With the 4th Sci-Fi London (www.sci-fi-london.com) a success the festival is now a mainstay on the film calendar due to its vibrant mix of both action blockbusters and cerebral tales to provide an essential picture of a varied and often misunderstood genre.
"I'm a big sci-fi fan," says Louis, "Sixties cheesy, bad sci-fi movies and the classics like Forbidden Planet, that's my period. Also stylish seventies stuff like Soylent Green, the 'we've screwed the planet up and we're gonna die' ones." With his tastes so broad, Louis recognised in the genre something for everyone and it's this that led him into an argument with a PR friend who snubbed sci-fi due to her own dislike of geeky franchises.
Louis continues, "She didn't like Star Trek and finds Star Wars ridiculous but that's fine, a perfectly valid opinion. But you can't say you don't like science fiction because of that. You'll miss movies. There's so much depth and richness in a lot of science fiction films, but if they get labelled as a sci-fi movie then there's a stigma and people won't entertain it because they go there with a prejudice".
So Louis laid down a challenge, he'd put together a festival deliberately putting aside the space operas and she could PR it, get people to see what sci-fi was really about. As Louis says, "It was about film and films that happened to be about science fiction. We look for a good story very well put together first. We don't say this has got to go in because it's got space ships in it, that doesn't make it a good film necessarily".
Louis and his team then did what they do best, watch movies. "When you start to filter out the mad high-action stuff there was still tons of material to choose from," he explains. "There were films like American Astronaut which was the first film we put on at the festival and we described it in the program as Jim Jarmusch directs Laurel and Hardy." This quirky choice was then mixed with more star-studded classics such as 12 Monkeys, backed up with the short La Jet é e that provided Gilliam's inspiration to give die hard fans something new. "We wanted to rip away at the clichés but at the same time we had an Aliens all-nighter. At heart I'm a geek and I love all these films so I'm perfectly happy sitting in a movie house with a big bucket of popcorn watching things get blown up."
Over the years Louis has maintained this careful balancing act and this year's festival brought in the Matrix Trilogy and Star Trek First Contact to back-up the more subtle films. "I'd been chasing Primer for a long time, which came out mid 2003 but was just very difficult to get hold of. Things like Steamboy I knew were coming and I'd been waiting for it as well as every body else. I was very, very keen to get hold of a copy and lucky enough to be able to screen it." Although Louis is eager to point out that buzz surrounding a movie does necessarily mean instant success, "If it sounds like an interesting story and a good idea people will come out and see it. Because it's within our festival, we've proved ourselves, so we've got a few regulars and also the press list us; we were pick of the day in the Evening Standard. We've started to get a reputation for finding interesting stuff".
Over the years Louis has been amazed by the types of viewer he's managed to get under one roof, "I don't think we have one kind of audience, it's a good mix. Some of them love Independence Day movies and some of them can't abide that stuff but they'll make sure they get up and see Solaris or Donnie Darko because they know they're going to get an intelligent film".
But making sure the festival represents a cross-section of people's tastes can be tricky as Louis discovered with the recent Chronicles of Riddick. "A dreadful film," continues Louis, "For me it's a commercial decision, do I put it in because it's a massive film and get it first or do we put it in and it's a movie that actually is not very good? It's not going to do the festival's reputation any good but then if it doesn't get seen how's anybody going to know! Otherwise it'd be called Louis' Film Festival, that's not the job of the festival."
Luckily running a film festival also means you can take the odd risk and go with instincts on smaller movies. The flavour this year being sci-fi films about sci-fi fans such as the comedic road movie Saving Star Wars where Louis put his foot down, "Ultimately it's my festival and I wanted to screen it, I think its good enough. They are now looking at doing a re-edit because they've had so much attention". Slowly audiences have become aware of what's out there, especially from the East, "Where there's been a little bit of success distributors are taking more of a chance. There's certainly a trend to exposing it more in the UK ".
Louis already has his eye on next years program, "It's not a full time job by any means although I live and breathe it all year as I'm always looking out for new films. At the end of one festival it's always how can we do it different, how can we make it better? Next year's our fifth anniversary and we're looking at changing things around, we'll have a complete fresh look at venues and how we do it". Although programme wise, Louis still has some way to go: "It's the last thing we know; what's going to be on!"
Richard Badley
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