Real-life medical dramas that shaped filmmaker’s journey to director’s chair

TINGE Krishnan remembers exactly where she was when she had her Eureka moment.

After moving from London to study medicine at Sheffield University, she was working another busy shift at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital’s accident and emergency department when she looked around at the waiting room and cubicles full of patients and realised that it was time to start another life.

“The nature of A&E means that you see a lot of people die,” says the 42-year-old. “At that moment I knew didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working in a hospital. I decided that was it, I was going to try to make it as film director.”

It wasn’t an entirely out-of-the blue decision. As a child Tinge had always written stories and performed plays in her school playground, but she was also academic and torn between the arts and science.

“I always had a passion for writing and stories, but I remember my English teacher once saying, ‘Tinge, whatever you do don’t go straight into writing, go do something real first’. She was absolutely right. I spent two years as a doctor and I don’t regret any minute of it. I loved medicine and it gave me a real grounding, but there came a time when it just felt right to see if I could be a director.

“I applied to the New York Film School and didn’t have anyone to write my reference so I asked my senior registrar at the hospital. I think one of the reasons I got a place was that they were so intrigued by the fact there was this woman with a science background who wanted a complete change of career.”

Tinge’s first short film, Shadowscan, about a pressurised young doctor who abandons a colleague suffering from depression to treat another patient, won a Bafta, her debut feature film Junkhearts is just about to be released and she’s now working with Michael Winterbottom’s production company on the adaptation of Elizabeth Haynes’s novel Into the Darkest Corner.

It seems like an effortless rise and a career which fully justifies her decision to give up medicine, but it was 1995 when she left Sheffield for the New York film school and the last 16 years have not always been easy.

“By the time I went to New York, I’d already done a few short film courses, but yes, I probably was a little naive,” she says. “However, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I think if I had known just how hard breaking into the film industry would be, I probably would have never left Sheffield. Some times ignorance really is bliss. My family were really supportive. They knew that it was something of a childhood dream, but I think winning the Bafta definitely helped allay any fears they did have that I had given up a secure job for life for the vagaries of film.”

The Bafta also helped open industry doors and the pockets of potential investors. However, just when it looked as though Tinge was about to make the move from short film to full-length feature, she found herself in the middle of the Boxing Day tsunami. The eight days that followed, changed her life forever. Half Thai, in December 2004 Tinge was visiting her mother in Phuket when South East Asia was devastated by the wall of water. She and her family escaped physically unharmed, but by the time she returned to Britain the disaster had left deep mental scars. “It was like a very surreal bombsite. Everything below the first floor of the buildings was destroyed, but above it was untouched,” she says. “My mother works for ChildLine out in Phuket and her first thought was that we should get out there and volunteer.

“I was busy trying to persuade her to go to Bangkok when I saw a doctor I knew being interviewed on the television. I’d worked with her years before and she now looked like a little old woman, but when I saw her getting onto a plane to do what she could to help, I thought I really had no excuse, I had to do my bit.”

While her medical training immediately kicked back in, her two years on the wards in Sheffield did little to prepare her for the sights she witnessed just a few miles from her mother’s home. Temples were being used as makeshift mortuaries to store thousands of bodies and at the hospital there was an endless queue of people desperate to know if their loved ones had made it out alive. “Computers had gone down and the phone lines were pretty erratic, so we set up a human internet using bicycle couriers so we could track the movements of people between hospitals,” she says. “It’s hard to put into words how you feel in a situation like. When you see a thousand bodies a day being brought into the morgue, it almost feels of Biblical proportions.”

After eight days working in the hospital, Tinge returned home. Various film projects were close to coming to fruition, but she found herself paralysed by memories of what had happened in Thailand.

“The flashbacks and nightmares started pretty immediately,” she says. “I went to see a counsellor, but it completely threw my career off kilter. I just couldn’t do anything. Gradually after talking through what had happened, I slowly began to rebuild my life, but it did take a long time.” Work on music videos followed and then she was handed the script for Junkhearts written by Simon Frank. The film is described as a story of family, addiction, love and loss and it’s central focus is Frank, a former British Army soldier who served in Northern Ireland and returned home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Given what I had gone through, the character of Frank inevitably struck a chord,” says Tinge, who began filming on Junkhearts last year after discovering she was pregnant with her second child. “The degree of PTSD is obviously much stronger in something like war because it rips that fabric of connection which exists between human beings in a way that natural disaster doesn’t.” Starring Eddie Marsan (Sherlock Holmes, Hancock) and Romola Garai (The Hour, Atonement), the film cost around £250,000, a tiny fraction of a Hollywood blockbuster and was funded through a mix of different private investors.

“It’s not easy to get projects off the ground at the moment, but I think people who are passionate about films will always find a way to get them made. I think there is a lot of really exciting films coming out of Britain and companies like Warp Films and Revolution Films are really holding their own.”

The latter is the company run by Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo and 24 Hour Party People) and Tinge’s next project, Into the Darkest Corner is due to start filming next year.

“The novel was written by a police intelligence analyst and it’s a really taut thriller about a woman and the stalker she has spent years trying to escape,” she says. “I am really hoping to do some of the filming in Sheffield. I spent 13 years of my life in the city and while I live back in London now, whenever I get back on the train north and see the skyline of Sheffield I just immediately relax. It’s always been a place where I have felt really at home.”

The Royal Hallamshire may have lost a doctor, but Tinge Kirshnan definitely hasn’t forgotten Sheffield.