Earth Mama filmmaker Savanah Leaf, X+Y and 500 Miles helmer Morgan Matthews and Spilt Milk screenwriter Cara Loftus all touched down at Dublin’s second annual screenwriting festival Storyhouse this week where they revealed their different paths of entry into the film business. 

“Someone once told me that you’re not a director until you tell people you are,” said Leaf, whose debut feature Earth Mama earned her a BAFTA award. “So, for me, it became about owning that title. I would then tell everyone I was an aspiring director and so I just started to reframe that in my own headspace.” 

Leaf, a former athlete who had played volleyball for Team GB at the 2012 Olympics, said she took the money she had made from her sports career and put it into making her first short film The F Word. 

“It was basically about me trying to understand why my father wasn’t parenting me,” she said. “And that’s where the similar themes come from in my work – trying to understand why a parent isn’t parenting and where that comes from and making that kind of lineage or connection between the lineage. I don’t know where it comes from other than just me as a person doing self-discovery and having an interest in making myself feel less alone by creating stories that in some way might connect with other people who are going through similar journeys.” 

Matthews started his career in the documentary space before moving into the feature film world with projects such as The Railway Children Return and upcoming Bill Nighy starrer 500 Miles. “I didn’t make drama for a long time,” said Matthews. “I only made documentaries for ten to fifteen years.”

He discussed his feature X+Y, a feature film inspired by his documentary Beautiful Young Minds. That film starred Asa Butterfield, Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins and focused on a teenage English mathematics prodigy named Nathan (Butterfield) who is autistic but found comfort in numbers.

“Going into the film, I had zero idea,” Matthews admits. “I hadn’t made any drama before and the documentary films I had made were mostly quite intimate with a very small crew.”

He continued: “All the construct and everything around the feature from the number of people and all of these different roles, I didn’t really know how it worked working with actors. But then I found the process really enjoyable. I really enjoyed working with actors and there are a lot of similarities in making a documentary and building trust and talking a lot more to people and gaining an understanding of each other.” 

Screenwriter Loftus, who was part of last year’s Storyhouse Lab, which runs alongside the screenwriting festival, spoke about having worked in the documentary, development and production spaces and how she pivoted into the writing world with her IFTA-nominated film Spilt Milk. 

“I just started reading loads of screenplays,” she said. “I was already watching a lot of films, but I started reading it on the page to teach myself how to do that format and how to structure dialogue and I think it took me years to even say to people, ‘So, I think I’m going to write.’

“Spilt Milk was one of the first things I wrote start, middle and end all the way through,” she said. “I’d been working on other ideas at the same time but that was the first idea I had where it wouldn’t leave me. I think I probably had the idea in 2016, and I knew that I wanted to tell this story – I had the vague conception, and I knew the start and the end, which actually now I think is really important. But I had no idea how to do any of the middle bit.”