With issue 10 of The Film Pupil just landed on our shelves we thought it was the perfect moment to find out more about this quirky, intelligent zine from its editor and illustrator Oliver Spicer. Take a moment to step inside the world of The Film Pupil.
Tell us about The Film Pupil……how and when did it all start?
I was in my first (and last) year doing film studies at Southampton University when the online version of The Film Pupil began. On campus, there was a really cool in-print culture magazine that had a film section - but the length of submission was quite limited, maybe 500 words. References tied down the longer essays for my course - as professors required a minimum number of sources, which restricted the uniqueness of your topic as it was harder to find scholarly articles on niche ideas. Longer film essays about unconventional subject matters were my goal - so I started thefilmpupil.comas a reason to write them.
Psychologically, I think I was conditioned to start a magazine by watching “The French Dispatch” (which uses a magazine as a premise for an anthology film) and reading André Bazin’s “What is Cinema?” over the summer - founder of Cahiers du Cinéma. I wanted to do both film studies and physics at university but couldn’t, so switched to physics and kept on running the website as a compromise. Many elements of the website influence the current printed issues: having five essays, the fonts, it being in black and white - a reference to student publications made on photocopiers or the film mags when colour printing was too expensive.
Then, two years later at my New Year’s party - one of my writers (Chloe Buxton) tapped me on the shoulder and said “I have two questions…” She leaned into my ear to ask “One: can the website be in colour? Two: could we do a printed version?” I probably spilt my drink whilst gasping “No! It will never be in colour!” and then afterwards thinking “Yeah. We could do a printed one”. I designed a test print that was finished in March, and then in August 2024 released the first printed issue to stores. Well, five stores - one being Pics & Ink.
What’s a small detail in The Film Pupil that most people might miss, but means a lot to you?
Our covers come in groups of three! The most recent trio was characters in different departments: a noir detective by a craft services table, Frankenstein’s monster applying his green make-up for the horror issue, then a cowgirl in the sound department shooting a boom mic. They even go together to create one continuous image. For Issue #10, it’s a new series: “film cameras” starting with the Lumière Brothers’ Cinematograph, one of the first moving picture cameras, in a bold teal.
Our covers come in groups of three! The most recent trio was characters in different departments: a noir detective by a craft services table, Frankenstein’s monster applying his green make-up for the horror issue, then a cowgirl in the sound department shooting a boom mic. They even go together to create one continuous image. For Issue #10, it’s a new series: “film cameras” starting with the Lumière Brothers’ Cinematograph, one of the first moving picture cameras, in a bold teal.
Print is slow and deliberate — what makes it worth it for you?
Economics was the main benefit when moving to print. You can charge our cover price of £5.00 because it’s a physical object - but couldn’t for online publishing really. Having a budget meant that we could pay our writers and attract new ones (in the beginning it was mostly my friends contributing). Writing quality improved as a result, and it also became more acceptable from my point of view to request edits or rewrites.
That’s sounds a little unromantic of me! There are actually lots of benefits to print that I didn’t initially realise. One novel to us is that there is a legacy of film magazines, a continued history of people writing their thoughts about cinema and getting it physically printed. That shows when I give a complimentary copy to the directors we interview at film festivals. They smile even if it’s been a long day of press because it reminds them of flicking through Total Film as a teenager. And for younger readers, it gives precisely that experience for the first time.
So much! About running a company as well as just starting a magazine. I wish I had a completed a set of essays for Issue #2 before publishing Issue #1 and had kept on that track. I wish that I had known that shorter emails are better when contacting directors to be interviewed or when seeking potential stockists. I wish I knew that you could enable spellcheck in InDesign by going to the “Edit” menu. But the good thing about magazines is that there’s a next issue to focus on and forget your mistakes. I’m not sure I could have started as a book publisher - it’s a bit too permanent of a medium.
And finally can you tell us about something surprising that made it into The Film Pupil?
I like to think that there are a few essays in each issue that will surprise the reader - either a film/genre not widely talked about or a new perspective on a well-loved one. But I think it’s our features that are the most surprising in terms of content.
Our “Interview Section” has a really great range of directors. I like talking to low-budget and non-conventional filmmakers the most, such as Curren Sheldon and his indie boxing film “Beat Down” (which casted real fighters) for Issue #10 or YouTuber Joel Haver who released a feature-length movie every month of 2024. Then, we also include conversations with award-winning directors such as stop-motion auteur Adam Elliot for “Memoir of a Snail” and Greg Kwedar for A24’s “Sing Sing” that won SXSW and had three Oscar nominations - both nice dudes.
Even more so, the “Data Section” is uncommon for a magazine of our size. It’s infographics on film, but we’re not dressing up some other researcher’s statistics - I’m tinkering with thousand-column spreadsheets to get new answers to questions. In Issue #10, we looked at Best Picture winners and used all previous nominees as the data set. And in the previous issue, the running time of literally every film ever uploaded to IMDb was analysed to find out whether films have been getting longer over the decades. To save your curiosity, they have!
Thanks Oliver :)
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