Paul Coe, by his own admission, is a nerdy film buff. “I know things you probably shouldn’t know about a lot of films,” says the production co-ordinator. He’s been like that since he was a child, he says. He has stacks of DVDs and a big screen at home and has worked on so many music videos that he can’t remember most of them. When I spoke to him he was at the Berlin International Film Festival with Clubbed, a British film that he worked on.
The film industry is the obvious career choice for this man, so why did he spend nine years in retail and three setting up a legal consultancy before getting into it two years ago?
Tame careers advice may be partly to blame. “At school I did theatre studies and acted,” Coe says. But acting wasn’t seen as a realistic career move. “The school careers officer told me to go into the Army.”
Not keen on being a soldier, Coe went instead into retail, working up to manager level at John Lewis. Then, three years ago, he and his wife, a legal journalist, decided to pool their talents and set up a legal consultancy, Claire Legal, offering advice to corporate law firms.
That wasn’t enough of a career change for Coe, though. “I was looking for something more different,” he says. “My role as a partner in the business was to make sure [that] it was set up to run smoothly. I drew on my managerial experience to create systems to make sure that tax returns wouldn’t be filed wrong, that we were invoicing our clients properly. The company was almost designed so that I would eventually be involved in it part-time.”
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His first experience of film-making came in March 2006, when he was offered a chance to invest in a film being made by Formosa, a British production company. This movie was Clubbed, about the violent world of 1980s clubs and doormen, and part of the investment deal was for the investor to be an extra – “I spent a lot of time standing in nightclub queues,” he says.
But it was behind the cameras that Coe found that he was most use, offering moral support – and cups of tea – to stressed camera crews. He got friendly with the grip (the person who pushes the camera around), who let him help out. “I said to him, ‘You just tell me what to do, and I’ll crack on’.”
This attitude has got him a long way since then. The assistant director of Clubbed set him up with an unpaid job as a runner on Take That’s I’d Wait for Life video and his first paid job was as a runner on a Beverley Knight video. He worked on The Mighty Boosh for a while, looking after Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding. He’s now back at Formosa as a production co-ordinator, trying his hand at editing. Did he make the right career decision? Not half. His next step? Producer, hopefully. “I wish someone had told me about this great film industry out there, where you can work behind the scenes,” he says. Now he’s making up for lost time.