How I Turned My Passion For Film Making Into A Reality

Retired drama teacher turned film director and producer, Rosita Clarke tells us about the ghostly Dorset love story that has just won her an award at an international film festival

- Rosita Clarke

TAKING my passion for drama into the world of film making was something I had always dreamed of. My directorial debut in film was Far From the Madding Crowd based on Thomas Hardy’s novel. It was unusual because it was made by a comprehensive school in Sherborne and featured students as cast members, including Ben Jones in the role of Francis Troy. Now known as Ben Hardy, he played Peter Beale in EastEnders and Archangel in The X-Men Movies and has a part in the currently in-production film Mary Shelley. Far From the Madding Crowd was successfully launched on the media circuit in 2009 receiving acclaimed coverage from CNN and the BBC.

In 2015 I set out to make a second feature film, The Other Side of the Lake a psychological ghost story set in the county I call home. The main character is an adolescent boy Tom Kearns who is visiting Dorset’s coast for the first time and gets inextricably involved with characters from the county’s 18th century smuggling past.

So how do you get a film made? When I set up my production company I Will Film my aim was to focus on making short films, writing screenplays and producing film trailers. Then an Irish writer called Jim Burke contacted me with an idea. He had seen my Far From the Madding Crowd film and wondered if a ghostly love story with a smuggling theme that he had written could be made into a film. After reading the story, which I loved, I realised that it would work extremely well if the setting transferred from Ireland to the Dorset coast. So I wrote the screenplay The Other Side of the Lake and the visual cinematic concept of the original story as a full length feature film was born.