Meet The Maker—An Interview with James Goodchild; award-winning editor of Mirella

✽ For the people, tell five-fold who you are, what you do, and what just happened last weekend.

JG: I'm James Goodchild. I'm a filmmaker, educator, and editor. And more specifically, I'm the editor of Mirella, a feature length documentary that just won at Kingston International Film Festival, Best Documentary. And it's the first feature documentary I've ever edited it as well. So really bonkers.

✽How does that feel?

JG: Yeah, it's not fully sunk in yet, and it's one of those things where, especially in the edit, they say, as you start editing, you become the library of the edit. And I don't know whether actual librarians feel this, but toward the end of that film, we worked on it for three years and I was kind of sick of it because I couldn't tell what was good or what was bad anymore, what parts were making sense. It was so meticulously crafted and planned. So it felt like it should make sense, but we were watching it and going. “What is going on at all these different parts?” So to see it come together and get good feedback. I mean, got really good feedback and then also for it to win an award is.. Yeah, it's still quite sinking in. We did pour our hearts and souls into it yeah, close on three years so. I do hope it comes off that way.

✽ Do you feel like you're at the precipice of everything taking off?'Cause I know you've been working for many, many years on many things and it feels like it's all finally coming into fruition.

JG: Yeah, I mean, I think you never know with these things, and that's the thing. And it was really interesting in one of the Q&A panels at the festival, Cristina Barillari, who was there, she's also a documentary editor. I mean, she edits lots of different things, but she always had in her brain. She said that if she can make it to Venice Film Festival, if a film got in there and won, like that is it, to make it as an editor, especially in Italy being an Italian editor as she is, to get that, she was like, "That's it. I'm gonna be set for life. That's my career done now”. And her first feature documentary that she worked on, she was editor on it. Won the festival, and then for the next five months, she couldn't find any work. So you can't put too much weight on those sorts of things, but it is really nice. There's been so many things that've been working on for so long where people have been like, oh, where can I watch that? And I'm like, "Well, it's actually not out anywhere yet. And it's, tucked away in film festivals and you can't really see them and, you know, unless you travel to the actual festival”. So I'm hoping things come off the back of it and I've got plenty more projects in the works.

✽Some may be published on Five-fold. Wink wink. How are you trying to be more selfish as a creative?

JG: How am I trying to be more selfish as a creative? I mean, I don't know, I've talked to people about this before about the idea of selfishness within art. And I don't know whether it's becoming more selfish, but I do think that a lot of it's about collaborating, especially within filmmaking. You can make a film on your own, obviously, and people do it, and people make features on their own, and they will write and direct and star in it. They'll do the whole shebang. But there is something inherently collaborative about the process, and there's this definition, I found when I was researching creativity and education, for my degree. There were two definitions of creativity that I just loved, and one is a standard definition. It's the combination of any two preexisting ideas to produce something novel. I really like that. But the definition I ended up actually settling on was any creative act or any creative expression is when you reflect on your internal world and you express that externally for other people. In terms of being selfish, maybe it's just finding the time to work on the things that you’ve had in your brain for so long to put them out there. There's something about expressing your inner world and sharing that with the world I think is part of the creative process that a lot of people would seem to be selfish.

✽What does the landscape of your inner world look like right now?

JG: Look like right now? Probably pretty crazy at the moment. It feels like.. I don't know one of those blob world paintings. I've got one up in the flat. And it's like a bridge and there's someone walking across it. I feel like I've just been tight roping across the bridge and I'm on the other side now. But I feel like I'm looking back at the gap going, bloody hell, how the hell did we go across that chasm? Like, what, what is going on there? But yeah, it feels like on the other side of things right now, there's definitely more of a sense of calm, especially with summer. Oh, my I'm so excited for summer, not being stuck behind a screen for as long.

✽ Yeah, how do you balance your practice or your services being behind the screens so much and getting some light?

JG: Yeah, I mean, honestly, in winter, it is a struggle. But I think it is that thing of.. You have to have firm boundaries, but also be flexible. When we were editing this film, the first push we had to edit it, we had about six weeks to go from basically a very loose assembly to a watchable feature. The clips are in order with some of the stories there, but the timelines are three hours. Just rough stuff. Putting together a preview screening that was going to be screened at the RGS, The Royal Geographic Society, and we had six weeks to do that. So I was like, “okay, every single day I'm doing this, and I will be up at seven, I'll check through all the timelines, prep everything, get on the train, I’d travel into Brixton to go to the edit location. We'd edit for 10 hours, I'd come home, I'd reflect on the day I'd make notes, I'd go to sleep”. And sometimes it calls for that. But I never try to do more than three days like that in a row, unless I can help it, unless there's a crunch time. And that fourth day is, I'm not doing anything. I'm not doing any admin. I'm just doing whatever, if I wake up in the morning, I'm like, I'm gonna lay here for three hours and then make a coffee and go for a walk. Then that's what that day is. And if that day ends up being, I'm going to lay here for 10 minutes, make a coffee, think about the edit, that's fine. But, yeah, for sure. Myopia is a serious epidemic, man. You gotta stretch them eyes, you know, 20-20-20.

✽ If you could open a third space in Kingston, that is completely your own to run, but can also be community run. What would it be? And I want this to be a place that you imagine yourself hanging out in all the time anyway because it's your world, but it's also a place for other people to practice creatively.

JG: I actually have a really specific idea for this. Don't steal this as a franchise. In university towns, you've got the filmmaking courses, there are psychology, philosophy courses. And I love the vibe of a cafe for writing. So a writers space first with good coffee is the dream, and there are some really lovely independent cafes here already, so not that that doesn't exist, but to have some kind of library space there, that can turn into some place of study where you can borrow books, you can exchange things. But also, attached to the wall or in a binder stuck to a table somewhere. There's just pages, and there's prompts on the pages or something like that, and you can go in there and you can you can write down a story, and, I don't know, maybe there's some way to signal to people. Like, you can come and ask me about this thing or, you know, this is just for me. And you can just read people's stories. You can write down whatever it is that you want. And it just becomes like a nice space for people to feel like they can share things. Also like they can study. I think there's that balance of taking things in and giving things out that I think is really important to get with everything, really.

✽And it is done. And it is done. You heard it here first, so no one can steal it?So it already exists. What would you call it?

JG: What would I call it? The first thing that came to my head first was calling it The Study. Maybe whatever that is, but in Greek. It feels like it has a nice apocrypha, you know, apothecary kind of vibe to it.

✽ Final question. If you could hire someone for £20 an hour, to do the work that you don't want to do as part of your creative practice, what would you have them doing?

JG: What would I have them do? Do you know, years ago I would have said, logging footage, because that takes so long. Just going through every single clip marking out where the slate is, syncing it, writing the description, it takes so long, honestly. That might be sometimes a third of the edit for a short film. But I actually now really like the process, I don't enjoy the process so much anymore, but you learn everything about the footage then. So when you're in the edit, you know everything. Currently for the project that I'm working on, the thing I would outsource to someone, Visual effects work. Whether or not I can do it is a separate issue from whether my computer wants to do it, and I've had too many crashes to think about just actually doing that myself. And so, yeah, I think I'd outsource the VFX. I'd get the bass plate done so people know where it's going. And I would love to hand that off to someone else.

✽ Okay, if that sounds like your cup of tea, you know where to reach James. Thank you very much.

JG: You're welcome.

✽ Fivefold.

JG: Fivefold.