If you know how film production works, you'll already know there's a process to follow. Pre-production and post-production have those names for a reason and casting always comes after a script is written. How else would know if someone was right for the part? For director Judah Finnigan, and his second short film Workshop, that path to completion started on an unfamiliar route.

"The whole process was a bit backwards for me"

"The project began when I was approached by Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School in 2019", the filmmaker explains. "Every year, the school (which is THE place to go if you want to train to be actor in NZ) hires three directors from the outside industry to make a short film for them. Basically, you get a small budget and an open brief - you can make a film about whatever you want. The only catch is you have to cast seven students from their graduate class and all of them must feature in your film in a speaking role. So the whole process was a bit backwards for me; rather than write a film and then cast for the roles I'd written, I was instead writing the roles from scratch for a cast I'd already been given".

[caption id="attachment_34239" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Workshop-short-film-Judah-Finnigan

The seven participants of the confrontational group workshop were all played by Toi Whakaari students[/caption]

Wanting to come up with a story that would give all of his young cast members equal screen time and still came in at under 20-minutes, Finnigan, like many before him, turned to personal experience for inspiration. "I was in a really raw part of the therapy process - lots of buried resentments and grievances bubbling to the surface", the director reveals as we discuss the motivation behind his narrative. Setting his short within a confrontational group workshop, he admits he "just wanted to make a film about how messy self-actualisation can be" and how you can "feel powerful and pathetic at the same time".

"I found this looser approach really invigorating"

With a lot of rehearsal time available (the students had two weeks cleared from their schedules), Finnigan was able to work with the cast on building their characters and wrote a lot of the script on the fly, during this process. "It ended up being this organic discovery of the film together, rather than me going away and pounding out a script in isolation", he shares. "I found this looser approach really invigorating, so it was important for me to maintain as much of a sense of play throughout the shoot as we could. I felt we succeeded there too - many of the film's best stylistic flourishes were the result of riffing on the day, which both cast and crew fed into".

Strange, funny and oddly relatable, Workshop is a real crowd-pleaser and it easy to see why it was so popular with festival programmers - having played Venice and Clermont-Ferrand. Acquired by Searchlight Pictures, Workshop is currently being developed into a half-hour comedy series, with Finnigan also working on his feature debut - a revenge comedy set in an evangelical church called GOD PEOPLE.