Adrian Lester Gets Out There

Adrian Lester, star of Primary Colors and Maybe Baby is acting as judge for BT’s getoutthere Film Shorts competition this month, which offers one lucky winner the chance to spend a week at the renowned UCLA film school. Empire Online took the opportunity to talk with Lester about the competition and his own break into showbusiness. “I started in the Birmingham Youth Theatre. At 14 I was acting, singing, doing lots of breakdancing and streetdancing. After that followed drama school and lots of theatre work. I did some TV and then I went into film”. After a few low-budget efforts, Adrian’s big break into movies came with Mike Nichols’ presidential satire Primary Colors. The director, who had remembered Lester from a stage performance of As You Like it in New York, cast him alongside such Hollywood talent as John Travolta, Emma Thompson, Kathy Bates and Billy Bob Thornton. “It was like reading an encyclopaedia. A kind of ‘how to…’ on film acting. It was incredible”. Having made his mark, Lester proceeded to land such roles as Dumaine in Kenneth Branagh’s all singing, all dancing version of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Hugh Laurie’s best friend in Ben Elton’s directorial debut .Maybe Baby. From the end of November Adrian will be appearing in a Paris production of Hamlet and it is a five-minute Hamlet that entrants to the Film Shorts competition are asked to produce. “It’s a universal story and everyone is familiar with it. The competition is not a technical thing. It’s about the emotions contained in the piece. How are people going to show us what a character feels? Or make us feel that? And that’s interesting, because a lot of people can do a great deal of technical stuff, which is fine. But they need to make me feel something.” Entrants can submit the idea as a storyboard, script or film and can focus on an element of the Bard’s Danish epic, they need not necessarily try to include a condensed version of the whole play. Empire Online asked Adrian what advice he would give to aspiring filmmakers, “Take a look at the getoutthere site, go and see what other people are doing. The idea of making a film, a book, a play… whatever, is that it doesn’t mean anything in isolation. It only becomes part of the artform if it means something to a stranger. If it means a great deal to you and nothing to other people then, maybe you should rethink your idea. But If you can convey someone else, somewhere else, then you’re on the right track”. Lester has just completed work on Milcho Manchevski’s drama Dust and will also be seen in The Final Curtain and Born Romantic. Keen to move into directing, Adrian is planning to helm a project penned by his wife. Rolling Over is based the experiences of Lester’s father-in-law, a Bengali doctor who was involved in a murder trial at the Old Bailey soon after moving to England in 1960. “It’s currently in pre-pre-pre-production and we hope to start filming in early 2002”. Don’t miss out on the chance to enter the getoutthere competition, visit the site here. The closing date for the Film Shorts competition is 30 September.