Our speaker today Andrew Birkin came all the way from Wales, England! Andrew is an old friend of Ms. Grippo’s and a noted film maker who was enjoying a short visit to the States and graciously came to talk to us about his career.

“I fell in love with filmmaking for all of the wrong reasons,” said Andrew. The only reason he applied for his first job in the film business was in order to meet his favorite actress! He did end up meeting her, but by then he realized that he enjoyed film making and decided to stay in the business.

Andrew had the privilege of helping in the production of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of Andrew’s jobs was photocopying the scripts for the actors. He said that although the script was top secret, he got to read segments of it when the Xerox machine charred the paper. 

One of Andrew’s other jobs was helping to write Omen III: The Final Conflict, and it came with a huge opportunity: while on this project, Andrew was given 48 hours to write, and five days to shoot his own short film Sredni Vashtar. He based it off of the short story of the same title by Saki. Sredni Vashtar was nominated for an Oscar. Andrew laughed, “I shouldn’t win anything for it because it was easy to do.”

Andrew then told us about his recent trip to Africa. There he taught kids in Malawi how to shoot short films on a smartphone. He noted how far technology has come since he was making his first film.

“Any of you can go out and make a movie,” Andrew told us. “Just make it short!”