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Joining me today is…he is going to hate that I write it this way, as you’ll hear in the conversation…but the director with the most nominated film at Raindance, Max Morgan, talking about his film BREAKWATER (2025).

The ability to make your first feature, your first film, carry the weight of, and I’ll quote Max here, “people never mean what they say, and there is a lot of that in BREAKWATER” is simply breathtaking. I’ve posted the trailer in the YouTube conversation, go watch it and you see what you mean. And the trailer is hardly encompassing of the beauty of the film.

The film has its premiere at Raindance on June 23rd, 2025 — sold out — but tickets are still available for the 24th. Go watch it if you can. There’s a reason it’s the most nominated film, the first feature out of the University of Oxford since 1982, and that’s Max Morgan and his team. 

In this episode, Max and I talk about:

• What people should expect to see when they watch BREAKWATER, such a wide ranging and expansive film — “it’s a psychological drama about connection between two characters, Otto and an older retired angler on the East Coast of England…and it’s about how their lives come together, collide through happenstance and fuse irreversibly and thematically”;

• How he decided to make such an ambitious film, the first film he ever shot! — “so it really was like a massive learning curve for me”; “and then when I went to university, I did lots of theater”;

• Was screenwriting a safety net for him? “ I find that thinking about myself as a writer is almost more important to me as thinking myself as a director in some ways”

• His advice for someone who is not gifted at writing and how to develop that skill without decades of education — “I don’t think that being able to write a good play or screenplay is necessarily a gift. I think it’s important to think about writing and directing in all kind of creative capacities as more of a craft.”

• His issues with the term debut film and filmmaker as “quite misleading”, as there’s so much that goes into a creative’s life;

• How mentors gave him advice on what he termed “bad plays, bad screenplays” — “ if anyone tells you as a piece of feedback that something is straight up bad, then they're really awful at giving notes”; 

• How you have to trust your instincts as well — you have to challenge incredibly bad and incredibly good feedback equally;

• The realistic dialogue in BREAKWATER — was it from life experience? “It was from the theater”; “people never mean what they say, and there is a lot of that in BREAKWATER”

• BREAKWATER has its world premiere at Raindance — has he seen it on a cinema screen and does he see a theatrical run for the film?

• An interlude about the amazingness of Tom Cruise and his stunts;

• What does being a British filmmaker mean to him and how he thinks people think of that identity? “ the way I think about it is so massively influenced by British art and the sense of British independent filmmaking, which has historically produced so many amazing filmmakers”;

• How he is planning for the world premiere at Raindance;

Max’s Indie Filmmaker Highlights: Mark Jenkin, famously of BAIT (2019) and other films; Sarah Brocklehurst

Links:

Buy Tickets To BREAKWATER

Follow BREAKWATER On Instagram

Follow BREAKWATER's Website

Max Morgan's Website