About Sheridan Sinclair
Where It Started
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I’ve been fascinated by films for as long as I can remember. As a kid I was already writing my own stories and trying to turn them into something people could perform — including a Roman epic which, looking back, bore a suspicious resemblance to Quo Vadis, The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators. Completely coincidental, obviously.
A few years later I even wrote my own sequel to Evil Dead II, long before Army of Darkness appeared. So the urge to make films was always there. I just took a rather long and unconventional route before I actually started making them. |
Taken in Hong Kong in 1991, back when I had hair. It was also where I bought my first camcorder, so perhaps the filmmaking bug had already bitten.
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The Long Way Round
After spending a while near the bottom of the entertainment food chain as a mentalist, I decided to move up a rung and train as an actor. Probably a questionable career strategy, but there we are.
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Filmmaking didn’t become my career straight away. After leaving the Royal Navy, I trained in hypnotherapy and psychotherapy and ended up working in that field for around thirteen years.
That led me into hypnosis, NLP, magic and mentalism, and for a while I performed under the name Nick Knight. It was a very different world, but looking back, a lot of it was still about performance, psychology and holding an audience’s attention. Eventually that chapter ran its course, and acting led me back towards film. |
Back to Film
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Acting was what pulled me properly back towards filmmaking. I started training at Derby Academy of Acting and, around the same time, got involved in a few amateur productions with my cousin and some friends.
That gradually turned into making our own stuff. We started with fan films and shorts, then one project unexpectedly grew into a feature. Somewhere along the way, what had started as a bit of fun became something I wanted to take seriously. So in 2014 I enrolled on the Film MA with Raindance and Staffordshire University. From that point on, filmmaking stopped being something I was circling around and became the main thing. |
On location for The Terrible Old Man. Directing mostly seems to involve several people staring at a camera and hoping somebody knows what they’re doing.
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And Now...
These days I’m still happiest either directing or acting. They’re two sides of the same thing really — taking something that only exists on the page and working out how to make it feel real on screen.
I’ll write, produce and edit when a project needs it, because independent filmmaking tends to involve wearing several hats whether you like it or not. Operating the camera, however, remains somewhere near the bottom of the list.
At the moment my main job is finally getting Remain Humane across the finish line, while developing a few other films that I’d very much like to make before another thirteen years disappear.
It’s been a slightly unconventional route to get here, but I’ve somehow kept coming back to film. And, truthfully, if I’m working on a filming project, life is generally pretty good.
I’ll write, produce and edit when a project needs it, because independent filmmaking tends to involve wearing several hats whether you like it or not. Operating the camera, however, remains somewhere near the bottom of the list.
At the moment my main job is finally getting Remain Humane across the finish line, while developing a few other films that I’d very much like to make before another thirteen years disappear.
It’s been a slightly unconventional route to get here, but I’ve somehow kept coming back to film. And, truthfully, if I’m working on a filming project, life is generally pretty good.
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The Film Psycho came after a few different production names. It seemed to fit: a background in psychotherapy, an unhealthy obsession with films, and a habit of being cast as psychopaths, gangsters and hitmen.
Eventually I decided it was easier to put everything under one name and stick with it. |