Jon takes the plunge
WHEN Jon Harris was three, two boys of around his own age moved into the house across the road in Fulwood and they have all been friends ever since.
Crucially, Mark and Simon Griblin's father had a cine camera which the boys borrowed and from an early age began making their own films.
All three have gone on to careers in the media, with Harris becoming a leading editor in the movie business who has made his feature directing debut on underground horror film The Descent Part 2.
It is the sequel to the 2005 film in which six female potholers were trapped underground with unseen malevolent beings lurking in the darkness. It picks up the story where the first left off and follows a rescue team accompanying the sole survivor back down to try and locate the missing women.
Harris had worked as editor on the original film and had directed some of the second unit sequences and the producers thought he was a natural choice to take over from Neil Marshall, who had moved on to Hollywood.
He was undaunted by the challenge. "The gulf moving from editing to directing is more a physical difference, having sat in an editing suite to going on set with 50 people, but creatively it's almost seamless," he says.
"I always thought of myself as a film-maker in an organic process."
Although the chance to direct was too good to miss, Harris says: "I wanted to be sure it was worth doing and we could do it well. As a kid I would watch anything and loved horror but as I get older I am more interested in storytelling so the horror has to have a story that holds up."
Which takes us back to those early days when the three friends completed their first film, aged nine or ten. "It was 1978 and we were into Star Wars and it was about robots. As we got older we were allowed to move further from home to places like Wyming Brook and Endcliffe Park.
"We would spend our summers making films and then show them to friends and family at the end. We would make daft sci-fi films and scratch special effects on the film.
"All three of us became editors. Mark now works for Sky and Simon is an online editor. Most editors agree it's the best part of the process."
From Tapton School, Harris enrolled on a film course at Harrow College, now part of the University of Westminster, followed by a year at Bournemouth Film School where he was reunited with the Griblin brothers.
"I came out of college in the early Nineties in the depths of recession and it was hard to get a job. I just carried on making music videos for emerging bands in London and cut trailers for short films.
"If I got a job I would have the keys which would give me access to gear and I could go in at weekends and edit other people's stuff," he says.
"You keep going and you meet people. One of them was Matthew Vaughn (Guy Ritchie's producer and now a director) and he got me on as second editor on Snatch and I ended up getting the whole thing," he recalls."Then the industry started to pick up and I got offered a lot more."
His credits include Ripley's Game, Layer Cake, Starter for Ten, Stardust, Eden Lake and, of course, The Descent.
Harris believes one of the factors that have shaped him as a film-maker is that those early exploits were on film.
"It was only after my A-levels that video became accessible and I made videos for local bands such as Minister of Inspiration (forerunner of Boy on a Dolphin). We rented gear from Sheffield Independent Film who in those says were working out of a house in Walkley.
"Nowadays all you need is a camera and a laptop and you can make a feature film and put it on the web. From a personal point of view I am glad I was there at the tail end of film when it was harder to do because I think that it teaches you a lot.
"Also, I think I would have made different films if I had grown up in London. In Sheffield there was more of an outdoor life, that's what you did. I remember school trips to the Blue John Caves and Speedwell Cavern. Mind you, the thought of that freaks me out now."
Given that he has just made a film set almost entirely underground, that seems surprising. "I got stuck on the Corkscrew at Alton Towers when I was about 20. I was there for 20 minutes and had to talk myself down and since then I have suffered claustrophobia," he reveals.
When he went to film school he tried to leave behind his boyish attachment to sci-fi horror and his graduation film was gritty social realism in the Ken Loach mould.
Some hope. "I remember a few years ago my parents moved down south to a house with a big garden. My mum said you will have to come and make a film, it is a great place for a monster. Mum, I said, I don't make monsters films any more. Well, welcome to The Descent Part 2."
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Saturday 04 February 2012
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