Sean Ellis happens to be one of the most fascinating young filmmakers today. His movie Cashback is so cool, so visually appealing and so damn good, I can still remember many of the scenes until now. It's been more than a week since I watched it.

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Says Ellis:

"I think I was always a frustrated filmmaker who worked in the medium of photography… I think these days it’s become easier to become a filmmaker because with the invention of high def or home video or DV cameras. If you’ve got an idea for a story, you can pretty much go and shoot it. Whereas fifteen or twenty years ago people weren’t into looking at home video films."

I have the same feeling and gush of emotions when I watched Ditto Montiel's 'A Guide to Recognizing your Saints' another awesome movie from another young filmmaker who really made waves with his film.

" And I guess I have expensive tastes as well and I thought well if you’re going to do it, you should do it properly and it’s going to be difficult for me to do it at a young age and talk people into giving me money to make feature films. So I thought one way of getting into the medium would be to do photography. I’ve had a great love of photography since a very young age of eleven. I became a fashion photographer in 1994 or 1995 and a lot of my fashion photography was lit very much like a film still. They were almost film stills for a movie I hadn’t made. For me, it always felt like at one point I’ll be able to cross over and do film. I started toying with the idea of doing pop videos and then commercials and then I did my first short film and then Cashback was my second short film. I think the two mediums are obviously very different. One you’re dealing with a point where you work to a fraction of a second and at the top of that pyramid is a still photograph. Whereas [with] film you’re dealing with a journey from A to B which is an expanse of time or an experience that you present and it has the added sense of sound which you don’t have from stills. I’m very obsessed with that whole aspect of moviemaking." [ more from this interview here ]

There are lots of exciting, quite sensual scenes in the movie and they were so artfully executed. I have no idea about how a camera works, but seeing this movie, I felt the need to know more. It's that good!

Since there are naked scenes, there would definitely be controversies...[ Brendan Kelly from the Quebec Gazzete reports ]

"I would never look at a nipple," a joking Ellis said in mock horror. "I think it's disgusting we have them."

There are plenty of nipples on display in Cashback. The cool concept at the core of the indie British flick is that Ben Willis, played by Biggerstaff, has a dream life in which he can stop time, an ability he uses to make things more interesting during his night shift at a suburban supermarket. He strips off much of the clothing of the female shoppers, most of whom happen to be drop-dead gorgeous; and, as an aspiring painter, he occasionally sits down and makes a drawing of the beautiful female forms he's admiring." says Ellis in an interview.

Sean Biggerstaff, the guy who played the lead, is of course, quite famous already from his role in Harry Potter.

"This is Biggerstaff 's first starring role since the Harry Potter flicks and he said working on an indie production like Cashback was quite different from doing a mega-budget Hollywood flick like Harry Potter.

"With Harry Potter, the problem was spending five hours sitting in your dressing room waiting for them to set up a shot," said Biggerstaff.

Being known as "the guy from Harry Potter" is a mixed blessing, Biggerstaff added.

"It happens everywhere else in the world more than it does at home (in Scotland), which I like," said Biggerstaff. "In Scotland, even if they do know who you are, they don't really care. They just let you get on with it. When I do get stopped in Glasgow, it's not by Scottish people, it's by American tourists."

Ellis is currently filming his latest movie, The Broken, starring Lena Headey and Melvil Poupaud which is due 2008.

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