According to the actor and writer Matthew Modine, “to make a film, you don’t need loads of trucks and lots of people whom you are never sure why they’re on the set”. To prove his point to sceptical friends, he grabbed a camera and made a short film in a day while appearing in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts in 1992. Now Modine is joining a panel of judges for the seventh annual

TCM Classic Shorts competition. They include Terry Gilliam, Pierce Brosnan, Imelda Staunton, Richard E. Grant and the independent film-makers Sally Potter and Stephen Woolley.

Interest from such high-profile players in the British film industry is testimony to the importance placed in seeking out new film-makers with the potential for greater things. Last year Andrea Arnold won an Oscar for her short film Wasp. Now the British director’s debut feature, Red Road, is competing in the main competition for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival next month. It’s quite an honour for a first-time feature.

The TCM Classic Shorts competition, run by the Turner Classic Movies channel, offers prize money of £10,000 for the six finalists. The shortlisted films are also screened on TCM, which launches its sister channel TCM2 on May 2, and at the London Film Festival, where the audience includes some of the most influential people in British cinema. “I’ve worked with some rising directors,” Modine says, “and there is nothing more exciting than coming across fresh talent.”

Modine has also worked with such distinctive directors as Altman, Alan Parker (Birdy), Oliver Stone (Any Given Sunday), Alan Rudolph (Equinox) and Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket). “They all share an interest in the world,” Modine says. “That’s the key. We have a generation of film-school graduates who are simply experiencing the world through other movies. We don’t need another a reflection of a reflection. A director like Kubrick held up a mirror to society and said: ‘Look at yourself’.”

Kubrick’s first film forays were documentary shorts, including Day of the Fight (1951), which immersed the audience in the daily ritual of a boxer down to the smallest detail and built up tension to the climactic bout. Modine’s directorial debut, When I was a Boy, showed an angst- ridden lad finding comfort in the ordered, Muzak world of a supermarket. His next short, Smoking, was based on the humorist David Sedaris’s musings on nicotine. Ecce Pirate, made while Modine was starring in the ill-fated cutlass blockbuster Cutthroat Island, was about a piratical child abduction.

“I shot Ecce Pirate on a 16mm combat camera used by old war correspondents,” Modine recalls. “Now, of course, we have easy-to-use digital cameras but that doesn’t mean it’s a case of simply pointing at something and see what happens. Think through what you want to do. Make something that is important to you. That’s what all the great film directors have done.”

TCM Classic Shorts competition

Having won last year’s TCM Classic Shorts competition, Jayne Lloyd’s Happy, about the life of a porn star tracked from birth in 1970 through snapshot images, is now being used in the latest video for David Gray’s single Alibi.

Other TCM winners have ranged from a surreal comedy about a dole office inhabited by aliens and mutants to the portrait of a teenage girl in Manchester. So any subject goes when it comes to the competition.

Entries for this year’s contest, which is open to short films with the majority of their production being British and not exceeding 20 minutes, are being accepted from May 2 to September 1.

For further information about past winners, downloadable entry forms and competition terms and conditions, go to: www.tcmonline.co.uk/classicshorts

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