O.K. so having had another great day's filming on Celestial Sisters (yes still in principle photography but only just - besides I enjoy working with everyone on it so I don't care how long it takes) we were sat in the pub, as is the tradition.

And as is the way when you get a bunch of film makers and enthusiasts together we talked about shoes… no of course not that would be silly, hahaha. We talked films obviously.

I must have heard every single idea from every type of film maker about what would be 'A Great Movie'.

Literally every concept has been pitched or explained or screamed at me. From 'Robot Vampires' to 'The Horse Whisperer told from the horse's point of view'.

And having seen so many films (like most film nuts) I've seen every different type of film, every genre and every way of telling all the stories there are.

And I'd love some of them and hated some of them and not cared about some of them.

Among the films I hate the most, purely from how much I felt manipulate (or at least what they attempted) are Armageddon, Pearl Harbour, Titanic and most recently Avatar.

Now Avatar, for what it cost and what it is trying to be as far as a technological advance of film making, I have no problem with. "Expand the box James, go for it, give film makers options for telling there stories, go on, more more more."

However that film and Titanic in particular are the most successful films of all time and as a friend pointed out "films are made to make money."

And he's totally right. Argue as much as you want for art and craft of film making, but... studios fund films with the pure goal of making profit. They finance and green light those films which will make them the most money. They don't care how or why the film is a success, they just want money. And as they fund it; they are in charge of it. They are the ones determining what they want out of a film and that's money, so Titanic and Avatar are 'the best' films ever, as determined by the standard the people who let them exist set out.

I've often argued the UK would benefit from being a bit more geared toward profit and a commercial attitude and one day I'll get round to explaining why it's a good thing to have a money driven film industry and how the end of the BFI could bring in a golden age of film production for the UK, but that's another story.

So yes Titanic, the best film ever.... and I hate it. I hate it because it's a manipulative piece of self indulgence. It has the soppy romance story for the girls and the dramatic disaster movie for the boys.

I mean that's not even me trying to be funny. The film is constructed in that way. 10 minutes for the boys, and hour for the girls, the ending for the boys. Leave a bit of romantic conclusion to keep the girlsies holding on and you're done.

I say 'boys' and 'girls' because that's who they are trying to manipulate, young people with very defined desired and tastes and plenty of cash to spend on things that provide them.

But seriously, go look - within seconds of Winslet's hand hitting the glass and Leo having won and completing that story (and it is about the build up to her sleeping with him and symbolically rejecting the snobby life style) the iceberg is spotted.

Shag - orgasm - hand - "iceberg!" How did we not feel so manipulated at the time.

Everyone's happy though I guess, The girls have had their conclusion, the heroine gets her pretty man and then during the disaster portion of Titanic, Leo and Kate are sorted, they're in love, they have nothing else to resolve, other than letting Billy Zane know he's out of the picture. The story for them is over. Now they just have to survive as a pair of lovers and movies always benefit from a guy saving the woman he loves, especially if he dies in the process…. Come to think of it, how many of Leo's movies does he die in before the end???????? Romeo and Juliet, Titanic.. does he die in the beach? Anyway….

And then the lads get to enjoy the CGI and the action and everyone's had something out of it. Very clever.

And now Avatar follows the same strategy. "HEY LOOK MARINES! COOL" then an hour of love-dovey stuff and just as the boys are getting bored "HEY LOOK MORE MARINE" fight to the death for the Smurf he loves.

Basically the way you make a great movie is to make a movie just for girls and cram it in the middle of a movie just for boys. That's why Cameron's films are 3 hours long……. And make a fortune.

But hey two movies for the price of one I guess.

So it's off to the script writing place… MS Word to write "Raiders of the Lost Sex and the City"

Ok so this week, the first one, I'll keep quiet short. Mainly because I'm tired but also because it's a rant, a bit of a rant anyway and unless you start with the intention of being brief, they go on and on.

As people who work with me know, I have the terrible habit of coming up with great ideas for films and projects only to find out that either that's it's currently being done or I leave it too long and someone does it... often badly.

Like many kids growing up in the 80s the idea of an A-Team movie seemed great... beaten to the punch there. Or Star Wars prequels or Lord of the Rings epics. The production of those films didn't hurt so much as so many other kids had the same idea.

What did hurt quiet recently was being turned down for script development funds for an film idea centring around Robin Hood. The story of a man who was a rich kid brat who goes to war and comes home to become the hero of the common man.

It always struck me about every version of Robin Hood that the most important period, the most interesting, was his time in the crusades. Research into the period proved that I was right and the crusades and the political history of the time were ripe with content.

Image my hurt when after the local film authority (I'm sure you know which one) turned it on the basis that the script wasn't developed enough to get development funding and that characters such as Little John and Maid Marion weren't featured enough.... "fine" I thought, maybe Nottinghamshire council will be more interested in a new angle on their favourite son.

Alas, no; and by the time we'd had feed back and yet another rejection, news of Ridley Scott's version emerged and so the idea was irrelevant.

What really made me feel sore though was a conversation a friend of mine was having with one evening whilst we were sat in the pub. He was on the phone to a colleague of his he had worked with a while back who was currently on the Robin Hood shoot. At the end of the call we were enlightened as to the content of the conversation, which said that the project was struggling to get going because they didn't have a script ready.

Now, not getting fund to get a script ready is a blow. Finding out one the best directors in the world is a disappointment you can accept. Finding out that the film you wanted to make is being directed by a man you admire but that he has no script, when the only reason you don't have one is because the film council said it wasn't worth the effort... ouch!

How accurate the crewmember's report on the situation was is still to be clarified, but either way the pain runs deep.

Sadly this story of missed opportunities, or as I've come to see it "stealing the great ideas from my mind with some sort of brain scanning device", is not rare to me. So many ideas that I've had or wanted to make have been taken away from me one way or another... I could list them but you'd never believe me (I actually researched and wrote a script for Troy, a year before it was announced... I even wanted Brad Pitt and Saffron Burrows in it. OK, lots of people want Brad Pitt, but very few people instantly think of Saffron Burrows, even though I thinks she's great... they must be reading my mind.

Anyway the reason I tell this story in this long-winded blog is because it's happened again, only 24 hours ago. I finally got on DVD (though the Spanish import version) The Last Star Fighter. I loved this film as a kid. What an adventure: the outcast, downtrodden boy from humble surroundings goes off to save the galaxy... classic.

Sitting there looking at it and thinking how much it impressed me as a kid I thought "hey, you know what would work? A sequel, where he comes back and the whole war has finally come to earth's door... blah blah blah... You don't need to know what I thought, other than that it was good.

Out of pure interest I jumped straight to IMDb to see what director (Nick Castle) was up to, or had done since. What should my wondrous eyes see... Starfighter (2010): a true sequel, not a reboot or remake, and the same director. All seemed right with the world, even though yet again an idea has been snatched from me.

Maybe this is a good thing though, maybe it proves I'm coming up with ideas that Hollywood wants.

Maybe in the next few years I can upset some young aspiring film maker by making a poor version of something he or she dreamed about.

Until next time, that was me being brief.