James Studholme

James Studholme, 47, is managing director of Blink Productions in London and a partner in LA-based Furlined. He is also well-known for his skill in discovering new directors.

I was born in 1960 at Wembury House, near Plymouth. It was my grandparents' house and has always been, for me, the acme of style, which was made all the more grand by having a butler and cook, and dressing for dinner. My grandfather, Henry Studholme, was MP for Tavistock and had impeccable taste. He was a good artist and was musical too, but went into the Scots Guards at 18. He was gassed at the Somme but survived... obviously.

My grandfather was also a very fine plantsman and gardener. He grew Cannabis Sativa in his garden because it was such a beautiful plant. He was ultimately dissuaded from this practice by the Chief Constable of the Devon and Cornwall police who was being shown around one day.

I love gardening too, and I'm trying to create a garden in Devon. Peonies are my favourite flowers - the moment when they suddenly burst into bloom for their brief season is incredible - but roses too, and daffodils.

Making a garden teaches you patience and makes you stoic in the face of the vagaries of nature. Your will is constantly broken - but that's a good thing. It's impossible to arrive at absolute perfection; you only get fleeting moments of it. Sadly I don't get to do as much hands-on gardening as I would like. I would describe myself as an executive peasant.

My grandmother was from the Whitbread brewing family. She had quite a daunting personality, which was mostly misinterpreted shyness, and lived to 103. She was a tough character. I remember her telling me about her having to throw incendiary bombs off the roof of the Chiswell Street brewery in the East End of London during the World War II air raids. She eventually fell out with her brother -who ran the brewery and was something of a monster - and didn't talk to him for 40 years. I guess I get my ability to bear a grudge from her.

I grew up at Perridge, a house near Exeter that was bought by my great-grandfather when my branch of the family came back from New Zealand in 1906. He was considered not to be made of the right stuff needed to survive as a sheep cocky in the colonies.

The whole place was pretty Hardyesque when my father inherited it in 1958, the year he came out of the army. The 1960s were good times for agriculture, and for him an incredibly dynamic time in terms of dragging the estate into the 20th century. I used to spend a lot of time riding around the farm with my dad, and everything I intuitively know in terms of management comes from watching him and imbibing his philosophy.

I also inherited a huge passion for trees from my father. It's ironic that the older you get the more interested you become in planting trees. Thank God we get the benefit of previous generations' altruism in wishing to plant things that they will never see in their full glory.

From my mother, like Margaret Thatcher an Oxford chemistry graduate, I got a certain dispassionate forensic and analytic nature: a sense of consequence. But that's where the Thatcher parallels end.

My brother runs the estate now. Ironically, he does it the way that you should manage a film company: tiny overheads, no employees, everyone freelance... and I run Blink very much like a 1960s estate!

Despite the golden glow that infused my childhood, neither of my parents was particularly creative. Creative activity was looked on as spurious. But I insisted on at least learning the guitar.

I was sent away to school at seven. On one level it was like being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, but I always enjoyed it. I'm not really a critic: I tend to just get on with things, in a reasonably stoic fashion, and am mostly happy wherever I am.

Later, I was at Eton, where I was spectacularly average. Actually, that might be over-claiming. I was beaten twice. I was very put out by the fact that they abolished the institution of fagging when I was half-way through. Hence I was fagged but never got the chance to fag back. Rotten luck.

Seeing David Bowie perform Starman on Top of the Pops changed my life forever. In some way, I either wanted to do that or do something as closely related to it as possible.

I spent most of my gap year of 1978 in New Zealand, working as a shearer, travelling and busking. Then came three years at Reading University, studying Land Management. Not even red brick: it was concrete and glass. I was in a band, though... but we were rubbish. Post-punk bollocks.

I gained the courage to thwart my parents and not become a land agent. As it turned out they were astonished I could hold down any job for more than a few weeks, which is ironic as I've had the same job for 22 years.

I got a job as a runner at the Moving Picture Company. I thought they made music videos. They didn't. I was hijacked by advertising.

I worked with Tony Kaye for about 18 months. We had a company called Direktion where I learned so much valuable stuff about how not to run a company.

I spent all of my 20s trying to be successful with music. Looking back, I can see I was always equivocating. We had a certain amount of success in developing music, festivals and radio sessions, but without troubling the accountants. I was too bourgeois and lacked courage.

Blink has been a great adventure. First and foremost it isn't a business. Any success we've had has come from the wholehearted pursuit of the most brilliant creative outcome for each project. Any decision polluted by pragmatism has inevitably ended in disaster. That's just how it is for me. It's a ghastly cliché, but only made so by being true, that money is a by-product of doing good work, not the end in itself. Music and art and doing things for the hell of it are big parts of the Blink DNA.

Most of the nicknames I have seem to be linked to my hair: Ginger Jim, The Ginger Supremo, that sort of thing. Although I have heard that James Statelyhome is occasionally used. Not to my face, though, unless uttered by the implacable Andrew Fraser.

The other day, my builder asked if I was an artist or a businessman. I guess that because there is a large part of me that aspires to be an artist, I know how important it is for an artist to be believed in: to be championed, guided, bankrolled and inspired by opportunity. That's what I try to do for my directors.

At Blink we now have an artist in residence called Doug Foster. He made Breather [a stereoscopic film installation] which, while impossible to describe, is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. We are in the process of producing two new pieces for the autumn.

Robert Louis Stevenson once said: "But of works of art, little can be said: their influence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered by them; yet know not how." That chimes a lot with me right now.

If you expect any thanks from directors for what you do for them, you're in the wrong job. It's not what they do, and particularly not once they are established. There is a tacit understanding among producers that this is an immutable law of the universe.

Everybody wants to be huge in America. Don't let anybody delude you into thinking it's easy. It's the vortex of hubris. The sirens on the rocks tempting you to come closer. I know that to my cost. I got it wrong the first time. But I am now in partnership with the marvellous Diane McArter and the vigorous Matt Factor in a venture called Furlined. It's housed in a strange, pyramid-shaped building in Santa Monica and is fantastic. LA? What's not to like?

The famous aphorism states that at 20 you care desperately what people think of you. At 40 you've stopped giving a damn what they think. At 60 you realise they weren't thinking about you anyway. I'm half-way between the latter two, and this saying fairly reflects my state of mind.

Why are clothes so important to me? I think it comes from spending five years at a school with 1,200 identically dressed boys. Sartorial rebellion went as far as… ooh… odd socks. Once released from those constraints anything seemed possible.

I have been married for 15 years to a raving beauty called Charlotte. She works at Vogue as a contributing fashion editor, which means she gets to take the school holidays off. We have three boys; Arthur (11), Rafe (9) and Flynn (6).
Children point things out to you that other people would consider too rude or direct. I presume that's what people mean when they say that having children is very humbling.

I've always been struck by the close correlation between football and production companies; for example, the fast-growing number of foreign players. Ten years ago we seemed to be in the vanguard, launching the 21-year-old Ivan Zacharias from the Czech Republic (the little bugger still doesn't look any older). Other than that, we were English through and through. Now we have directors from Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Finland, Sweden, USA, Canada, France, Argentina, Ireland, Switzerland and Australia. Just like the premiership! (Football is the lingua franca of advertising and can always be relied upon for a helpful analogy).

In the last year, people in advertising agencies have stopped answering their phones. It's a mobile-only culture now, but calling mobiles seems so much more invasive. People don't seem to have as much time to watch reels. The repping model is going to get tougher, and the brand and profile of the production companies will be increasingly important.

There's often a general presumption among my production peers that advertising is only some kind of springboard into making movies. But I have always loved advertising for itself. It's been good to me. It's full of bright, inquisitive, eccentric, motivated characters. Plus, you're always playing with ideas. That said, it isn't as fun as it used to be and you can see that in a lot of current work. Most English work lacks freedom of spirit and exuberance. We're frightened to entertain. The exception is Fallon with Orange and Sony, and Wiedens with Honda.

We are taking digital, integrated, 360-degree thinking very seriously, but I am more optimistic about the 'old school' part of our business than I have been for some time. The making of compelling short-form moving image pieces is not going to go away. Actually, we've never been busier. Nor can I remember a time when the new young talent coming through has been so exciting.

Politically, I am an old school, One Nation Tory. I believe that people are fundamentally good and need less, rather than more, governing. Apparently this government has created over 3,000 new legal offences. That's nearly one for every day they've been in office!

I do believe in God - but some times more than others.

If I could relive my life I would have singing lessons. I wouldn't change much else, though. The good, the bad; everything happens for a reason. And I've learned a lot more from the bad stuff.

It hasn't all been plain sailing. I had a bad time when both my parents died of cancer in the same year - 1990. Before then, if anyone had talked to me about depression, my reaction would have been, "You need a good night's sleep and a couple of glasses of decent red wine, and then you'll be fine." But I had what I would now recognise as a nervous breakdown. There's a big difference between sadness and depression.

I embarked on a series of adventures to try to get better. My favourite was courtesy of two rather bored American girls, probably the wives of bond traders or something, who had decided to become pop psychologists. Their modus operandi was to give you ecstasy pills and stroke you quite a lot. It was not done in a sexual way at all, but it did provide some relief from being completely depressed.

The talking cure is what works for me: psychotherapy rather than analysis. What I got from the whole experience was a much greater level of empathy when dealing with people. Also, it makes you much less judgmental.

On a spiritual level, I think that your parents' strength does transfer itself into you when they die. I had a very powerful experience when my dad died. I was alone with him in his room late at night and I really felt him leaving his body. They talk about the 1,000-yard stare, but this was like a 1,000-mile stare. That was the moment he died and it was incredibly moving. I woke the others up and we waited while he stopped living in the physical sense, but actually it was all done.

In the end, what really matters is… love, health and happiness.