Movie Star

If like me you’re an ardent fan of Radio 4’s Today programme, you may have caught the clip this morning about one-time Czech Republic president and acclaimed playwright Vaclav Havel’s, who, aged 73, is fulfilling a lifetime’s ambition and directing his own movie. Titled Leaving and due for release next spring, the much-vaunted movie is about a former political leader coping with the diminishing of his power. Cathartic? Maybe.

It’s unlikely that slipping the reins of the D&AD presidency last year prompted our own Garrick Hamm to turn to film as a medium, aside from his job heading the creative team at Williams Murray Hamm.  But, like Havel, he had a dream and has fulfilled it – to great effect.

This week Hamm won the Best Comedy award in the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival with his second short, The Man who Married Himself, the creation of which coincided with his D&AD stint.

Says a modest Hamm, whose first short movie, Lucky Numbers, came out in 2008, ‘I’m very chugged. It’s like winning my first design award, which was Design Week Award for BP oil,  which must be, 20 years ago.’

We assume Hamm meant chuffed, but as the dictionary definition for chugg reads ‘to emit a series of regular muffled explosive sounds’, it may well be the case.

The moral? Talent will out, whatever the medium, so whatever your fancy, make it real.