21 Days, No Names, No Interference : The Making of a Truly Independent Film
Director Richard on shooting a WWII-era ensemble in under three weeks, the brutal reality of late-stage casting, building a remote edit suite across two continents, and why “independent film” is a label most productions don’t deserve.
After a gap of more than twenty years between features, a director returning to the industry might expect to find an alien landscape. New cameras, new workflows, new gatekeepers. What Richard found instead, on the set of Think of England, was immediate: the fundamental craft of storytelling hadn’t moved. Everything around it had, and that turned out to be mostly to his advantage.
The film — a WWII-set period drama with a deliberately deceptive opening, an ensemble cast of unknowns, and a production that ran on 21 shooting days — has been quietly making waves on the festival circuit, picking up awards at Tallinn before heading to Glasgow and Manchester. What the festival audiences don’t see is the production architecture behind it: a strategy built on a production shaped by independence, constraint, and a remote editing workflow that would have been impossible a decade ago.
For filmmakers working today — whether in pre-production, on set, or deep in post — the lessons Richard drew from this shoot cut across departments and budgets. Here’s what he had to say.
Forget the Names. Build the World.
One of the first decisions Richard made was also one of the most commercially risky: no names. In an industry where casting often functions as a financing mechanism — bankable talent unlocking funds, which unlock more talent — choosing to build an ensemble of unknown faces is a statement of intent that has real downstream consequences.
“Normally you’d be going for names,” he says, “but I didn’t want any. Otherwise it would have overwhelmed the ensemble thing. I wanted a sort of equality of stature.” The goal wasn’t just creative preference, but authenticity. The cast needed to look like they belonged in the 1940s—not like contemporary actors dressed for it. Getting that right, he says, was one of the hardest parts of the process.
“I wanted these people, the moment you looked at them, to somehow just feel like you’d stepped back in time.” — Richard, Director, Think of England
The casting process itself was anything but orderly. Natalie — found first, partly through her work on Call the Midwife — was locked in six months before shooting began, giving the production the anchor it needed. The rest of the cast assembled around her, one by one. The lead male, Jack, came on board just ten days before cameras rolled.
“It was terrifying,” Richard says without embellishment. “It just feels like it’s not going to come together. And it sort of does.” The ten-day buffer gave the production time for a full rehearsal block with Jack, a compressed but intensive process that he credits for much of the performance work on screen. It’s a reminder that rehearsal time, even when squeezed by late commitments, can be a production’s most valuable investment.
Shooting 21 Days: What “Ambitious” Actually Means
The 21-day shoot is the number that tends to stop people. It’s the kind of figure that sounds like a boast until you understand the production’s actual scope: multiple aspect ratios, multiple formats, and weather conditions that did not cooperate.
“It was insanely ambitious,” Richard says. “Not just because we can film in 21 days — but if you consider the different aspect ratios and mediums we were making it on, some of those scenes we were shooting effectively three times.”
The film’s black-and-white sequences required a distinct camera setup with halogen lights; those same scenes were then cut with colour footage shot from entirely different positions. The logistical problem isn’t just time — it’s continuity of intent across formats.
The camera package centred on the ARRI Alexa, with the ARRI Mini used for handheld and smaller setups. The production’s most distinctive technical choice, however, was lighting. Cinematographer Sarah pushed for hard tungsten lights, practical period-accurate lighting that not only served the black-and-white sequences but bled into the colour material, giving the whole film a heightened, shadowier quality that most contemporary productions actively avoid.
“People just would not use them anymore,” Richard says. “But it gives it that heightened shadowiness.” The willingness to impose period-specific technical constraints across the entire production is the kind of unified creative decision that separates films with a genuine visual identity from those that simply look like their budget.
“With the pre-production and the production, I think it was sort of 40 consecutive 18-hour days. When I got back home after we wrapped, it was an 18-hour sleep.” — Richard, Director, Think of England
Think of England (2026) courtesy of Vianney Le Caer and Giant Aura Limited
The Transatlantic Edit: Remote Collaboration Done Right
The edit for Think of England was conducted between London and New York — editor Alex in a London suite, Richard on screens in a New York apartment — over several months. What makes this unremarkable as a statement of fact is worth examining: it would have been harder to achieve ten years ago, and it’s now a genuinely viable creative workflow.
The tools: Frame.io for review and annotation, and Looper for live simultaneous editing sessions.
“You can use it live,” Richard explains. “So you’re almost putting them together and there it is.” The time difference between New York and London — which might seem like a complication — became a structural advantage. Richard would spend afternoons writing extremely precise, timecoded notes down to the frame; Alex would implement them overnight; they’d review together when the working day overlapped.
What “Truly Independent” Actually Costs You
Richard is pointed about the gap between the label “independent film” and what it actually means in practice. Most films described as independent, he argues, aren’t — scratch the surface and you’ll find broadcaster involvement, public funding bodies, tax credit structures, or studio output deals that come with corresponding strings. Think of England was made without any of those mechanisms.
“We are truly independent,” he says, “which means nobody has any invested interest in us succeeding now.” He’s not presenting this as pure virtue — the trade-off is real. Complete creative freedom up to the point of release; then, at the point of release, a machine that has no stake in your success. “We have all the advantages we’ve had up to now. Now we have the disadvantage.“
The decision to avoid public funding was also a practical one rooted in painful experience. “My own experience of that is just so difficult and so laborious and you don’t win and your whole life’s gone out to play.” He estimates a decade of his career spent in development and funding cycles that produced nothing. For some projects and some filmmakers, those systems are essential infrastructure; for others, they are a creative and temporal black hole.
On distribution, the strategy has been festival-first — Tallinn, Glasgow, Manchester — to generate word-of-mouth, meet sales agents, and establish the film’s profile before committing to a release structure. The landscape here has changed enormously since Richard’s last feature. Streaming platforms have created what he calls “creepers” — films that find audiences slowly, organically, over years rather than in a theatrical window. “You can really have films that find their audience, word of mouth, one by one.” That’s a genuine structural shift for independent filmmakers whose work doesn’t have the marketing weight to compete theatrically with studio product.