Multi-award-winning screenwriter, director and leading US indie producer James Schamus has shared his journey to becoming a filmmaker in a master class at Qumra.  
The session was the first in a series of five master classes taking place during Qumra’s second edition, the annual industry event by Doha Film Institute designed to nurture the development of
emerging filmmakers.
Schamus recounted memories of how he first got interested in film growing up in Los Angeles and watching silent movies on Friday night on television.
He described first meeting Ang Lee when he co-founded the US production company, Good Machine, in the early 1990s with Ted Hope, and decided to focus on
making “no budget movies”.
From the first encounter grew a long working collaboration that has spanned nine movies, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won four Academy Awards and remains the highest-grossing non-English-language film in the US. It was screened at Qumra as part of the Modern Masters Screenings.
Schamus confided that it had been Ang Lee’s “dream from childhood” to make a martial arts film. “Ang was a fan of the genre, a fan of wire work but he took it to a whole different place,” said Schamus.
Discussing the importance of casting directors, Schamus also stressed how much he personally enjoys the casting process when working with first-time filmmakers. “Casting is 90% of directing,” he said.
About his recent move into directing – first with the short documentary That Film About Money in 2014 and then his feature directorial debut Indignation, Schamus said: “Directing is a disease that strikes middle-aged producers. I knew I was always susceptible, but I’d always had the luxury of writing for Ang Lee, so why would I have
done it before.”
He also spoke about the key to success in becoming a screenwriter. “You are not writing a sonnet, it (a screenplay) doesn’t even have to be particularly elegant, it has to be
persuasive.”
Moderated by Richard Pena, the session showed clips from Schamus’ films, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ride with the Devil and That Film About Money.
During Qumra, Schamus will mentor 10 filmmakers whose projects are participating in an intensive development programme, including writer/director Mohamed al-Ibrahim’s crime drama Bull Shark (Qatar, Bahrain, US); Hamida Issa’s feature documentary To the Ends of the Earth (Qatar); director Sherif Elbendary’s feature narrative Ali, the Goat and Ibrahim (Egypt, France, Qatar); writer/director Mohanad Hayal’s feature narrative Death Street (Iraq, Qatar); and director/screenwriter Karim Moussaoui’s feature narrative drama Till the Swallows Return (Algeria, France, Qatar).