Rutger Hauer Filmfactory

On the Writers' Guild website, Anton Damen speaks to the writers who provided the scripts at this year’s Rutger Hauer Filmfactory for young filmmakers.

The Rutger Hauer Filmfactory is not a film school, it's a crash course. The participants are thrown in at the deep end, because it is Hauer’s firm belief that everybody has a film in them; ‘trust your guts, make a movie,’ is his mantra. The international experts are there to ensure that none of the participants accidentally drown in the sometimes immense experience of making a film with limited resources and, even more so, limited time. The five groups this year each consisted of a director, producer, director of photography, editor and an actor. Together, they managed to overcome dramatic deadlines, logistical nightmares and internal conflicts and at the end resurface with two films shot in just one week.

More importantly than the end results, in Hauer's eyes, is that they enjoyed the creative process. In order to get the teams off to a flying start, the Filmfactory commissioned two scripts by young screenwriters: Lili Forestier from France and Dirk Achten from Belgium. They each wrote a special screenplay for a five-minute short based on the pitch ‘my one and only’. Each screenplay formed the basis for the films of two of teams (the remaining fifth team got a poem to sink their teeth into), whilst Rotterdam High School students also got the same screenplays to toy with.