Beinghuman Interviews Valeria Bullo

BEINGHUMAN

BEINGHUMAN

DIRECTOR / FOUNDER

FOUNDER

EDITOR

SOUND / TECH

INTERVIEW LOCATION: LONDON

GAYNOR O'FLYNN

CHRIS LOVELL

LUCY MANNING

NICK ROTHWELL

BEINGHUMAN

ISSUE NO. 1

ISSUE NO. 2

ISSUE NO. 3

AILEEN GONSALVES

NICOLE YERSHON

VALERIA BULLO

BEINGHUMAN

BEINGHUMAN IS A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN BEINGHUMAN FOUNDER GAYNOR O'FLYNN & COOL, CLEVER CREATIVES WHO CARE.

GAYNOR EXPLORES THESE EXCEPTIONAL, ELUSIVE, ETHICAL HUMANS THROUGH THE LENS OF THEIR CREATIVE WORK, LIFE & PRACTICE.

THEY INVESTIGATE WORKS THAT INFORM WHO THAT PERSON IS, WHAT THEY DO, HOW THEY DO IT & WHY.

ONCE A YEAR, BEINGHUMAN RELEASES A LIMITEDEDITION PHYSICAL MAGAZINE OF LIFE.

VALERIA

Valeria Bullo is an experienced production executive and consultant with a passion for mental wellbeing and inclusion in the TV and film industry.

She has worked studio productions such as Inception, Sherlock Holmes, Maleficent, and Mad Max/Fury Road. She has also been involved in award-winning projects such as Pride, Suffragette, Selma, Florence Foster Jenkins, Viceroy's House, and Judy.

Experienced in leading and implementing change within the industry, Valeria has created a first-ofits-kind toolkit for mentally healthy productions as part of the Whole Picture programme for the Film and TV charity.

Most recently she founded Cinemamas, an online platform for parents working in the film industry in the hope of providing a place of support and conversation.

GAYNOR: We are talking to Valeria Bullo, who is an experienced production executive and production consultant with a strong passion for mental wellbeing and inclusion in the TV and film industry. She has a sixteen year history in a wide range of high level productions which we will find out about in this podcast. So, let's start by saying how you got into this wonderful industry. Tell us a bit about your story.

VALERIA: I came into the industry a little bit later in life. I had studied languages and was working as an interpreter, and decided I wanted to work in film and television. I went the academic route and got back into studying, which was great. I had already done a degree, and this was a second degree, and I realised rather quickly when I moved to London, that actually, I should have just come to London and tried to get a job. And, although the course was brilliant, I could critique the lighting of the third man but I had no idea how to work practically in production.

So I moved to London in 2006 and I quite literally began knocking on doors because there was no way of getting work other than cold calling and meeting people for coffee.

GAYNOR: What was your very first job in the industry?

VALERIA: My very first job was working as a producer's assistant for a Harold Pinter play that they were putting into film with the late Harold Pinter himself. It was definitely a baptism of fire. Although I'm a huge Harold Pinter fan, he was quite a complex individual and it was with a big heavyweight cast of Penelope Wilton, Colin Firth, Sophie Okonedo, and Michael Gambon.

GAYNOR: Wow

VALERIA: I was with all these huge actors, and also I just moved to London, so I was living the London life: working in Soho, staying out to all hours, and kind of rocking up at work. I also worked in bars, I waited tables, kind of waiting for the phone to ring and it took me a long time to get that first break.

GAYNOR: What an amazing first job, what did you learn from that?

VALERIA: I learned a lot of really tough lessons on that job. And I think when I look back now, and I think of the industry where I cut teeth, that's where I met a lot of those first initial toxic working environments, not specifically in that job, but in many others. That was the start of it, this kind of culture of having to completely sacrifice yourself for the sake of the job.

VALERIA: You would do anything, that kind of line from the Devil Wears Prada, ‘thousands of girls would kill for this job’ and I was very quickly reminded of that, because I was still having a bit of a life.

GAYNOR: How did you feel about that when you were younger?

VALERIA: I believed it. I was full of passion and drive and realised fairly quickly that I wanted to work on films. I had been in London for two years prior to that and I would take anything, any job that was going, I did a tonne of free work, which I don't condone in the slightest anymore, because I was really struggling to make ends meet. I was working in corporate film as well which was a lot more lucrative, and I worked with a lot of great people, but it was films that I wanted to work on, and I quite quickly adapted to that and thought i’ve got to give everything up. When you have a lot of energy, you ' re younger and you don't have anything else other than your group of friends, it’s very easy to make sacrifices then.

GAYNOR: Why was it that you chose drama, and features in particular, to focus on?

VALERIA: If I dig deep down inside, and I think about where my passion lies, it was a film that really inspired me called Dark Days by Mark Singer.

VALERIA: He was an English model who went to live in New York, and had never picked up a movie camera before. He made this incredible documentary with some homeless people on the abandoned Amtrak lines of Penn Station. He said, ‘If we ever win anything, I'm gonna give all that money to you guys and get you off the streets.’ And that's exactly what happened. DJ Shadow did the soundtrack for it, it's an incredibly intimate documentary, and it just blew me away, it changed my life. I thought, okay, that's where I want to be. I want to be behind the scenes putting all the pieces together. It took me a while to figure out that it was production, but that's where I knew I wanted to work.

GAYNOR But you were driven to drama more than documentary?

VALERIA: That’s a really good observation. I was a big Christopher Nolan fan in university, I managed to work on a film of his, I really loved the idea of being part of this huge project and being part of that chain. I wasn't really interested in being the kind of creative force as such, or the centre of attention, but I feel there's a lot of creativity in production as well, it's not just about being in front of the camera.

PhotobyBAFTA/AlecsandraDragoi

GAYNOR: Tell us a bit about the next stage of your journey through some of those amazing dramas you worked on

VALERIA: I had managed to carve quite a decent career out in corporate film and documentaries. I had just been in Central America, in El Salvador producing a documentary and I’d come back to the UK and was contacted by someone I'd hit up for work over the years. They said, ‘Look, I have this feature film, I'd love to get you involved’. I told her that I was just back from El Salvador and she said, ‘Oh, you won't be interested because it's just a production assistant position.’ Anyway, I persevered, I got the job and it was Christopher Nolan's Inception. It was one of the most exceptional experiences of my life. Obviously, I was a fantastic production assistant because I was so experienced, but it was very freeing, because you don't have that level of responsibility that you have at a more senior level.

GAYNOR: Why was it so exceptional? What was it about that production?

VALERIA: It was almost like a classical life lesson in traditional filmmaking. He's a very traditional filmmaker and Warner Brothers have these airplane hangars where he would build all of his sets - he still has the sets from the Batman films.

VALERIA: For anybody who's seen Inception and the spinning room, I was seeing those kind of special effects as opposed to relying just on CGI. It was absolutely incredible. I got to travel with them all to Paris and Morocco, it was just a really phenomenal experience. He's a very strict, almost Hitchcockstyle director. He wears a suit on set, and even when we were in Morocco, at 40 degree heat, it was just very interesting and exhilarating to be a very close observer of all that.

Gaynor: After that, what did you go on to?

Valeria: That job really opened up the floodgates. I sort of broke the seal, got in with a team and went on to work on the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films, Maleficent, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Bryan Singer’s Jack and the Giant Slayer, all of these enormous, big, big, big productions. That went on for about eight years, with lots of travel, and going back to that level of sacrifice, it happened quite naturally because these jobs were so long and so intense. Even now we don't have enough people to meet the demand of production. Not to sound too old, but in my experience it was very much a feast or famine. So you do these big jobs, and you try and stay on for as long as it could last, and then sometimes you would have breaks of eight months, so back to the bar job, or maybe some interpreting.

VALERIA: I did that for about eight years and in between that I did quite a lot of independent film as well. I did Michael Winterbottom films, I did a Warp film, there was a bit mixed in with the big, big productions as well. That was until about 11 years ago, now, I did the job that broke me, which was Fury Road Madmax. It was all the way over in Namibia and South Africa, beautiful parts of the world, and I think that was the beginning of my well being journey as such.

GAYNOR: You touched on that earlier, but why did that particular job break you?

VALERIA: There’s a perfect storm of reasons why. The biggest catalyst for it was that I had lost my best friend very, very quickly in a space of two weeks. She died from liver cancer. She had been visiting me and what started as a tummy ache, two weeks later she passed away. I was working on a production at the time in the UK and I didn't even have a day off. I was dealing with this seismic process of somebody being very sick which led to this big loss, and there was no break. ‘The show must go on’ you have to turn up to work, and even on the day of her funeral I was given the special dispensation to be able to fly to be present at her funeral and then back in the office again.

VALERIA: But again, I hadn't really registered any of this and then this opportunity came up to go to Namibia, and in the kind of state of mind that I was in, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, yes, this is exactly what I need to get out of London’ and just get as far away as possible from everything. Already the state of mind that I was in set me up for quite a fragile emotional state, and the job, although I met lots of wonderful friends, was very challenging. Like many projects, it was very intense and the hours were very long. I was very far away from home and I was hired in a capacity that was very difficult for me to gel with the existing team. It went on for a very, very long time so I found the whole experience very intense. Now when I look back I can see all the reasons why.

The real positive in that experience was that there was an amazing American producer called Denise Di Novi, who's a senior level producer for Warner Brothers. Every night we would work these insane hours, like 7am to 10pm, it was a huge project as well over a thousand crew. Many people relocated from Australia with their families or South Africa and then there was the international crew too. She would make all of the production team get up from their desk every evening and go downstairs into a room where she would lead a guided meditation every night. Of course, we all rolled our eyes and thought it was the most ridiculous thing ever to begin with.

VALERIA: Slowly but surely we all really embraced this incredible, twenty minute brain gap to feed oxygen to our minds and souls, so much so that she recommended a couple of books. It really, really helped me centre and deal with my grief at the time. I got very much into meditation after that as a result. But after that experience, I came back to the UK and said, ‘okay, I need to learn how to do something else, because I don't know if this is sustainable for me.’

GAYNOR: Right? And what did you do next? Because that is a very full on experience for many.

VALERIA: Yeah, there were people away on that job for two years and it was a small village. There were moments when I was in this tiny trailer in the middle of the desert, I could have been in a car park at Sainsbury's in East London, you know, all I saw was the four walls of this trailer.

So I came back to the UK, and I decided I was going to get into teaching. I taught production for a year at film school, it was an amazing experience.Now when I look back at my career, everything kind of joins up, but at the time, everything felt very disjointed. So it was great to be around young people, it was great to be with the future filmmakers of tomorrow and it was just what I needed, I really focused.

VALERIA: That was the year I bought my flat, I did a lot of therapy in dealing with the loss of my friend, I just really threw myself into some self care. But I wasn't conscious of what I was doing in a way, it was more, ‘Oh, I need to stop feeling so awful and change what is making me feel so bad.’

GAYNOR: And what did that lead to? What sort of change in your career?

VALERIA: Well, interestingly enough, that led to a different approach to the industry. After a year of teaching I was offered the opportunity to become an internal production coordinator, which then led on to becoming a production executive in house. It was the Holy Grail of freelancers, you know, this kind of in house role. It was for a small UK production company. I say small, I mean, it's quite significant. They're the company responsible for Selma, and Pride, and Suffragettes, it was a really good time to join. I was desensitised with the big, massive blockbuster productions and I'd wondered whether there were films I would actually want to go and see, and why was I in that industry at all?

So it was wonderful to join an organisation that was championing female talent and diverse female directors like Gurinder Chadha and Amma Asante. It was just a really meaningful time as well, themes of LGBTQ plus, so yeah it felt like a really good time. So I was in house for about six years.

GAYNOR: So, as you know, I was luckily selected for BFI female founders. What would you say is the impact on women compared to men with regard to mental health well being, and the issues we ' ve been talking about?

VALERIA: To answer your question, absolutely, I do think women are affected hugely, and also often overlooked for opportunities, and therefore that has an impact on mental health and well being. If we even just look exclusively at the time's up movement, the fact that it took the time's up movement to really significantly change the policies and ways in which we work within our industry - which we still haven't resolved in terms of bullying and harassment - but it took at least eighty to ninety years for things to change for women.

I do think people from underrepresented groups are disproportionately affected within the film and TV industries in terms of the impact on their mental health, and women certainly fall within that category. By becoming mothers we ' re instantly pushed out of the industry, and therefore have to leave, and there's a talent drain that happens with that. I think there's many aspects to being a woman in the industry that puts us at a disadvantage, and therefore it affects our mental health.

GAYNOR: Tell us about what you did to respond to the needs of women and mothers in the industry?

VALERIA: Fast forward to four years ago, I went back to being a freelancer. I then became a mom. I had been bullied quite badly within the industry, and then I became pregnant. When I was kind of sort of looking at reentering the industry I really felt pushed out, I felt like there was no place for me. I also didn't really have any role models, the only women that I knew who were mothers within the industry were very wealthy, and therefore, had maybe live in nannies or a family support network, and I have neither. Both my partner and I are not English, and therefore, it was like, what do people like me do? I really wanted to do work that was more meaningful. I’d done a bit of mentoring myself and I had done a few master classes for some new entrants that had come from diverse backgrounds. So I had a feeling that I wanted to work where I put my energy where it was more meaningful.

Then the pandemic happened and work dried up very quickly. I wanted to create a space for mothers working in the industry. So I set up a community peer support group for women working within the film industry, which is called Cinemamas. During the pandemic we ran a lot of workshops with coaches and therapists around confidence and impostor syndrome. What became really evident, having created this space, was that like a lot of people, but in particular, maternal mental health, given the challenges that we were all dealing with like homeschooling, there were gendered roles.

VALERIA: A lot of the women that were having to do the homeschooling and the cleaning, cooking, were also working - if they still had a job. The importance of mental health, well being and creating a safe space for women to have became really evident. So it became a focus, and over the course of that time we supported a lot of women through that. How do we enter the industry post pandemic? How do we network in a virtual world? That was fascinating, and that was my first sort of sense that this wasn’t just a problem within women, or just within parents.

We would often have people join our online sessions, who weren't either parents or women. I remember, I always use him as an example because it was such an exceptional contribution that he made, there was a young cinematographer who said, ‘You know, I'm not a parent, but maybe one day I want to be and I'd love to sort of hear from the others in the room, you know, how you ' re doing it.’ And he also said, ‘You know, a lot of what you ' re talking about are things that we all suffer from, like insecurity or lack of confidence and so on.’

So off the back of that experience, which is still running three years on, we had our first in real life event on the 22nd of September of this year. We offer a jobs board, we promote job sharing, flexible working, and we’ve become quite a strong group in terms of also raising people's profiles.

VALERIA: There might be another peer group that wants a light shone on their work. Last month we did Camera Village, which is run by a group of moms who are camera operators. The month before that we did Trans on Screen, which is an organisation run by trans and non binary filmmakers and industry professionals.

We cover all sorts of groups and topics, and also we give an opportunity for people to raise their profiles. So you might be struggling to get work, and you really just want to kind of get your profile out there, or you ' ve launched yourself as a consultant, we ' re there to do that.

GAYNOR: And do you think women particularly suffer with doing that with, you know, blowing their own trumpet or whatever?

VALERIA: Absolutely. 100%. It all comes back to confidence. And confidence means something different to everybody. It's something we all strive for so much, but it's so abstract. I'm sure what confidence means to you means something completely different to me.

You know, I have a friend who always says to me, ‘Well, what would a middle class white man say in this situation?’ You know, that's in our head, the epitome of confidence, right?

VALERIA: Because we just stop ourselves. I have often stopped myself from applying for a job or going for something because I think I'm not trained enough and not qualified enough.

We need to do more of this or more of training, we’re the ones that kind of go back and study. We mentioned imposter syndrome previously, if you look at the kind of traits of imposter syndrome, there's a lot of this kind of overachieving. But for me, it's not, it's that kind of confidence, a lack of confidence, we feel like we ' re not good enough.

GAYNOR: And then we undervalue ourselves.

VALERIA: 100% Yeah.

GAYNOR: So did that lead to the toolkit that you developed?

VALERIA: Absolutely. So off the back of that huge piece of work, in complete honesty, I lost all of my work. I had been on maternity leave the year before, I had just gone back into the industry, I was working as a production consultant for a really cool production company. And then it was like the pandemic took it all away. I also wasn't financially independent, because I had no income.

VALERIA: So I threw myself in, it was such a haven to be in this virtual world with all of these women that felt exactly like me. Off the back of that I was offered the opportunity to be part of the whole picture programme.

I was one of the respondents to a groundbreaking piece of research that the film and TV charity carried out in 2019 called The Looking Glass report. It was a survey which was done nationally across the UK, which highlighted the people in film and TV in the middle of a mental health crisis. In response to that, with the support of funders and partners within the industry, the whole picture programme was launched.

As part of that there were six strands of work and mine was one of those six strands, which was the development and creation and co-creation. So it was all co-created with the industry - which sounds easy, but was very difficult - of a toolkit to change the ways that we work. It was a two year programme. It was an absolute hell of a ride, in many, many ways, positive, but also very, very challenging because of the scale of it. We hadn't anticipated how big it was going to be.

This is one toolkit for the whole industry, for every genre, and to have it all co-designed, created by the industry for the industry.

VALERIA: There were hundreds of consultations. Obviously a working group, many, many focus groups, but also the charity wanted a test and learn approach. So I ran on top of that, because also bear in mind, I was a team of one so it was just me. I ran 12 pilot production's to test and learn what we were coming up with. We didn't want to wait two years to see if the toolkit worked.

We wanted to test it all the way along. So it was taking those learnings, putting them back into the process. It was incredible. Now to sit back and see the impact that it's having I'm so proud of it. It's so great to see. I mean, I can't take all of the credit, you know, that it was made with the industry.

GAYNOR: What do you think is the biggest impact it's having, the part that you ' re most proud of?

VALERIA: Opening people's minds to changing the way that we work. That is by far the biggest obstacle and the biggest impact. Because going back to that first experience, and my experience of the film industry, sacrificing it all, the no-controlover-your-life, work life balance doesn't exist.

The example that I shared of losing my friend and not being able to attend a funeral. But it's a common story: missed birthdays, weddings, and unfortunately funerals, that is the way that we ' re programmed to think that we have to work.

VALERIA: But actually that's completely outdated. The stats have shown us that we are a broken industry as a result of that toxic approach. Therefore implementing small changes can have the biggest impact.

PhotobyBAFTA/AlecsandraDragoi

VALERIA: And it can be really small things like having a mental health first aider on your team, knowing how to signpost, creating some boundaries, not being available 24/7.

I'm a parent, but I'm also a carer. I'm a carer for an elderly person, so for me getting a WhatsApp message at like 11 o 'clock at night, unless it's an emergency, that will trigger a huge amount of anxiety because I'll think something has happened.

GAYNOR: It’s also important for us to set our own boundaries within that. And to learn that that's okay to do that.

VALERIA: And having to unlearn, because I've had to do a huge amount of unlearning. As I've learnt more about mental health and wellbeing and inclusion, I've had to unlearn those behaviours, because that’s how we ' re programmed to deal with stress. So yes, absolutely. I'm still learning about personal boundaries, and had to set those, but I think that there are really small things that we can do that really have a huge impact on the people that we work with.

I worked in production offices where even if you ' ve finished your work, you would have to wait until the line producer would leave, and then get in the car and drive for two hours to get back home.

GAYNOR: Yeah, that's exactly why I left a television company I can't mention.

VALERIA: Unfortunately, we all have those horror stories, don't we.

GAYNOR: So you ' re now in the wellness and mental health space. But could you see a time when you'd want to get back into more production, but on different terms? Do you think that would be feasible to enter mainstream film, documentary or TV production?

VALERIA: Well, I'm still active. I've produced a documentary with a friend for a trans football team in Cambodia. It's a phenomenal story called The Lotus club - worth checking out. I'm still passionate about following my internal passion of documentaries. In my current role I'm the conduit between production companies and their productions, and there are people to help with wellbeing and inclusion. So I haven't completely hung up my coat and said, ‘I no longer kind of work in that space.’ What working at the film and TV charity did was remind me why I got into the industry, and it made me very hopeful that we can make change. It sounds very rose tinted glasses, but actually seeing the level of change now - compared to 3 years ago, pre-pandemic - it's astonishing. It's huge progress but there’s still a long way to go.

GAYNOR: You should be really proud of the work you ' ve done in that space. It's been great talking to you, if people want to find out more about how to connect with your organisations and the toolkits, where is the best place to find that information?

VALERIA: Thank you. www.cinemamas.co.uk is for anybody who wants to be part of our community. We're also on social media, Instagram and Facebook, and for anybody who's looking for further mental health support wellbeing, I would absolutely signpost them to the film and TV charity website, there's a huge amount of support available for freelancers. They also have a 24 hour support line 365 days of the year. So I would definitely go there as your first port of call, and they'll direct you to lots of different places.

GAYNOR: Well, thank you so much. It's been really great talking to you. And just to finish, if you had to give one piece of advice to women in the industry, from what you ' ve learned, what would you pass on?

VALERIA: I think, just believe in yourself. I know that sounds so cheesy, but believe in yourself because nobody else will. Nobody else will give you that time if you don't. Surround yourself with self care and really believe in yourself, and if something's not working, it's okay to let it go.

GAYNOR: Thank you. That was brilliant.

GAYNOR

Gaynor O'Flynn is a performer, writer, director & maverick.

In her extensive career, she has worked with luminaries including Anton Corbijn, Björk, the Dalai Lama, Stomp, Terry Gilliam, The Verve, New Order, PJ Harvey & Eddie Izzard. She has collaborated with organisations such as UNESCO, the BBC, Channel 4, Canal+, the BFI, the British Council & Google.

The BBC called her ‘that conscious, cathartic voice’, Artrocker ‘bloody brilliant', Le Cool London 'hugely fnlightening' & Frieze ‘exhilarating’.

She is founder of Beinghuman Ltd & The Beinghuman Collective CiC & has campaigned & spoken to millions globally on humanitarian & environmental issues. Gaynor is a student of Dzogchen, a Himalayan philosophy she embeds in her life, work & art.