Texan Living in the UK Finds Success on His Own Terms

Screening Thursday and Friday June 23rd-24th at the Los Angeles Film Festival, “darkly amusing” short The Terms has been gradually opening some new doors for its writer-director Jason LaMotte.

LaMotte tells FilmStew that while shorts in themselves are not yet a get-semi-rich proposition, they can lead to all sorts of wonderful opportunities. His 2002 offering A Post-Modern Man got him launched on a career as an AD and commercials-industrials director, while the solid festival run of The Terms has netted him a meeting with a top Hollywood talent agent, who contacted him out of the blue via email. LaMotte, who currently lives in England with a wife and small child, will be taking advantage of his time in LA to make that ICM meeting happen.

On your mark, get set...

The funny thing about The Terms is that even though it stars two top-notch UK actors—Gary Lewis (Billy Elliott, My Name is Joe, pictured above) as the rifle-toting father and Ciarann Flynn (Hunger, Robin Hood) as the fighting-for-his-life son, it's found almost all of its festival traction on this side of the pond. Perhaps the storyline of a son, given a fifty-yard head start to evade a single bullet in the rifle chamber after setting fire to the family home, is too subversive for the Europeans.

LaMotte has been accompanying his latest short to festivals for almost a year now, hitting Palm Springs, Seattle, Nashville among others in 2010. He's about ready to call it a wrap for The Terms in that regard, and who knows, if that meeting with the agent goes well, the next time you read his name it could be in the Hollywood trades.

[The Terms]