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  DIRECTORS UK ELECTION STATEMENT FROM BILL CLARK Thanks for taking the time to read this expansion of my election statement. I am standing because I am concerned that, in the wake of Covid, Brexit and, what I believe, is the current government’s complete disinterest in our industry, within the independent feature film sector, in the reporting and accounting of the performance of our work, we as directors, do not have enough protection either financially or contractually. For some time I have become frustrated by the levels of report I receive on the feature films I have made. Despite the fact that they are with bonafide distributors throughout the world and available on multi broadcast and web platforms I am left in the dark about their performance and rarely receive updates on how the films are performing. My complaint is not that I do not receive enough money - it is that I receive or no information on how my work is performing or how the ledgers are stacking up. Directors UK has, i
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Working through the predjudices

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The following is a piece I was asked to write for Directors UK in support of their disability group. Recently, I attended the Directors UK Disability Working Group’s Zoom event “Ask Us Anything”. Although I am not disabled, I have been fortunate enough to know and to make a film about someone who is, so for a long time, the problems of living and working whilst being disabled were a daily concern of mine. For a decade I worked on  Starfish , the story of Tom Ray, who, like me, worked in the film business, like me, had a wife and two kids he loved beyond dreams, but who, unlike me, suffered a terrible, life threatening illness that left him a quadriplegic amputee, only escaping death by surrendering much of his life. Tom Ray working as a body double on the set of Starfish. Photo: Bill Clark. The strength I saw Tom and his wife, Nicola, draw on to survive, keep their family together and grow their relationship and conquer those immense challenges, both rocked the belief I had in my own c
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How complicating the maths might help industrial relations.

Listening to the row about the meagre pay rise being floated for NHS staff, and thinking about the fiscal balancing act that the Chancellor is undertaking to pay back more money than there are numbers in the world, it occurred to me that perhaps the problem lies in successive governments determination to dumb down the maths that run our systems to the point where any creature with a decimal number of digits to work with can understand it. I was born into a society without a metric nerve in its body. We were avoirdupois, l.s.d. and imperial to our roots. We had stones, shillings and chains to consider using intricate mathematical relationships that seemed to have no logical relationship   and operated independently of each other. It was complex and challenging - but it taught us how to think outside the binary world and consider different ways that arithmetical systems could solve problems. When I started work in my father’s print works in the early 70s, I was tasked with learning every
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The day the HS2 money pit opened...

Today is the official ground-dig start of the HS2 build. At a time when the country, ravaged by a disease which it, apparently, didn't see coming is financially broken by the cost of deferring redundancies and bankruptcies and has discovered new, travel free ways of doing business, the government is undertaking yet another Bob the builder project which will inevitably spiral out of cost control, take far longer than has been planned and ultimately, be of little benefit to the commuting population that will pay for it. There really is little defence of this project on any level. The idea that the save in time will be of benefit to the business community in 2050 is ludicrous. By then technology will provide us with instant visual communication anywhere in the world and electric helicopters to take us anywhere we need to be in the security of our own space. 
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