ABOUT ME!
Paul Wiffen Biography/FilmographyThe first feature film Paul worked on was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner as he was employed by Vangelis on leaving Oxford University with a Master's Degree in Languages as a sound designer during the composition and recording of the soundtrack for this seminal film. Paul then worked as a musician, sound designer and music programmer for 20 years, doing more sound design work for Vangelis on The Bounty starring Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson, Liliana Cavani’s Francesco starring Mickey Rourke and another Ridley Scott masterpiece 1492: Conquest of Paradise as well as for Paul McCartney on the title song for John Landis' Spies Like Us. On a two year stint with Stevie Wonder, he programmed sounds and sequences for songs in Die Hard, Woman in Red and Jungle Fever and whilst in Los Angeles also worked with award-winning composers Mark Isham and Hans Zimmer. Peter Gabriel began to use him in Philip Noyce's Rabbit proof Fence Kenneth Branagh.
Outside of films he programmed for Ultravox (including Midge Ure's bass-line on the
best-selling Band Aid single Do They Know It's Christmas), Geoff Downes (Buggles,
Yes, Asia), Peter Gabriel and Jean-Michel Jarre (including the 1989 concert in Paris to
celebrate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution which is still listed in the
Guinness Book of Records as the world's biggest ever concert with an audience of 2
million. JMJ’s Laser Harp is only ever used to trigger one of Paul’s sync sounds
because of its futuristic timbre. He also assisted Elliot Scheiner on 5.1 surround
remixes of Bohemian Rhapsody, Hotel California, Long Train Running for sound
specialists DTS.
In 2001, Paul was headhunted by Apple Computer to launch their iPod at AppleExpo
and learnt Final Cut Pro software packages at Cannes and Video Forum which
marked the start of his own career as an editor and then director of music videos,
shorts, virals, commercials and eventually feature films (first one this year). His first
30min film Personal Justice (written by historian/playwright Ivo Moseley and starring
Swedish actress Frida Farrell) was nominated for his cinematography in the Turner
Classic Shorts. At the Cannes Film Festival, he won the Audience Award at the 24hr
Film Challenge for Love On The High Side, a 5 min short shot and edited in 7 hours
(he spent the first 17 hours finding a camera to shoot on).
In 2008, he was hired to do sound on a Kenneth King online musical documentary
which director Garth Jennings was then forced to abandon because of his own film
Son of Rambow obtaining finance so Paul ended up directing all the new High
Definition footage for VP: The Musical and editing the entire film as well, which Time
Out made Film Of The Week shortly after its Coronet premiere in Notting Hill. It has
so far had almost 60,000 views on the Internet.
In 2010, Paul directed another online work for Kenneth, this time a fictional musical
set in North London loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, in which a tabloid newspaper
work experience girl falls in love with the graffiti artist whose identity she is assigned
to uncover. Featuring an attractive and talented teenage cast drawn from the best
stage and drama colleges in London, Me Me Me premiered in May 2011 at the
Cannes Film Festival, Kensington Odeon, London and Eurovision Song Contest in
Dusseldorf.
In 2011, Venice Lido, Past, Present & Future, a 46min TV doc directed & edited by
Paul, drawn mainly from archive footage sourced in the Venice Videotec but it was
never released as the current Lido shots could not be acquired as building work at
Palazzo Del Cinema & Hotel Des Bains were ruining the look of whole area for 5 or 6
years. As the 2019 Mostra ended, Paul filmed the now restored Lido with his 4K
drone so this exciting glamorous documentary can be shortly be released.
In 2012, Paul was drawn into the London Olympics Ceremonies by Bond composer
David Arnold, with whom he had worked on Emmerich’s Stargate and ended up
doing the edit of the Closing Ceremony which is still online to this day.
In 2013, Paul began to teach Film and TV at the University Of Greenwich adding
lecturing in Music and Surround Sound at the University Of West London in 2014.
In 2014 Paul flew to Israel to direct a 23min TV doc about cooperation between
Jewish, Arab and Christian peoples in the Holy Land and this was shown in the
Cannes Short Film Corner that year and then at the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival.
IN 2015 he directed a 30min biopic on French writer/poet Raymond Radiguet whilst
the Charlie Hebdo aftermath was paralyzing Paris edited and shown by the BBC.
In 2016, he directed Beckett at the BBC for writer Robert Ian Binney, a BBC
employee and this won the BBC’s internal short film competition for staff.
As a result, in 2017 he began work on his own TV series Affairs On Capri on which
BBC Worldwide has first refusal (it covers what writer Graham Green witnessed of
celebrity scandals whilst living on the island, as well as his own two mistresses).
Earthquakes and actresses marrying Trump minions have caused delays but he is on
course to preview the series at MIPTV in March/April.
In 2018 he created Venice From The Air by editing aerial footage shot during the
Regata Stoirca & Mostra Del Cinema to his own Venetian Suite piano duets & after
Mostra 2019 he shot extensively north of Treviso for a follow up called La Strada Del
Prosecco (both projects sell as classical music videos on iTunes thereby avoiding the
streaming trap for the music)
Excalibur films
Excalibur Films was founded by award-winning director Paul Wiffen in 2009 to produce the scripts he was writing and developing himself. The first of these was a short film called Bohemia Scot Free which was shot in Crieff in Scotland (the famous Crieff Hydro spa was one of the locations). This was premiered in Cannes at the now legendary Short Film Corner in its second year.
This was followed by Private View the following year which won an award for Best Short Film at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
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In 2014, Paul directed and edited a feature length documentary called Peoples Of Israel completing the edit in Jerusalem before flying home in time for the film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and this was immediately followed by The Destiny of Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, about the renowned Ukrainian economist in exile in American & Canadian Universities until he returned to Kyiv to modernise the Ukrainian economy, was premiered at the Venice Film Festival in the same year.
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Paul then directed Fame & Death, a short biopic on the short life of controversial novelist Raymond Radiguet (he died at 20), one of Jean Cocteau's prodigés and lover of Coco Chanel (amongst many others), whose first novel scandalised France just after WWI in the same way that Lady Chatterley's Lover did England. The subject matter was very similar, about a married woman taking an underage boy as a lover while her husband was away fighting the Germans. When he died, thousands of women clogged the streets of Paris for his funeral cortège (paid for by Coco Chanel) to Père Lachaise cemetery where he was buried near where Jim Morrison of the Doors would be buried 50years later. The film, produced by Robert Binney of the BBC also premiered at Cannes that year.
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In 2016, the pair repeated their successful partnership with Beckett At The BBC, about the challenging relationship between the prickly Franco-Irish playwright and the commissioner for radio plays at Radio 4.
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Excalibur's TV series Affairs On Capri was due to be shot on the island in 2018 but an earthquake on nearby Ischia caused on of the main locations to fall down and filming had to be postponed until 2019 when it had been rebuilt. When filming was rescheduled, the actress playing Brigitte Bardot in one episode was no longer available so Paul brought Christine Mulhern in to replace her as BB.
The series was then interrupted by the pandemic but filming has now recommenced and should be transmitted early in the 2023.
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Current Excalibur projects in pre-production include Birth Of A Goddess about the early years of Marilyn Monroe and her rise to fame including many scenes not previously depicted on the big screen (although well documented in biographies), Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, the vampire novella which precedes Dracula by 23 years, starring Monica Bellucci and her daughter Deva Cassel as a pair of female vampires who terrorise a girl's school in Austria, adn Virtua, a science fiction romp about a virtual girlfriend who gets crossed with a android soldier to create a deadlier than the male terrorist. Christine Mulhern is due to appear in all three films.