Coffee Films contributors; Rob Fairlie

Rob Fairlie
Producer/Director/DP

Rob was born in Frimley, Surrey, in the hospital named last year "Worst in England or something like that", and spent his early years running around climbing trees in the Wiltshire countryside with brother, sister, Dad (long haul pilot for BA), Mum (a lazy housewife apparently, sorry Mrs Fairlie), and two weird friends, one of whom put a spade clean through his own foot one day as Rob watched him.

Rob spent most of his spare time building camps in the woods, and got plenty of cool family holidays thanks to having a pilot dad, including 2 trips to Australia staying three months at a time in a beautiful apartment by the beach, New Zealand, most of the Caribbean, Malaysia, Florida and Portugal (where they visited family friends who worked for the embassy and had diplomatic plates and immunity and cool shit like that).

He went on to private education and at 13 found himself in a huge, daunting, stereotypical public school with a chapel and quadrangles and so on; "Harry Potter without any magic". There were, however, a colourful array of friends to be met, such as the one with a kung fu movie fascination and piles of ninja swords and throwing stars back at home which they used to enjoy running around the local woods with chucking at each other. It was also around this time that the infamous Fairlie-thousand-yard-stare developed;

"I remember getting busted a lot by teachers for just gazing into space daydreaming, but I think that's where the interest in movies came in really, my imagination just wanders off and I sit there dreaming up little stories and sequences in my head."

Despite daydreams and extreme laziness he cruised on through to the sixth form, beer, parties and a slew of abysmal A level predictions. Fortune smiled down however as Rob's sister was retaking her A levels hoping to get into medical school, and the pair decided to share a flat in London and check out alternative places of education, this had the desired effect and led him on to Southampton University, planning to do philosophy but eventually combining it with economics on hearing philosophy degrees were the most unemployable and useless of all degrees to have.

University was the first time Rob had an opportunity to do anything film related, he hung out with some of the film students and started helping out on shorts. This was followed by a summer job for a satellite kid's channel, rotating around most of the assistant jobs available on set. Another summer he and a mate managed to blag a free trip to Ireland with AISEC, a big student body who send students off to do useful stuff. Rob and his mate took the free flights and accomodation, ducked rapidly out of the "weird corporate team building type shit" and headed for the nearest pub to have a fantastic time with the famous Irish hospitality, he made up for it though a couple of years later as one of the organisers of a hugely demanding conference AISEC were holding.

Emerging from university with a 2.2 "drinker's degree", Rob saw film as something of a far fetched career and considered being a policeman so that he could legally shoot people, or a pilot to the extent of having laser surgery to correct his short sightedness, or an architect until a stint of work experience showed the industry to be highly uncreative, unsocial, and unlikeable.

Eventually he launched his working life on a building site chopping stuff up and burning it, then a friend's father told him about a job going on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon kid's magazine show about to launch on the new Channel 5. Rob quickly worked up from runner to researcher and assistant floor manager before his contract ended, then moved on to Pearson TV's post facility in London as a runner and again worked up quickly and trained to be a QC. During all this Rob had been planning to go and do some serious travelling, and in 1998 he went away to Africa for a 6 month stint checking out the amazing animals and often worryingly different culture;

"I bought a VW van over there and on a long drive to Malawi it started playing up. I asked around for a mechanic and several people directed me to a guy in some little village. We trekked down there and started asking around for this guy and everyone was just saying 'you don't want to talk to him, he is a bad man.', it was really odd. We stayed over and started asking around again the next day. By now everyone knows I'm looking for him and I hear he's coming into the village to find me; only then does someone tell me that this guy dealt in human organs; mainly testicles and teeth, and he sends out groups of men to kill people and amputate their body parts, so, image of balls on the chopping block in mind we got the fuck out of there as quickly as possible."

After Africa he moved on to Australia where he settled comfortably into a pad a few hundred yards from the Fox studio in Sydney, who he'd go and bug for work every day for the next year; it was another amazing experience full of beautiful cities and cross country motorbike rides with packs of kangaroos, and Rob picked up some more TV production work. A year later he headed back home and found himself timewarped back at Pearson as a QC as though nothing had happened;

"Hunter S Thompson said 'The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where pimps and theives run free and good men die like dogs', I have to agree with him really."

He continued to move around the fringes of London and In 2001 bought a Canon XL1, planning to start shooting short films and other projects, but every project that came along was either a waste of time or soon fell apart due to all the usual no budget problems. By the time he met Steve Piper in 2002 Rob was 95% ready to sell the camera and forget about being a film-maker. Fortunately he was easily talked round and started working with Coffee on How To Disappear Completely, his work on which won a best cinematography award against feature length competition. He is currently developing a range of concepts for future production.

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