An interview with a filmmaker

Here’s how he moved from being a student pastor to an award-winning filmmaker.

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I had the privilege of interviewing Phil Dunn during Stronger 2022. Phil is the founder and director of the label Authentive, and is an award-winning film director, a screenwriter and poet. He’s also a good friend.

I thought it would be good to hear from Phil because I’m convinced that there are lots of filmmakers and creative writers and story tellers out there who need a bit of encouragement and cheering on, especially if the last couple of years have been challenging for you, or if you’ve just started experimenting because you’ve responded to a nudge from the Holy Spirit.

I knew hearing from Phil would be faith-raising, and a good example of someone who has been moving forward, a step at a time, seeking to respond to deep seated and God given passion and drive. What he has managed to accomplish already is really inspiring, and I’m excited to see where it goes.

Here's a little snippet of my conversation with Phil, before we release the recording of the whole conversation in the coming weeks:

Question 1: How did you pivot into filmmaking from what you were doing before that?

‘We had a handy-cam in the house, and we would mess around with that, and then my cousins and I would make little films together and I loved it. I didn't really think at that time that it would be something I would do, because it's one of those careers that people look at and go, ‘hmm, I could never do that. I mean, that's Hollywood’. But for me, it’s still something I think, ‘why couldn't I do that?’, ‘Why couldn't I go into that?’. 

Anyway, my father was a doctor and I ended up choosing medicine to study at University. Already there was a bit of a common thread with filmmaking, because it was about people and their stories, and how you help them.

And so I went into medicine, but in the meantime, I started making little videos with the video department at my local church in London because it was something I was fascinated by and enjoyed, and it just kind of grew. We did events with 200 students, and I would play these thought provoking videos of quotes and music and visuals, and the more I did it, the more I really got a kick out of it. I really loved how it connected with people, and I suppose in contrast to my experience of medicine, where I was finding that it was heading towards less contact with people and more problem solving with science.

I then stopped doing medicine and moved to study theology, after which I became a pastor in a local church and it was there that I really started connecting much more with story, and the power of story, obviously, in theology, where you know, these stories have been told for thousands of years, and which still hold sway over so much of culture and society, and then looking at Jesus and everything he did, and all this the incredible symbolism in the Gospels and how those guys, you know, the Gospel writers use that to tell powerful stories. 

And the more I'd studied it, the more I just loved it and it seemed to connect with this past time that I had of filmmaking, and they started to join up more, so that's kind of where it kind of was birthed.

Question 2: How did you keep the vision alive in a time when you had a vision of something bigger, but you weren’t quite there yet?

It’s still the same challenge today, but I bought a camera when I was a student on a credit card (very unwise) and I would make stuff, and then people were like ‘we want to pay you to come and make something for our company’, and I was like ‘Okay, right’. And so it grew that way, but then as the years go on, it started to feel a bit samey. 

When I first started, I did weddings a little bit, and I quite quickly tired of those, because it was like, this is sort of formula for doing weddings. And after a bit, you know, I'm sure some people will do much more creative job. And after a bit, you sort of think I've kind of done these now. And it was great way of building up skills, observing people, honing things like the light, and what the person's trying to say, and how do we help them to get that across in the clearest way possible. So honing, honing, honing skills.

And it was time to take these skills that I had learnt and start applying them to something that I felt really passionate about. So I initially was really passionate about the skills, but then it was like, Okay, now that I've got them, what do I use them for? 

And personally I had a sense of like, I want to tell stories and it's not the story of that bank or company, but actually some of what God has been speaking to me about. So that's taken quite a lot of prayer and friendship support to actually get through to a place where I feel okay about doing that. But, yeah, it's one of the hardest things to really go to that point that God has genuinely called you to go there rather than just settle.

Question 3: What is the process of creating and writing the stories behind your films? 

For me, the ones that I feel really passionate about, like Box Office Smash have really been an idea that will just not go away. So using Box Office Smash as an example, it came from just playing with those words, it sounds like a big block blockbuster film, and it's not, it's, you know, it's very sort of unusual, slightly abstract, and an absurd kind of film. But again, very symbolic, and it's a man who works inside a cardboard box, and in that cardboard box in the middle of a park. And he doesn't realise he can get out of it.

And for me, that was very symbolic at the time of me, in that cardboard box of making corporate videos for people and thinking, ‘hang-on, surely I can get out of this…’ And in that story, you know, sometimes you need things to go horribly wrong for you to realise it's time to get out. And the guy in the film, his computer, messes up and he ends up, having a bit of a moment and breaks out of his his box office. But as a story, as a concept, it was just something that got in my head five years before and it just stayed there in my mind, that held a message that I kept coming back to. And I really do feel like that was God sort of saying ‘I want to speak to you through this…’.

Keep you eyes and ears out for more from this interview with Phil. Hopefully this gives you enough to provide some value but also whet your appetite for more!