Richard Purves

Born in January 1979 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Richard Purves had a fairly shaky and eventful start into the film world in 1999 when a friend suggested that they write and direct a feature film together despite the fact that neither person had any filmmaking experience at all. This had stirred long forgotten memories of seeing Disney's Peter Pan and being transfixed with the wonder of cinema as a small child. It turned out that neither Richard or his friend were quite up to the task of making a feature film, so he decided to go to film school and learn how to do things properly. While at Newcastle College's film department , Richard made contact with Producer/Director Richard Reay and formed a friendship that lasts to this day. As a result of this, Richard was able to work as an offline editor in a professional film crew for the first time while still attending film school. The resulting film "Making Tea for the Mob" was produced by FNA Films and still has a lot of the basic shape that Richard was able to imprint on it. From there Richard was proud to be part of various short films in varying crew positions, made in the North East of England. These included Richard Reay's "Roulette", Kristi Juliussen's "Sherbet" and others. The time eventually came when Richard felt ready to co-write and direct "Mayfly". This required three years of working in various contract I.T. positions to acquire the budget as various UK funding bodies were not interested in a first time director. The film has gone on to have it's World Premiere at the Burbank International Film Festival as well as win a Gold Award at the 2009 Houston WorldFest. Time will tell where the career of this promising new Director will lead!