The Better Man (Comedy/Drama)

What’s it all about?

The Better Man tells the story of two best mates, Aaron and Josh, as they travel to Wales to attend their childhood friend’s engagement party.

Aaron is desperate to prove himself the perfect best man candidate. In fact, his sense of self depends on it. Josh, on the other hand, is just along for the ride, passively bumbling through the motions. Throughout the course of the film, as Aaron’s attempts to impress fall catastrophically flat, we see Josh start to figure out what it is he actually wants from life.

So what’s the plan?

Principal photography is set to take place over a fortnight in August 2012, and post-production will be completed in time for Christmas.

The film will then be submitted to festivals, where we hope it will win praise for its enduring, relatable subject matter and for its high calibre of writing and production.

It is our ambition that The Better Man will establish Bustabowl Productions as an exciting new voice in British independent cinema and enable them to secure funding for future projects.

And you want my money?

Yes, please. The Better Man has a projected budget of £3,000 and although we'll be investing as much as can ourselves, we simply can't afford it all.

The money will be used for props, sets and costumes, equipment rental, and to cover the travel/living expenses of the cast and crew, who will otherwise be working for free out of enthusiasm for the project.

Whatever amount is left over at the end of production will go towards festival entrance fees.

If you think The Better Man sounds like a film you'd like to see, please help us out. And we've got some great rewards for our sponsors as an extra incentive.

Who are you, again?

As a highly collaborative team of talented young writers, directors, technicians, actors and musicians, Bustabowl Productions is a creative force to be reckoned with.

Just ask anyone who attended the 2011 Bedford Festival of Comedy Film Shorts, where our film Obulon (the tale of a wizard with questionable morals) was awarded the Audience Prize for Best Film in Festival.

This success inspired us to tackle more ‘mature’ subject matter, and the screenplay for The Better Man is the result of those efforts. It is constructed to demonstrate the full extent of our skills and enable us to secure investment for evermore ambitious projects.

Check out our showreel

Writer’s statement:

I was little more than a child when I bought into the fantasy of The Writer wholesale, and have since been waiting for a return on my investment of fourteen years, two-thousand hangovers and an ever-diminishing circle of friends.

To whom should I implore charity for the sake of something so trifling? How about anyone was has ever had an urgent dream? I imagine that was most of you, at one point in your lives. Situations change, as do priorities. We go down different paths and find out satisfaction in places we'd never even considered looking. That's how life works out, mostly.

But I don't want to find something new, and so I refuse to look. This is the only thing I've ever wanted to do and, as such, the only thing I ever learnt how to do.  I don't have a fallback plan, because I would rather fall off than back. My dream (and head) (and DICK) is too big.

This isn't the last stand of the angry young man. If this doesn't work, I'll be back in the new year with a fresh deck of fart jokes, and then again, and again, and again, until I arrive where I'm going - and that's a Hollywood Hills estate with a ppol in the shape of my own head; it's critical reverence as a distant voice of note and relevance; it's a diamond toilet seat and rocket car. 

It's not those things, really, though they would be nice. All I want is to convey an experience to someone who has had a relatable experience. It's then, when the experiences of the artist and the audience meet - between the pages, the reels, the notes, the strokes - that art is born and nutured and lives like some sort of sad, beautiful alien lifeform. 

Whatever. This is pretty wanky stuff, but it's also true. Should it bother you? Maybe not. I imagine it might even turn a few of you off but, much like the movie itself, it kind of really wanted to be written. I've always been guilty of spilling my guts, holding them up to people's revolted faces and asking 'are these good guts?' I guess that, like The Better Man's protagonist, I'm a bit of a glutton for validation.

Actually, I have a feeling we all are.

- Tom McInnes

Director's statement:

The Better Man is funny. It has at least one fart gag and a comedy wank in a cupboard, and those things are objectively funny. But the film is more than that. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be wasting our (or anyone else’s) time and money making it. The script is honest and original and will resonate with its target audience: anyone who’s ever been young and confused about the future.

The film’s characters find themselves at a crucial juncture in their lives: the transition from the protected bubble of education into the ‘real world.’ This shift has always been difficult for graduates – Dustin Hoffman taught us that when he fooled around with Mrs Robinson more than half a century ago – but now, in the era of recession, it’s harder than ever. Smart kids end up either unemployed, doing unpaid internships or working menial jobs. It’s tough and it’s scary and it’s easy to resent anyone who seems to know not only what they want, but how to go about getting it.

At the heart of The Better Man is the question of how to react when one of those people is your oldest friend; how to reconcile your arrested development with their readiness to leap through life and embrace all the responsibilities of adulthood. Which, of course, leads to the altogether more pertinent and challenging question: what does your friend’s ability to leave you behind say about you, personally?

There is no black and white in the The Better Man. No right or wrong. There is simply life in all its inherent sadness and silliness, and in a world where most people think of the cinema as the place you go to see robots turn into cars, that’s worth fighting to get up on screen.

- Matthew Tindall