the role for which he is best known – but as a grubby club owner in The Bank Job, a performance that is all the more impressive when you meet him and discover such a charming, smart man).

The finalists – who had been chosen to pitch in person, after their video pitches had been viewed online and voted on by the public and the judges – were a varied bunch, from industry professionals to people who had barely picked up a camera before.

At Pinewood Studios, where the walls hang with classic posters, stills and storyboards and celluloid memories feel as elemental as oxygen, they each made their case, during two days.

After much debate (I had to break up a knife fight between Poirot and the creator of Wallace & Gromit*), the prize went to young director Simeon Lumgair.

His pitch – working title The Runaway Slave – was based on the book of Philemon, about a, yes, runaway slave who hopes for unwarranted forgiveness. Re-imagined as a future-set thriller, when finished it is likely to have more in common with Children Of Men than The Passion Of The Christ.

Stories are how we make sense of the world and biblical stories, incidents and themes infuse Hollywood movies to a surprising extent – from the frogs of Magnolia (Exodus 8:12) to Neo's resurrection in The Matrix. It’ll be fascinating to see how The Pitch turns out and to see even more entrants next year, striving for a not insignificant prize.

*OK, OK, they actually got on famously.