Middle Watch - Finding the story

“The thing that started to take hold is… what does an extraordinary experience like that do to you? How are you changed by that?” John Stevenson

John Stevenson: And the thing that was most interesting was this guy who wrote the letter in 1960 to claimed that he never told anyone about it…So I thought, Well, it's interesting if you have some enormous event, happen to you something that's extraordinary and unique to you. And then you never tell anybody, So what good did it do? I thought that was sort of interesting. And so that was from that which became the kernel of rather than just trying to do a depiction of what was in the letter. Could you take the interesting events of the letter, but then try and sort of say something about, you know, somebody having this sort of an existential crisis in a sense? So that's where it started. And then when I started to, you know, work with everybody that idea kind of started to change. It became something more positive and healing, rather than a sort of a way that just haunts you for the rest of your life. So, so and that's a very long answer to your question, which was it came around from my wife kicking me up the bum and saying, "Do something", me going "easy for you to say!", you know, just whip up a short film as if I could just pull out of the air and then literally the next day, finding the story and being fascinated by it and then going, well, maybe there's something there. Maybe, maybe I could make a short film out of this and then going down the rabbit hole of research and tracking down the letter and doing the whole bunch of, you know, research, the Imperial War Museum and things like that.

“…finding a human question I thought could be folded into interesting visuals... that would make it a story worth telling.” John Stevenson

Rosa Mulraney: I often read about directors saying “I wanted to explore” or “I was fascinated by”. So that really kind of chimes with that kind of directorial approach of finding this topic. And yeah, like you say, trying to find the human story in it and really fascinating to hear you talk about putting yourself in their shoes and thinking, what would it, what would that experience have been like and how would that have changed me? And I think it's really fascinating that you picked out the key moments and explored those within a story and not get too hung up with being sort of documentary style... to the letter.. that it's kind of inspiring a kind of creative response to it.