Meet the Beacons Makers: Charlotte James

Charlotte James’s coming-of-age drama Doss House explores two teenage girls’ experiences of friendship, romance, and how emerging adulthood is filtered through the lens of male desire.

Before the broadcast, we sat down with Charlotte to chat about the ups and downs of short filmmaking, and the importance of time and place.

Hi Charlotte, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?  
I’m from Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. My background is in Creative Direction, Casting and Styling. I mainly have been working on a collaborative project with Clementine Schneiderman, together we developed the community-based photography project Bleak Fabulous which is part of the archive at The National Museum of Wales. I’ve directed a few moving image projects, but Doss House was the first narrative piece that I’ve written and directed. Writing and directing is always something I planned to do, and I made the move when I applied for Beacons. 
 
How was your experience of making Doss House? 
It was a brilliant experience and one I will always remember. To be able to make a film in my home town and work with actors from there was really special. 

What were the most challenging and most rewarding parts of the process? 
I think adapting the story to the timings on shoot days was quite challenging, we had quite a bit to get through and shoot with lots of location changes, so we had to cut some parts down, and we cut a big chunk in the edit so letting go of certain parts was a process I had to get used to.

It was rewarding collaborating with the actors, cast with Hannah Williams from HMW casting. We were looking for working-class young people in the Valleys and met some brilliant people in the workshops Hannah put on. We cast two amazing young women, Grace Meaden and Ellie Minard, who had not acted before only in school. We also cast an old friend of mine Cameron Jones, who was excellent. I spent a lot of time in the summer with them all developing the script and I loved that collaborative process, and getting their input on the story and language, keeping it authentic to me and them. 

Why did you choose to set the film in the Welsh valleys?  
The Valleys is home to me, I have made all my personal work here so it was a natural step to want to tell stories from a world I know alongside my community. The story is loosely based on experiences I had as a young woman, but the story I think is universal to a lot of the female experiences growing up. 

What kind of support did you get from Ffilm Cymru Wales & BFI NETWORK? 
Ffilm Cymru were really supportive throughout the development of Doss House. Giving script notes and checking in with me as the project progressed. They were always on hand if anything came up in pre-production and the edit, which was really helpful to me, as they were a great soundboard for any questions or worries I had. 

What do you have planned next?  
I’m studying on a short screenwriting course at NFTS and developing a feature idea with a production company, it’s a story about three generations of women from The Valleys and the complexities of intergenerational relationships, and how they’re affected by circumstance and working-class social pressures. I am also working on a short film idea with the team at RAPT Productions who produced Doss House.