Simon Shore (original) (raw)

Simon Shore never planned to be a movie director.

“I always thought I was going to work in the theater,” he says. But after finishing high school, Shore left England for France, where he became fascinated by cinema. “Paris is certainly the best city in Europe to see movies,” he says.

He put off going to college to stay on in France, coloring animation cels. In his spare time, he remembers, he would prowl a particular Paris flea market, looking for unmarked cans of film that he could take home and recut.

When he finally did start college in England, it was as a film student, not a theater major. He studied for six years, first at the London College of Printing, then at the Royal College of Art. One of his student films, “La Boule,” won the British Academy award and was a runner-up for the student Oscars.

He began his directing career the very day after he graduated, flying to Indonesia, where he spent three months shooting a documentary in the rain forest. From there, he went on to do more documentaries, television dramas and then “Get Real,” his first feature.

Anant Singh, the executive producer of “Get Real,” says he was especially impressed by Shore’s work with performers.

“I think the one thing that he has been phenomenally good with is his ability to extract performances and work with actors,” he says. “In the case of ‘Get Real,’ most of these actors had done very little, and their performances are as good as you can expect from anyone.”

Singh also admired Shore’s approach to the material in “Get Real,” a coming-of-age movie about a gay 16-year-old boy in England who falls in love with a classmate.

“It was the heart that he was able to communicate in the story,” Singh says. The most important thing, he adds, was Shore’s determination to make sure that all audiences — gay or straight — could understand and relate to the dilemma of the lead character, Steven Carter.

Shore says he felt strongly that as many people as possible should see the movie.

“Parents who might have gay kids should see this, and friends of gay kids should see this,” he says. “It’s a gay film, but it’s using that gay story as a metaphor for something that we all understand. Steven Carter’s story is a metaphor for everyone’s adolescence.”

Shore, who is straight, says he and writer Patrick Wilde, who is gay, struggled to find a way to make heterosexual audiences understand why Steven was so tortured by staying in the closet.

“I got Patrick to write a list of 20 reasons why it’s bad to be gay and not come out,” Shore recalls. The list became a template for how they would make Steven’s predicament comprehensible.

For example, one item on Wilde’s list was, “Girls fall in love with you, and you don’t know what to tell them,” which prompted a subplot in which a girl at school has a crush on Steven. “I wanted some way of identifying with the way Steven’s being gay impacts everyone in his circle of friends,” Shore says.

While Shore would like to do films in the United States — and in France — he says he wants to find a project that requires his particular sensibility, and that is set in a world he can understand.

“The things that I think people like about ‘Get Real’ are to do with the way I know the subject matter. I know the English sensibility,” he says. “I don’t want to just go to America and do an American movie. I want there to be a reason for me to be doing it.”