Working Internationally
Three SCA graduates on what it’s like to create in media markets outside Hollywood
by Alison Gee
A growing number of School of Cinematic Arts graduates are taking their filmic education and translating it into high-quality projects abroad. These projects often allow nascent Trojan filmmakers more advanced and complex opportunities as creators—not to mention the chance to work in thrilling and inspiring—albeit challenging—international locales. In turn, SCA graduates who have had success working on projects around the globe can leverage those experiences into impressive possibilities in Hollywood.
IRAM PARVEEN BILAL
Caption: Iram Parveen directing.
Since graduating from the Peter Stark Producing Program in 2007, Iram Parveen Bilal has shot two independent films on the streets of Pakistan. Each Karachi-based production has brought with it a moment that has made her heart beat double time and her brain exclaim we definitely aren’t in Kansas anymore.
There was that time when she and her production team set a 5 a.m. call time expecting the local Pakistani crew to rest early and turn up to the set ready to work long hours. You know—the natural thing to do, if you’re part of an American production anyway. “In Pakistan, of course, nobody is going to go to sleep and get there by 5 a.m.,” Bilal says. “They would just stay up and turn up to set. We ended up with a very, very tired crew.”
On another occasion, Bilal enlisted a local rickshaw driver to play a role in the film. The next day, he didn’t show up. “He told us he couldn’t make it,” she remembers. There went the possibilities of any continuity.
In 2013, Bilal, then age 28, was directing her debut, Josh (Against the Grain). The shoot included an ensemble cast of 50 actors and a crew of 100—all of whom were set loose on the streets of Karachi. “It was just nuts!” she says, laughing at the memory now. She and her female director of photography were in the middle of a crane shot, framing scenes at the vehicle’s pinnacle. “We were in a dangerous part of town, my DP was sitting at the crane’s top with her poufy, curly hair, and I’m directing on a loudspeaker. We were two females making a film in Pakistan,” Bilal says, shaking her head. “Every take, there were more and more people watching. Then, my producer came up to me and said, 'Okay, we can do three takes, but after that, we are going to get chased by hoods.’”
Ten years after shooting Josh, Bilal shot a new feature, Wakhri (One of a Kind), in Karachi. “I was both relieved and saddened,” she says of returning. Relieved to see a crop of younger filmmakers and crew practicing efficient set management and creative collaboration. “That was significantly evolved from the days of Josh.” Yet, she was saddened to see the lack of shooting infrastructure in the country, and to see the cinemas in dilapidated condition—victims of political instability and “the resulting cannibalism of its own social and creative fabric.”
Ultimately, Bilal found it “heartbreaking to see the disillusionment of younger minds as to their futures in the field. Which is also a further fuel to keep creating and enabling opportunities for them.” In response, the filmmaker created a screenwriting lab, Qalambaaz, now in year ten of its call for submissions. Bilal runs this lab, sparked by the desire to "give back and build an army of storytellers, those especially who continue to give voice to Pakistan’s grass roots.”
Pakistan “is tough,” Bilal says, shrugging coolly. “Conditions are really difficult. It is culturally hard. You always have to act as if you are stepping on eggshells so that you’re not received as being a bitch. Just the act of shooting this film was a rebellion."
Caption: Iram Parveen directing.
So why does the Stark-trained producer-turned-writer/director do it?
For one, because her two years in the Stark Producing Program at USC taught her that there was a need for stories from abroad—and a need for her to make them. “USC has created a lot of famous independent filmmakers,” Bilal says. Her years at SCA “gave me the opportunity for creative exploration.” At the same time, she surveyed the industry landscape and saw that there “was a lack of voices like mine and a lack of understanding for the stories I wanted to tell.”
Her USC training taught her that she could tell those stories. Enduring the rigors of the program gave her the confidence and skills to take a giant leap. Although nervous about returning to her homeland to take on such a project, she knew she could manage a 35-day shoot, with 150 cast and crew, a tight $250,000 budget, in a developing nation where she knew no other filmmakers and had few other resources. “USC taught me about the business. I learned how to find the resources. And the program offered the top-level people who could teach me.”
That is even though the Stark program typically focuses on teaching students how to produce big Hollywood fare. SuperBad was a blockbuster film during Bilal’s MFA studies. That sparked in the filmmaker a feeling that she couldn’t connect to any projects the industry offered at the time. “I couldn’t see myself in anything,” she says. “The kind of films I wanted to tell—they would have to be told outside the system.” Bilal, who also received a Caltech degree (B.S. in Environmental Science Engineering, graduating with honors), found she could figure out how to do that from Stark Program professors, from other USC contacts in the business, as well as from her MFA cohorts. “I saw other Starkies go into directing,” she says. “In the program, I realized I could do what I wanted to do.”
For her first project out of USC, Bilal decided to write, direct and produce Josh, which she describes as an Erin Brockovich-style thriller based on real events. But how to raise the funds? The Stark Program taught her how to do that, too—how to hustle. “I would wake up in the morning and then I would drive from Pasadena, where I lived, to Culver City, where I worked as an editor. Then, in the evening I would tutor physics and math. I used all that money I made tutoring on the weekends to fly to the Bay Area and pitch to all the techies. I would pitch, pitch, pitch. I raised a quarter of a million dollars for this film—and that was during the recession.”
In the end, Bilal’s efforts to shoot abroad were more than worth it. Josh became Pakistan's first film on Netflix. It was also included in the permanent selection at the Library of Congress.
In the decade since, the filmmaker has made several short films, and three features: I’ll Meet You There, in New York; The PhD Movie: Still in Grad School, in L.A.; and her latest, Wakhri, in Karachi. Her global experience has brought her American opportunities, but those stateside projects also offer her the chance to film in Pakistan. “Everywhere you shoot in Pakistan—it’s magic," says Bilal. “You can’t say the same of shooting at Pasadena City College.”
TAD DAGGERHART
Caption: Tad Daggerhart with cast and crew.
Tad Daggerhart had never been anywhere close to Amsterdam when a film industry contact he met through USC asked him if he could write an action film script set there.
A 2011 graduate of the John Wells Writing for Screen & Television Division, Daggerhart grew up in small towns in the Carolinas, and studied Religion and Philosophy at Furman University in South Carolina. He credits a steady childhood diet of southern literature — Gothic works such as those by William Faulkner—as his first storytelling influence. “There’s a literary tradition and storytelling tradition that infuses the South,” he recalls. “It has always been an influence on me.”
It was during Daggerhart’s years in USC’s MFA screenwriting program, for which he was awarded the prestigious Annenberg Fellowship, that he wrote the award-winning short film, Traffic Cone, which taught him to create stories that felt fully dimensional and alive. “I think school is a lot like filmmaking in a way, in that it takes a whole community to educate, motivate and help someone mold their dreams into reality,” Daggerhart says.
The program’s talent pool was also pivotal to his growth as a filmmaker. “USC is incredibly fortunate that it can tap some of the greatest writers Hollywood has ever produced to fill that community. I learned something from every single one—Jack Epps, Howard Rodman, Mark Shepherd, Georgia Jeffries, Don Bohlinger, Michael Cassutt and Mary Sweeney—each inspiring me to a greater understanding of character and conflict, scene construction, or the patience and art of rewriting.”
The Amsterdam project, Black Lotus, came to Daggerhart through contacts he made during his years moving through the film industry. A mentor, whom the screenwriter had met at USC, hosted Writers Guild of America events. There, he met friends who put him in touch with a Dutch company, Tom de Mol Productions. Working in conjunction with Capstone Film Group, Tom de Mol Productions aspired to make a movie with Rico Verhoeven (a worldwide heavyweight kickboxing champion). The producers put out word that they were looking for an American writer to write a film set in Holland, using their production crews and their actors. The film would star an international cast.
Caption: Daggerhart working in Bulgaria.
“The project came my way from friends of friends,” says Daggerhart, whose story pitch ultimately emerged as a frontrunner. His success, he says, “has to go back to USC and the relationships I made there. USC is ground zero for everything I've done in the industry—all the relationships I made there. There is an exploding effect that moves outward and scoops up people and relationships in its path.”
Prior to Black Lotus, Daggerhart worked on the screenplay for the Sylvester Stallone-Dolph Lundgren action thriller Expend4bles (2023), a project that also came to him through the Wells Writing division’s mentorship program. Daggerhart’s mentor, Kurt Wimmer, has become “a close friend and occasional writing partner, and that was one of the projects we were hired to write together.”
Perhaps, even more essentially, the SCA experience also gave Daggerhart the skills to world-build cinematically: “I wasn’t intimidated when I started writing it, even though I had never been to Amsterdam,” he says. “That was certainly a hurdle, but I walked those canal streets the best I could, and even learned a little Dutch. I tried to immerse myself as much as possible. I learned the most by packing my bags and going,” he says.
Black Lotus opened a huge portal for the screenwriter: “I got the opportunity to be a part of the process from page to screen,” he says. “I was on the ground in Amsterdam and Bulgaria with the reigning world champion heavyweight kickboxer, an international cast, crew, and production team, watching everyone bring their A-game, becoming a part of that crew—of that family—and witnessing the joy we had working together. Then, seeing that work and joy come to life on the big screen. I think about them every day and hope to one day work with them all again. I couldn't be more proud of that.”
Seizing this opportunity to write a script set in a different part of the world, working with a foreign crew, as well as expanding into a larger role on set, has inspired Daggerhart in surprising ways. He is ready to tackle other global storytelling possibilities. "You see different places and meet different people. You take in other cultures and that opens your mind to these other places and people. And that’s often where other stories come from—seeing the bigger world out there.”
He also wants to bring his increasingly masterful skills home: “I'm always looking for a way to work with the friends I made through USC,” he says.
TIM DURANT
Caption: Time Durant at the Sochi Olympics
When Tim Durant was studying producing at USC’s Peter Stark program (MFA 1999), he didn’t realize he would have to learn a whole new language—that language being “Globish.” Defined by dictionary.com as a “simplified version of English used by non-native speakers, consisting of the most common words and phrases only,” Globish has saved Durant many times during his work as an experiential-producer/designer, whose projects span the world: Korea, Russia, Singapore and Canada are among his work landscapes. He recalls once asking a foreign client to meet at 1 p.m... Durant meant 1 p.m. for lunch but the client thought he meant 1 a.m. “You need to double check everything,” says the dual British-American citizen. “When trying to produce something abroad, you have to use a different language. You can’t use any slang. Avoid contracted words. Avoid any regionalisms. You can’t tell jokes or use metaphors.”
Durant has clearly mastered this lingua franca, because he has found a high level of success in this field of production. He has produced such global shows as the opening ceremonies and halftime shows for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the South East Asian Games, along with the Victoria’s Secret fashion show in Shanghai and Paris, and music tours for Neil Diamond, Sir Paul McCartney, Bruno Mars, Steve Aoki, and OK Go. He has also created branded experiences for such American companies as HBO, the NFL, Doritos, and Electronic Arts. “My projects,” explains Durant, who lives six months in L.A., and the other six around the world, “are mostly international, in locations such as Russia, India, Singapore, China, Saudi Arabia, France, Ireland, Sweden, Canada, and Mexico.”
Growing up in Durham, U.K., Durant took his first steps toward USC when he was a teen, intrigued with Los Angeles. “I saw lots of movies and television, and I read books set in L.A.,” he says. “It seemed like a crazy and exciting place to live, much more interesting than post-industrial England. I remember seeing Repo Man and just saying, ‘wow, that town looks nuts. Let’s go.’”
After studying British Literature at Sheffield and film and television at the University of London, where he received an MA, Durant applied to USC. “I knew it was the best film school in the world,” he remembers.
“What USC taught me about producing was incredibly helpful in places like Russia,” he says. “What I learned was not just about management, it was about how to solve problems creatively. Russia, for example, has a very convoluted way of conducting business relationships. You have to navigate through many people’s agendas to get done what you need to get done. USC taught me how to navigate different personalities and situations.”
Much of his work initially came from the program’s connections. “It’s not just who you know—that feels empty,” he says. “It’s about building on relationships.”
Durant’s dynamic career has flourished in part thanks to this education in fostering positive connections around the world. “At USC, we learned that you have to work internationally and speak locally,” says the producer. “It’s handy to learn basic words. People really do appreciate you making an effort to say hello, goodbye, thank you and yes and no in the local language. It’s the right thing to do.”
Durant praises his experiential production career: “It’s the epitome of global experience. You can get a sense of a place as a tourist. But if you live there longer you can have a deeper experience. Working with locals, you get a good grasp of what the culture is about. It’s thrilling.”