Greg Hall interview

Made on a budget of £3500, and cut on a PC that was "cobbled together, using programs downloaded from the internet", Greg Hall’s first feature film The Plague has won awards and critical acclaim at film festivals around the world.

"You need to blag a lot, to beg a lot of favours," he admits. "But I never got into it to make money, and lacking money wasn’t the most important thing. I had bucketloads of enthusiasm, and so did all the actors, and crew. Making a film, there are always a lot of constraints, but you just have to be creative. I love the film language and culture, and to me, that’s what’s important; the film language is what cinema is all about. Directors working with big budgets still struggle, still have to deal with constraints. But you can lose important things using CGI and special effects."

Fittingly, Hall’s cinematic hero is Frederick Wiseman, whose first film Titicut Follies ("a scathing expose of prison conditions") was notoriously the only American film banned from release for reasons other than obscenity or national security. Hall has his own experiences of the legal restrictions facing filmmakers.

"It’s really frustrating. We didn’t get any licenses at all for The Plague. All sorts of permissions are needed to shoot a movie in the street, but we just went ahead and did it."

In fact, legal obstacles in the shape of copyright law almost derailed the release of The Plague. "There's this one scene in which the four lads wake up after a house party. It's Saturday morning, and they're sat on the sofa, smoking a joint and watching the TV. They’re watching the film Reefer Madness - a drugs morality tale from the 30s. It intercuts between the TV and the four watching, and it worked really well."

Only in post-production did he realise that he might need permission to use the footage from Reefer Madness. This was a potential disaster - licensing can be the most expensive part of making a low-budget movie. For example, Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette’s acclaimed film about his dysfunctional family, cost him $218 to make on his Macintosh. But because the film’s many references to popular culture each had to be cleared with the copyright owners, the film ended up costing $400,000. Greg Hall’s experience was happier. "Eventually, we confirmed it was in the public domain. And I thought... phew!"

For reasons like this, he is a big supporter of Creative Commons licenses, and plans to publish his music videos under one. "The beauty is you can get things from the web, like short films, and clips. For me, Creative Commons is perfect; it makes more sense and isn’t as anal as 'All Rights Reserved'. It creates a sensible balance instead, in which some rights are reserved."

Hall, who has directed videos for artists like Skinnyman and Benjamin Zephaniah, says that coming at filmmaking from a culture of "hip-hop and block parties" means "nothing should be restricted, and no creativity should be illegal."

In fact, he finds the notion that creative reuse might transgress the law absurd. "All ideas are influenced by the past. If you're writing a character's dialogue, a certain line you read in a book might creep in, but that isn't stealing. There's always reinvention, there's always a discourse with the culture. Where we are now depends on what came before us. Play is the most subversive thing, and it's essential to creativity."

As a judge on the Mix&Mash competition, Hall says he is looking forward to seeing what people do and how they create meaning out of existing material. "Cinema is all about meaning," he says. "What I'm about is making audiences sit up and feel uncomfortable. Mixing and mashing, the idea of taking footage, reusing it and recreating it forces you to think about what you're saying and how best to say it."

Remix as an approach, he maintains, is the same as it has ever been. "As an artist you're always trying to take things from the past and reinvent them. But in the last 10 years there's been something new, in the sense of availability and accountability. So people can now go to Google Video, click a button and suddenly fifty people know about it, and then it's exponential, another fifty people, and soon thousands of people have seen it. So there's more of a sense of an open forum for it to thrive. It's a good thing, but of course the ethos and ethics of it have always been a part of art."