Bringing It Home
The London Premiere and What It Means to Show Your Film to the home crowd
Two years in, and what goes through my head right before the lights dim isn’t what you’d think. It’s not “I hope people love this” or “I hope they understand what we were trying to say.” It’s simpler, more practical, and honestly more revealing: I hope nothing breaks. I hope the projection is clean. I hope the sound is loud enough. When you’re about to show a film to people who have been there along the journey, worrying about the technical is a blessing because it stops your brain from spiralling into what actually matters: Did I deliver on what we promised them?
There’s this idea that premiering your film is mostly about the moment it hits the screen. The red carpet energy, the audience applause, the validation. And yes, those things happen. But what no one tells you is that showing your film to strangers at a festival is profoundly different from showing it to people who were in the trenches with you, those who saw behind the curtain.
The people who made your film with you and those who followed the journey from the very beginning, they know exactly what you promised. They know the script you were excited about. They know which scenes you fought for. And they were there believing in it alongside you. That’s where the real pressure lives.
Tomorrow night at Raindance, it is going to be scarier. There’s no getting around that.
The Think of England Experience
Think of England is a deeply British story. Not just in setting, but in the specific texture of what we were exploring, the nuance, the subtext, the things we don’t say out loud. When we showed it in Tallinn for our World Premiere at the Black Nights Film Festival, the reaction was one thing. People responded to the visuals, the craft, the emotional core. But when we played it in Glasgow for our UK premiere, we got a different response. The laughter came earlier. The silences felt different. People caught things that don’t necessarily translate with subtitles.
For our London premiere at Raindance, I know it’s going to be even more pronounced. It’s where people are used to watching everything, from everywhere, in every style. That’s exciting. It also means they’ll pick it apart more thoroughly. They have context. They have a comparison. They’re watching it against everything else they’ve seen. But because we knew who we were making this for, and we knew the people we were making it with, we weren’t trying to make something for an imaginary universal audience. We wanted to make something original and bold and that will inevitably be divisive.
The stills and trailer we released months before the premiere helped with this too. It wasn’t just marketing. It was easing people into what to expect, gently preparing them so when they walked into the cinema, they had some framework. And then there was the fact that the film has already had success at other festivals, but real recognition from people who care about independent cinema. That matters. It builds faith and credibility. It tells your cast and crew, “You made something real. People outside of us see it too.”
What actually matters when the film hits the big screen
I’ve learned that what makes a premiere successful looks different from the outside than it does from the inside. Success for me now is about the technical everything working perfectly. It’s about having a full audience, yes, but also having the people who made it there with you. It’s about launching the film in the conditions it deserves on a proper screen, in a proper cinema, not on a screening link where you’re watching it on someone’s laptop and that’s important to me and our mission at Giant Films.
The relief of finally letting it go is real. As a producer, you hold so much: the vision, the budget, the timeline, the relationships, the problem-solving. And then one day you don’t anymore. The film is what it is. You can’t touch it. You can’t make it better. And that’s actually liberating. If you can be at peace with the film being what the film is, not what you imagined it could be in some perfect version, but what it actually is, then you’ve won something bigger than a good premiere!
Why Raindance is where we needed to be
Raindance led by the incredible Elliot Grove has always championed truly independent filmmakers. The maverick ones. The ones making films the way we’re trying to make them. When they said yes to premiering Think of England in London, it wasn’t just a venue for us, it was also alignment. It was them saying, “We believe in what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.” That matters for us as filmmakers.
And that matters because independent filmmaking means making things in collaboration with people you trust, on budgets where every decision costs something, with a crew small enough that everyone matters. Those people deserve to see their work on a big screen. They deserve that viewing experience. They deserve to be celebrated not just in a wrap party, but in a room full of people who are there because they chose to be.
What Comes Next
The film still doesn’t feel finished to me and I don’t think it will until it’s had the general theatrical release later this year, until I can’t touch it anymore, until it belongs to audiences I’ll never meet. But for tomorrow night, if you see me, you’ll know I’ll be in the room thinking about the projection, the sound, the lights. I’ll be holding my breath. And I’ll be grateful for two years of people who believed enough to show up and make something honest.
That’s what it means to bring it home.
If you would like to follow the journey and find out how it all goes, I will be doing a webinar next Thursday 25th June at 4pm BST with Richard Hawkins, the director of Think of England, to debrief about the whole experience. Sign up here and see you on the other side!