Rebecca Graham

We first met when you won the Daily Motion pilot competition at Raindance in 2014. Was that your first short?
It was my first web series, but it wasn’t my first short. Actually, Dance 4 Me wasn’t even supposed to be a web series; we had shot it to be edited into a television pilot. We were actually in the editing room when the DoP came across the Daily Motion competition at Raindance and sent it to me. And I was like, ‘we have about a week, we can probably do it…’

Oh, so you had already shot it as a tv pilot before you heard about the competition?
Yes, and then we edited it down [for the competition]; we had actually overshot, and then we just selected the best. The story arc was still there, so we thought that this could almost be like a teaser trailer type of thing.

I remember when they started playing the winning show at Raindance…
Yes, and I was like, screaming! Because here’s the thing: we finished editing it and then we actually realised we had to go through a public vote. At that point, we knew nothing about web series – I had never watched a web series – but we thought, ‘ok, we know how to story tell, we have a window of five minutes,’ and we knew we could do that.

So we edited it down. Then we saw the top 30 [other entrants] and we saw that there was nothing really like what we had done. I wanted it to be oversaturated; I wanted it to almost look American.

It sort of looks like a music video.
Yes, it was supposed to look glossy. It wasn’t supposed to look like something that was UK standard; not that that’s a bad thing, but I think the UK has a certain look and the US has a certain look, and we were definitely going for the US market.

Because…?
Because it had a whole music video vibe with the singers and the dancers. I just think that the US looks different to the UK. If you look at shows like Empire for example, it’s got a different look to things we have in the UK.

Was that a conscious decision before you cut it for the pilot competition?
Yes, it was always supposed to look like that.

So after we cut it, we had the one week public vote. We didn’t sleep, it was ridiculous. We really went for it. I was waking up in the middle of the night, and seeing that we were down to second place, and yelling, ‘Go! Go! Go!’

So you cut that for the pilot competition and you won; did you then go on to make it into the series that you had originally envisaged?
No, the outlook for it changed at that point. The idea had been to go on and make a full length season of Dance 4 Me, but there were some issues between myself and the other co-creator. It was almost like a divide; one half was saying that, even though we’d won the competition, what we’d done still wasn’t good enough. We had no budget – it was completely self-funded. And then there were lots of other issues – lots of lies came to light – and I was like, I cannot work with people who can lie to my face. So I thought, ‘this is the end of this project for now – let’s move on.’

So let’s go back. What were you doing when you got into filmmaking?
Well, I was a care worker. I worked with people with mental and physical disabilities, and I studied sign language. It was a nice job. I liked helping people, and I still do.

Was this pre-university?
Yes. So, I didn’t do well at GCSEs. I dropped out of sixth form and two other colleges, and then I found my way. I did work experience at a school with children with autism and I found that I really loved that. I was a teacher’s assistant, and then a care assistant. My youngest client was 3 months old, the oldest was 97, so I’ve worked across a whole spectrum.

It’s unique, and it definitely helps with storytelling because you see real emotion. For example, with a 97 year old who is telling you about their life story, it’s just something you don’t usually hear versus coming across someone who is dying in front of you – that’s just a whole different emotion. I’ve been with people that have had strokes, and we were literally saving their life right there; luckily, I’ve never been in a situation where someone has died on my watch but there’ve been some close calls.

Then a friend of mine called me up to ask if I knew an editor. So I called around and got some quotes for them, but the quotes were just too high.

This is such a random interjection.
Totally. But they were doing this project where they were going around and filming club events and editing them and trying to sell them. So I told them to just give me the footage and I’ll have a go.

That’s such a classic way that everyone gets into this: ‘I don’t know how to do this, but eff it, I’ll figure it out.’
Right? So I do it, and we sell a couple of copies – a pound here, a pound there.

Then from there, they wanted to expand into a company, and I would’ve been the editor. But they wanted to teach outreach to children and things like that – these had been the same people I had been working with for a couple of years in the care sector, so I knew them.

So you worked in the care sector together, but then in your spare time you were doing these club events?
Yes. But then we got in touch with this indie artist. I was supposed to go to his music video shoot to film the behind the scenes in Brixton. But when we went there, we found out that the videographer and everyone else hadn’t shown up. I was the only one with a camera, so he asked if I could please film it. And I said yes.

Wow, it’s just as well you had equipment.
Well, it wasn’t anything: it was just an HD camcorder. That was it, that was all I had. So I shot it, went home, hacked some software, and then cut it and gave it back to them the next day. They loved it. I look back on it now and think it was an absolute crash. But they loved it, and they wanted to do some more. And I was getting paid.

Then it branched out to the artists that he knew, and I met their studio manager and their sound engineer, and he put me onto more artists. So I was doing these very amateur music videos, and that went on for about a year.

By then, the people from the original group started hating me because I was the only one bringing in any money into the company.They actually decided to cut me off, which was fine, and I just carried on making music videos.

So I sent off two applications to two different colleges – one was for sign language and one was for filmmaking – and I said that whichever one came back first, that’s what I was going to do. The one for media production at South Thames College came back first. So I went to that one.

Here’s the thing though: when I went to South Thames College for their open day, I went, ‘look, I have minimal GCSEs, I have no A Levels, but I want to get onto the HNC media production course,’ which is basically the first level of university. And they were like, ‘well, you don’t have any qualifications.’ And I was like, ‘I am not doing the Access course,’ – which would’ve been two years of my life – especially with all this writing that I don’t do.

I eventually went to speak to the course leader – lovely woman – and I showed her my portfolio of music videos and she said, ‘come on,’ and accepted me without any qualifications.

So I was on the course. We did things like soundscapes, which was so out of my comfort zone, and we had to write reports and things like that, and I was getting merits and doing well. And she begged me to apply for university but I told her it wasn’t for me.

So this course was just for a year?
Yes, I thought I could do the course and then get into a company, and she was like, ‘no, if you really want to do this, you need to go to university and you’ll do well.’

What year was this?
It was 2011. She kept begging me to go. I remember doing this one project, and I got a distinction, and I was like, ‘hang on a minute – I’m actually getting good grades.’ Because I just used to scrape by at school. And my teacher was like, ‘look, just apply to go – you don’t have to go.’

So I applied to five universities, and I got accepted into most of them, except one. I applied to University of Westminster, Middlesex, Roehampton, Southbank and Kingston. Kingston really wanted me. Southbank and Roehampton – they accepted me without interview.

Westminster interviewed me and offered me a place on the spot as well. Middlesex, where I really wanted to go – I called them up, and they told me that I got a D in GCSE English so they wouldn’t offer me a place. I was doing an HNC, and they were like, ‘how did you get onto that course?’ And I told them it was because of my portfolio. Then I declined them, hung up, and accepted a place at Westminster.

You know, a lot of people would be thinking, ‘I’m already working, I’m getting paid for what I want to do etc.,’ so I’m wondering, what was the lure for you to put yourself through three years of university instead of going straight into the industry where you were already on your way?
I think my main reason for going to university was that I’d never gone in the first place because I honestly thought I was too dumb to go. Going to high school in the 90s, there wasn’t that much support; they never recognised I was dyslexic. So I always struggled with reading and writing, and it wasn’t until I went to South Thames College that they really supported me. I did ask for a dyslexic test at that point, but it cost too much and it would’ve had to come out of my pocket so I didn’t take it.

But I remember telling my tutor that I didn’t know how to write an essay, and she broke it down for me. And it almost became like a pattern and a rhythm, and I could visualise how an essay was supposed to be structured, so I was able to write and get high marks.

So really, it was at South Thames College that I realised that, if I liked a subject, I could really concentrate on something, and two, I can actually write an essay. It was really those tutors there that gave me a push and showed me that I could actually do it, and changed my mind.

How did you find the experience of being older than everyone else going into uni?
Nobody ever guessed my age – I’ve always looked far younger than I actually am. I was 28 when I started university, so for a good couple of months no one knew my age until people started asking questions; by that stage, you realised that a good five or six people in the class were about my age.

And then, especially by the end of the first year, you realise that age is but a number. It is really about teaming up with people that like to work as hard as you to get the job done, and who are as creative as you – that’s it. So by the end of the first year, we had this group of three or four people and we just worked on film after film after film. We had a camera operator, a DoP, a producer, and I’d be like, ‘ok, I have this script idea…’

That’s just how we progressed. What got me noticed on the course was this short horror film that I’d done that was based on Buddhism, so there was some Japanese spoken in it as well. It was a psychological film, but it was talking about the seven realms of hell that are in Buddhism.

I remember my tutor begged me not to make a horror film – it was going to be too clichéd, too slapstick, and I said, ‘no, it’s going to be a psychological horror,’ like someone going into a mental state. It’s basically about three people that go into a room and they don’t know how they got there. And then one of them starts to go down this crazy spiral and after the credits, you see that someone’s watching them in this room.

When it was shown back to the class, the tutor did actually say, ‘I’m so glad you didn’t listen to me, because it’s a great piece of work.’ From there, the trust was already built, that I wasn’t just going down a genre convention, that I could spin things.

Are you from a creative family?
My Dad used to make mannequins for window displays, so he had an archway in Forest Gate. He used to design them, make them, spray them, and then he’d have a make-up artist come in and do the make-up. He was the sole provider of mannequins in the UK in the late 80s, early 90s, and he used to ship out to Europe as well. All the mannequins that you’d see in C&A and Marks & Spencer’s were my Dad’s. He used to make penguins, big dogs, all kinds of figurines.

He’s very much like me: he’s dyslexic as well, but as they say, dyslexics tend to be creatives.

When you were a kid looking forward, did you ever conceive of a career in the arts or media or anything creative like that?
Never. I wanted to be a lawyer and a doctor at some point. I think I was always interested in technology because those were the presents that I got from my Dad. When I was eight or nine, it was the Amiga 600. He was like, ‘here’s a computer, learn how to use it: it’s the future.’ And then when Windows 95 and things like that started dropping we got a massive PC at home. Weirdly, I failed IT GCSE. But technology I always loved. I was always the one that figured out how to use the VHS player.

So when did writing and directing come into that then?
That didn’t come until I picked up a camera and started doing those music videos – so, I was 25, 26.

Some might say that’s relatively late.
Yes, but sometimes I look back on my life and see that the clues were there – I just didn’t pick them up. I was always a shy child, but if I was on stage, and someone pushed me to do it, I would do speeches in front of big crowds. But then people stopped pushing me.

Or when I was younger, I was a huge fan of The Sims. I would create stories; I would hack the game – I still hack the game – and I would put in codes that would stop them being autonomous, and then put in another code that would have them make a reaction. So I actually created stories that I would just edit. That was actually my first web series if you think about it! Because I would have episodes – they’re actually still online, I should probably look at my account. Some of them were actually topping seven hundred thousand views actually, because it was The Sims, and I had Tina Turner in there singing What’s Love Got To Do With It.

I would’ve been in high school because it was The Sims 1. I would’ve about 15. But I never thought of it as anything other than a hobby. I was just hacking the game and playing with it.

Do you have a bias towards which medium or industry you’d like to work in in future?
You know what, I see it as, if I have a story to tell, the medium doesn’t matter, to a certain degree. The story always comes first, and afterwards you look at the medium. Some things don’t work as 90 minutes long, they work as three 30 minute episodes.

When I look at directing and screenwriting, in my mind they go hand in hand. First and foremost, I feel like a director who could work on other people’s scripts. I’m not a script writer who could let go of my work and have someone else direct it. So ideally, it is tv series or movies for tv, but the big goal is big films with theatrical or cinematic release.

But I remember speaking to someone about this the other day: even if I end up in Hollywood making blockbuster films, I would still be making indie projects because I think with blockbusters, they get lost sometimes with the empathy, where they lose telling the human story and it just becomes about the money, which is great if you’re getting paid thirty million to make a film… that’s nice, right?

But on the other side, I still feel like I need to be true to myself and make stories, make films that engage emotion, and that will always be where my heart lies. If you are crying or laughing or feeling deep emotion because of something I’ve made, that’s great: that’s what I want.

It’s interesting when I meet different directors and they have different points of references that come out of their backgrounds; for example, some people are actor-directors, some have a more technical bias to directing, others are writer-directors. Now that I think about it, I don’t know another director that doesn’t have another discipline that guides their perspective, or the technique or method.
Well, when I write, there’s always me in the script but it might not be evident. Sometimes it’s hidden because it’s based on something that I just don’t talk about. And sometimes the person in the script is male; for some reason, I always write myself as a male character. I think that’s because I grew up with my Dad and I tend to understand men a lot easier than I understand women. That’s just me though.

So when I’m speaking to an actor about the emotion, I’m not just talking about the character, I’m talking about something I’ve been through, but that’s unknown to the actor, so that I can go deep into the emotion without the actor knowing where it’s coming from.

Do you have a focus for what you want to do in the future?
The end game is to be the first black woman director to win an Oscar. Not one has won one yet. There has been about five or six nominations, but not ever has a black female won.