Find out who I am.
I’ll stand at the front of any room if that’s what it takes to get you looking. But I’m always pointing somewhere else.
I remember standing at the back of the main screen in the Curzon Mayfair, watching Charlotte Rampling walk out to the rapturous applause of four hundred people. The film was Hannah — a small, quiet film that would never have been released in the UK without our company. And there she was, receiving exactly the kind of reception her work deserved.
That’s the moment I’m always working towards. Not the deal, not the booking, not the review. The room looking at something it wouldn’t have seen without me.
I’ve been doing this my whole life, in one form or another — teaching English literature, running a film club, building a film distribution company, training people to make their lives better with tech, making tools that show you what your audience is actually saying when nobody’s watching.
Same gesture. Different materials.
Growing up in Cornwall in the seventies, I was the kid who couldn’t quite talk to people – but I found that if I could share a film, or a record, or invite someone around to watch something, that was enough. That was the connection.
I used to sit in the Regal in Redruth watching the same film three times on the same day because something in it needed to be understood, not just seen. I followed a double bill around five different cinemas across the county because the only way to watch it again was to go to the next town.
I became a teacher. Then an actor. Then a filmmaker. Then a film distributor — which, it turns out, someone told me was my destiny in a job interview in 1987. It took thirty years and a film I saw at Cannes to find out they were right.
Along the way I built some things I needed and couldn’t find anywhere else. Pain Point Pulse came out of wanting to understand what audiences were actually saying — not what they put in surveys, but what they typed at two in the morning when they thought nobody was watching.
The Kadence plugin came out of spending hours fighting a website when I should have been talking to it. These tools exist because I had the problem first.
I just happened to be able to build the answer.
I have an ADHD brain, which explains more than I realised — the obsessive repeat-watching, the hyperfocus, the systems I build to make everything work. I was diagnosed at 58, which means I spent a long time thinking I was just unreliable. Turns out I was wired differently.
The systems help. And now I share them.
None of this is separate. The film work and the tools and the training and the club — it’s all the same thing. I find what deserves attention and I make sure it gets seen.