Filmmaker’s First Feature Film is Love Letter to Lancashire Blackpool’s (Lytham St Annes) Ryan J Smith is 24 years old; he achieved his bachelor’s degree from the world famous MetFilm School aged just 20 (he was accepted aged 17) and is continuing to make name for himself in the film industry. Not only is he multi-award winning, he has just completed his first feature film, Lottery, soon to be shown at Regent Cinema Blackpool.
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here’s a kind of symmetry in this, Ryan’s first ever film, a LEGO stop-start animation that he created as a primary school project (Roseacre) was put on at the Blackpool Odeon. . Ryan said: “I remember seeing the credits, my name on the huge screen: ‘Directed by Ryan aged 8’. That was a feeling! So, I’ve had a great deal of encouragement from a very young age. I can’t remember a time when I was ever going to do anything different other than make films.” The idea for Lottery, first came to Ryan at Metfilm School, he said: “It took me a couple of years to land on a solid script worth shooting, but we got there in the end. I spent two years after film school shopping the movie idea around every studio and production company in the country all of which, predictably, said ‘no’. “The lesson I learned was to listen to my gut, which by that point was screaming for me to become my own studio and own what I do, both creatively and financially.
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“I’m glad I waited on this movie and didn’t shoot it back when I was 19 and doe-eyed, it would’ve been a very different film, much more straightrazored — whereas now, I feel it’s
LANCASHIRE & NORTH WEST MAGAZINE
shifted into something more mature although my fingerprints from the past are still all over it, it’s more of a tattoo than a film for me.” www.lancmag.com
