Why make Impact50? Interview with Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival
7 August 2023 · 2 min read
As part of the Sydney International Science Fiction Film Festival where The Impact is playing, the organisers asked me some questions, and I thought I would share them here too. You can get more info on the festival and tickets HERE.
What have been the science-fiction works – books, films, art of any kind – that have inspired your work and forged your love for the genre?
As a kid, fantastical cinema was huge part of my life. Occasionally at the cinema but more often on TV. By the time I was a teen, I suspect I had seen almost every SciFi film of note to that date, and a huge amount that should maybe remain a footnote too.
British TV has a heritage of Sci-Fi too, be it Dr Who or Quatermass or others, and I immersed myself in that also. For most filmmakers my age, Star Wars was THE film, but for me it was ALIEN. The atmosphere, design, story, characters, the whole thing, mesmerised me. But I still love all those 1950’s movies in particular, like THEM, The Day The Earth Stood Still etc. and will do anything to work a Theramin into any project.
How did the original concept for your film take shape? What aspects of your film’s narrative and your protagonist’s journey were most important to you?
The Impact is not a normal film, it’s a collective film project with thousands of people from around the world involved. Out of the London Screenwriters Festival we built this project called Create50 to get 50 writers produced. We ended up publishing several books and making two feature films, The Impact being the second film. We asked writers to pen scripts that were two pages long and told their story in the final two hours of humanity before an asteroid strike that would be a planet killer. We had thousands of scripts submitted and hundreds of films. We chose the best and made a feature film from them.
Does the ‘science-fiction’ genre have deep roots in the art and cultural history of your homeland? Were the resources, facilities and talent pool required to bring your film to life easily sourced?
Britain has a tradition of Sci-Fi but the film was globally produced.
Describe for us the very best day you had in the life cycle of your film…
The premiere. Making a crowd sourced film is like herding cats and I was glad we could finally get in a cinema and celebrate.
Having guided your film from idea to completion, what lessons and advice would you offer a young science-fiction filmmaker about to embark on a similar journey?
All my lessons from this film are about crowdfunding and crowdsourcing. My biggest piece of advice is don’t do it. Crowdsourcing is remarkably hard. That said, we did it, so it does work. I wrote a long post here that you can re-use if you like, and any of the posts on the main site can be re-used.
Written by
Chris JonesPassionate about all things film, I have spent my life watching movies, making movies and helping others make their movies too. Most recently I have been directing Splinter Unit on 'Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning', parts 1 and 2 for Paramount. I also executive-produced 'The Enfield Poltergeist' for Apple TV+. Deeper into my past, my early major projects include action thriller 'The Runner', serial killer thriller 'White Angel' and paranormal horror 'Urban Ghost Story'. I co-created and authored The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, published by Bloomsbury. There are now eight books in the series. More recently I have run a series of London-based festivals, kicking off with the London Screenwriters Festival which attracts over 1,000 professional screenwriters from around the globe annually. I also set up and run TEDxEaling, an annual TEDx conference on storytelling and human communication. In 2009, I made the multi-award-winning and Oscar-shortlisted 'Gone Fishing', the whole process being heavily documented on my blog. In 2014 I completed my fourth feature film, the crowd-created 50 Kisses which entered the Guinness Book Of Records for most screenwriters on a feature film. Following this success, I founded Create50 to continue the idea of crowd-created projects. Twisted50, our first book, was published on Halloween 2016 and immediately toppled Stephen King from the top spot on Amazon. Five books have followed in the Twisted50 series and we are working on the sixth now. During the summer of 2016 I trained to become a master Firewalk instructor and now regularly take people across the hot coals for charity. Late 2017 I directed the short film 'Seeing Him' which collected a ton of awards too. Over the following years I continued to make award-winning shorts, such as Meet The Nativity and Never Too Late. In the summer of 2022 I premiered Impact 50, the second feature-length movie from Create50. This time I directed the segment at the start of the film, with Olivia Williams as the President, and written by Joe Eszterhas. In the summer of 2022, I also joined the Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 productions as Splinter Unit director. At Halloween 2023, the Apple TV+ show that I co-executive-produced, 'The Enfield Poltergeist', premiered. I run regular filmmaking workshops for filmmakers both online and in person. Some people ask how I began making films? Like most filmmakers of my generation, it was with a Super 8mm camera, summertime and school friends, usually after watching a behind-the-scenes TV programme on a Hollywood movie like Star Wars. My first film was a zombie horror called Necronomicon, heavily influenced by John Carpenter's The Fog. And I was hooked for life. Contact me at Ealing Film Studios, Ealing Green, London, W5 5EP, UK
